4 .sx AUDIENCE :sx SITUATION AND CIRCUMSTANCES .sx One of the general weaknesses of Bultmann's theology is that its austere challenge is issued directly to each individual , poor , bare , forked , human animal in isolation from all the rest .sx It has , in other words , virtually no social dimension .sx What is more , it is curiously timeless .sx Bultmann never subjected his own existential categories to the relentless scrutiny with which he probed the 'mythological' language of the Bible .sx And if he was able to present his understanding of the Fourth Gospel as a message addressed directly to his own contemporaries , with no need of modification or adaptation , this is because he was convinced that this message had lost none of its urgency or validity .sx The situation in which the message was first proclaimed had consequently no importance for Bultmann .sx " Unlike the prophets' words , " he says , apropos of the Fourth Gospel .sx " Jesus' words do not thrust the concrete historical situation of the People into the light of God's demand with its promise or threat ; they do not open men's eyes to what some present moment demands .sx Rather , the encounter with Jesus' words and person casts man into decision in his bare , undifferentiated situation of being human .sx " Accordingly , his solution to Lessing's fundamental dilemma ( " contingent truths of history can never serve as the demonstration of eternal truths of reason " ) was to lop off one of its horns :sx history does not count .sx Hence whereas in each of the other areas of interest ( book , content , origins ) Bultmann's great commentary had made an indelible mark , there was one area in which he left a gap .sx Slowly this gap began to be filled ; not just because in a field as well-trodden as the Fourth Gospel it was encouraging to come across a relatively green patch , but also no doubt because of the growing influence of redaction criticism .sx The possibilities are not infinite , and it may be useful to categorize them schematically .sx There are , broadly speaking , three questions that may be asked concerning John's audience or readership :sx was it ( a ) universal or particular ; ( b ) Jewish or Gentile ( or possibly Samaritan - somewhere in between the two ) ; ( c ) Christian or non-Christian ?sx If a non-Christian audience is intended then the writer's aim could be either polemic ( attack ) or apologetic ( defence ) or kerygmatic ( missionary ) ; if , on the other hand , the audience is Christian then the purpose could be either hortatory ( to warn or encourage ) or catechetic ( to teach or remind) .sx These possibilities are not all mutually exclusive , since a writer may have more than one purpose in writing and more than one audience in mind .sx Besides , if it is allowed that the work may have gone through successive stages , then it must also be allowed that the purpose of each may be different .sx A document that was directed in the first place , say , to refuting the claims of the followers of the Baptist could be taken over and adapted as a missionary tract by a disciple of Jesus .sx And so on .sx The situation is complex , but provided that the key questions are borne in mind it is possible to shape the enquiry fairly straight - forwardly .sx Bultmann nowhere spells out his universalistic presuppositions .sx C.K. Barrett , who in his commentary , as we have seen , avows himself impressed by " a certain detachment of the gospel from its immediate surroundings " , held a similar view and expressed it unequivocally :sx " John was not engaging in a pamphlet war , either with Judaism or with the disciples of John the Baptist , but writing theology in a book that was to be a possession for ever .sx " The reasons for thinking this view mistaken will emerge in the discussion that follows .sx Concerning the original conclusion of the Gospel , C. H. Dodd has this to say :sx " If .sx .. we try to enter into the author's intention , it must surely appear that he is thinking , in the first place , not so much of Christians who need a deeper theology , as of non-Christians who are concerned about eternal life and the way to it , and may be ready to follow the Christian way if this is presented to them in terms that are intelligibly related to their previous religious interests and experience .sx " Anyone who reads this with some knowledge of what follows will realize straight away that it affords more insight into Dodd's own intentions than into those of the fourth evangelist .sx For his whole book rests upon the assumption that the Gospel is to be explained in the way he suggests .sx In this one respect he resembles Bultmann , for he justifies his own procedures in advance by aligning them with the alleged intentions of the author .sx What he calls " background" , for instance , he thinks of not as intrinsically bound up with the beliefs of the evangelist but as an external stimulus prompting him to find a new language in which to couch a message that does not differ in any essential respect from the kerygma he has inherited .sx It is hard to avoid the impression that Dodd is reading his own interpretation into the conclusion of the Gospel , which is just not clear enough to allow us to make any direct inference concerning John's projected readership .sx As for the particular reader envisaged by Dodd , a devout and thoughtful citizen of Ephesus tolerably well acquainted with Hellenistic ideas , he is too Greek and insufficiently Jewish .sx Dodd does admittedly devote a short section of his " Background " chapters to a consideration of rabbinic Judaism ; but because his often brilliant analyses of the Gospel's leading ideas were worked out long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls it is perhaps not surprising that they are based largely on the Hellenistic material already studied , though less thoroughly , by Bousset and others .sx In 1957 , Dr W. C. van Unnik of Utrecht read a paper at a New Testament congress in Oxford designed to draw attention once again to the essential Jewishness of the Gospel .sx He specifically dissociates himself from the views expressed by members of the history-of-religions school from Wrede to Bauer , who considered that the evangelist's attitude towards the Jews was completely hostile .sx Against these , van Unnik first remarks upon the emphasis the Gospel places upon exclusively Jewish titles like " Messiah " and " Son of God " and then goes on to ask who would be most likely to respond positively to this emphasis .sx After adducing further evidence from Acts and extra-biblical Jewish-Christian literature , he concludes that " the purpose of the Fourth Gospel was to bring the visitors [he presumably means congregation] of a synagogue in the Diaspora ( Jews and Godfearers ) to belief in Jesus as the Messiah of Israel " .sx Elsewhere he correctly asserts that the Johannine phrase " Jesus is the Christ " " is a formula which has its roots in the Christian mission among the Jews " .sx None the less , the scholar from Utrecht exhibits in this paper a certain short-sightedness , or rather strabismus , for with both eyes turned inwards on the messianism undoubtedly present in the Gospel , he misses ( like others before him ) the broader implications of the evangelist's developed christology .sx Moreover , if this Gospel , as van Unnik says , " was not an apology to defend the Christian Church , but a mission-book which sought to win [ sic !sx ] " , then the evangelist must be adjudged to have set about his task in a singularly ham-fisted way .sx Interestingly enough , Karl Bornhäuser , whose arguments van Unnik declares himself unable to accept , had pointed the way he should have taken if his views were to gain ground .sx What is required is the possibility of distinguishing different senses of the word vIonda i-circ oi , or rather of finding another name for the 'Jews' of the diaspora .sx For how could anyone believe that the evangelist was setting out to plead his cause with those he calls vIonda i-circ oi when he excoriates their perversity and obstinacy on almost every page ?sx J. A. T. Robinson takes up a position very similar to van Unnik's , stating that it is the title " Messiah " rather than " Logos " " which controls John's Christology in the body of the Gospel " .sx And he adds , astonishingly , " This is obvious from a concordance .sx " If he had continued leafing through his concordance as far as nwi o s he would have found that the occurrences of " Son " as a special title - quite apart from the title " Son of God " that is arguably to be linked with " Messiah " - considerably outnumber all the rest .sx It is true that the Gospel does furnish some arguments for the view that it was originally designed as a missionary-tract , even one specifically directed to Jews of the diaspora , but like van Unnik , to whom he appeals , Robinson fails to consider the ground and nature of the Gospel's opposition to owi vIonda i-circ oi .sx This question cannot be satisfactorily countered by observing that the Gospel is not " anti-Semitic , that is , racially anti-Jewish " or that " the world of the Gospel narrative is wholly a Jewish world " .sx Rather , the question of the identity of owi vIonda i-circ oi becomes even more acute .sx Robinson slips easily from " Jews " to " Judaism" , and says that " to John the only true Judaism is one that acknowledges Jesus as its Messiah .sx Becoming a true Jew and becoming a Christian are one and the same thing " .sx But where in the Gospel is there any invitation to " become a true Jew " or any advocacy of " true Judaism " ?sx Certainly , as Robinson points out , " 'the Jews' for the Gospel are not merely the Jews of Palestine , but with two exceptions only ( vi .sx 41 and 52 ) the Jews of Judea " .sx ( In fact , as Bornhäuser had shown , the term frequently has an even narrower extension - the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem .sx ) But if one translates owi vIonda i-circ oi by " the Jews " and then goes on to employ the same term for those to whom the Gospel is addressed , then the result can only be thoroughly confusing .sx Robinson actually believes that in its earliest period the milieu of the Johannine tradition was " the Christian mission among the Jews of Judea " .sx But this multiplies the difficulties .sx As for the phrase " the children of God who are scattered abroad " ( 11 :sx 52 ) , Robinson may once again be right in asserting that it does not refer to Gentiles .sx But that is not to say that it must refer to Jews :sx it could just as well refer to other Christian groups .sx Interesting as it is , Robinson's article does not consider sufficiently seriously the suggestion that the Gospel was not only composed within a Christian community ( which he concedes ) but primarily addressed to that community .sx The articles of Robinson and van Unnik both appeared in 1959 , some six years after the earlier of Dodd's two books .sx Meanwhile the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls had begun to make itself felt ; and there was an increasing readiness in the scholarly world to accept that the origins of the Gospel were in some sense Jewish , though there was not then ( and is not now ) any agreement about where precisely to locate the Johannine community .sx As yet there had not been published any major commentary that made use of the new finds , though except for a handful of German scholars who still leaned towards Bultmann's Gnostic theories the tide of opinion was beginning to flow away from both Bultmann and Dodd .sx In 1966 came the first volume of Raymond Brown's important commentary , and his sensible and balanced advocacy of a Jewish setting for the Gospel established this case beyond reasonable doubt .sx Moreover his theory that the Gospel had gone through a number of different editions , none the worse for a certain imprecision , was , as we have seen , very definitely along the right lines , so that Schnackenburg , assessing the results of what he called the " traditio-historical " method a few years later , could speak of an almost universal consensus " that we are actually faced with a somewhat lengthy process of composition , with levels of composition leading up to a final redaction " .sx This double agreement , first on origins , secondly on composition , paved the way for J. L. Martyn's History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel , which for all its brevity is probably the most important single work on the Gospel since Bultmann's commentary .sx