Christ or Socrates?
Sir: I once heard many years ago the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel described In Yorkshire idiom as 'a nark,' which means, I suppose, 'a hcr.toring bore.' I have to confess that secretly I then felt in 80= agreement with that opinion. As long as Xsno.p Raven and I (I have since learned better) hello*
that the reported speech of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is his ipsissima verba we are in difficulties. It is for Raven and for me incredible that a human being could use the sort of language attributed to Jesus in John. What kind of man could say 'Before Abraham was, I am' or (to quote Raven's example) 'I am the way, the truth and the life'? Raven describes such a man as monomaniacal; I cannot dissent from that. But see these statements as theo- logical constructions expressing in the first person the conclusions of the late first century Church about the significance of Jesus for them and they make sense.
Previous page
