John 20 - The New International Commentary

1 The woman known as “Mary Magdalene” (identified consistently by her place of origin, Magdala on the lake of Galilee) has made only one cameo appearance in the Gospel so far (see 19:25). Just as in the other Gospels, she is the first named person to come to the tomb of Jesus, but here (in contrast to the other Gospels)* she comes alone: “On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes early, while it was dark, to the tomb, and sees the stone taken away from the tomb” (v. 1). We are not told why she came. In Mark (16:1) and Luke (24:1) it was to anoint the body with spices, but in our Gospel that has already been done (19:40); in Matthew (28:1) it was merely to “see the grave,” and that seems to be the case here as well. What she sees is “the stone taken away from the tomb.” The definite article, “the stone,”* like “the tomb,” implies that a “stone” has been mentioned before* (as it is in Matthew and Mark),* but as we have seen (19:42), this is not the case. The notice implies some familiarity, therefore, with other accounts of the burial, whether oral or written. In much the same way, the reader is likely expected to have more knowledge of who Mary was than the meager information supplied in the Gospel itself—at least that she had accompanied Jesus and the disciples in their travels and contributed to their support, and possibly that she had been healed of demon possession (see Lk 8:2; Mk 16:9).

D. The Empty Tomb and the First Appearance: Jesus and Mary (20:1–18)

On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes early, while it was dark, to the tomb, and sees the stone taken away from the tomb. So she runs, and comes to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and says to them, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter went out, and the other disciple, and they were coming to the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and came first to the tomb. And he stooped down and sees the linen cloths lying, yet did not go in. Then comes Simon Peter also following him, and entered into the tomb, and he looks at the linen cloths lying, and the cloth which was at his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up separately in one place. So then the other disciple who came first to the tomb went in, and he saw and believed. For they did not yet know the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went away again to themselves.

Now Mary was standing at the tomb outside, crying. Then as she was crying, she stooped down into the tomb, and she looks at two angels in white, seated one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say to her, “Woman, why are you crying?” She says to them that “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” And having said these things, she turned around and looks at Jesus standing there, and she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus says to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Whom are you seeking?” She, thinking that he is the gardener, says to him, “Sir, if you have carried him off, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus says to her, “Mary!” Turning, she says to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni” (which means “Teacher!”). Jesus says to her, “Don’t take hold of me, for I have not yet gone up to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God.” Mary Magdalene comes, announcing to the disciples that “I have seen the Lord,” and [that] he said these things to her.

The time is fast forwarded to “the first day of the week” (v. 1). John’s Gospel, like Matthew and Mark, tells nothing of what happened on the great “day of that Sabbath” (19:31; only Luke tells us that “they rested on the Sabbath according to the commandment,” 23:56). The discovery on Easter morning that Jesus is risen unfolds in stages involving three individuals: Mary Magdalene, Peter, and “the other disciple, whom Jesus loved.” The account of their discoveries (whether intentionally or not) forms what is commonly called a “chiasm,” or a-b-b-a pattern:

a) Mary Magdalene came first to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed (v. 1).

b) She ran to Peter and the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, told them what she had seen, and the two ran together to the tomb (vv. 2–4a).

c) The other disciple outran Peter, bent down to look in the tomb, saw linen cloths, but did not go in (vv. 4b–5).

d) Peter arrived, entered the tomb, saw the linen cloths “and the cloth that was at his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up separately in one place” (vv. 6–7).

c′) The other disciple finally entered the tomb, “and he saw and believed” (v. 8).

b′) The two disciples “went back to their quarters” (v. 10).

a′) Mary Magdalene, still weeping outside the tomb, stooped down to look in the tomb, and saw “two angels in white, seated one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been.” Then she turned and saw Jesus, and when he revealed himself to her, she went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (vv. 11–18).

Thus Peter is at the center (d), the other disciple at (c) and (c′), the two together at (b) and (b′), Mary at (a) and (a′). The story is Mary’s, in that it begins and ends with her. She is the first to see the risen Lord and carry the good news of his resurrection. Yet it is also Peter’s story, and the other disciple’s, for at the center of the chiasm is the unmistakable evidence, seen first through Peter’s eyes, that the tomb is empty, and the consequent faith of the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” This is the only Gospel in which the fact of the empty tomb is verified by two male witnesses, in keeping with Jewish law (see 8:17).* The narrative invites reflection not only on the nature of Jesus’ resurrection, but on gender roles and the relation between faith and sight—the faith of a man (v. 8) and the prophetic vision of a woman (v. 12).

2 For whatever reason (perhaps because she is alone), Mary does not enter the tomb (as in Mark and Luke), nor does she encounter anyone to tell her that Jesus is risen (as in Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Instead, she simply assumes that the body has been stolen: “So she runs, and comes to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and says to them, ‘They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him’ ” (v. 2). If the stone is “taken away from the tomb” (v. 1), she reasons, the body must have been “taken away out of the tomb” as well! It is unclear whether she thinks someone has stolen the body (see Mt 27:62–66; 28:11–15), or whether she imagines a reburial of some kind (the words, “where they have laid him,”* echoing the account of the burial in 19:42, could imply the latter). To Mary, the dead body is not just “the body of Jesus” (as in 19:38, 40), but “the Lord,”* confirming (along with her presence at the cross) a level of discipleship stronger than death. The unexpected “we”* is not, as is sometimes suggested, a relic of an earlier account (as in the Synoptics) in which Mary is one of several women coming to the tomb. Even in the Synoptics, the women say no such thing. Rather, the plural “we” simply reflects a consciousness of belonging to a larger community—in this case a community of disciples, embracing Peter and the other disciple as well as herself—an indefinite “we,” over against the indefinite “they” whom she suspects of stealing the body.*

Mary ran from the tomb, and came “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved.” The repetition of the pronoun “to” could imply that the two did not live together, and this is consistent with the reader’s impression that the disciple “whom Jesus loved” had “his own home, where he had taken Jesus’ mother” (19:27).* Mary seems to have gone first “to Simon Peter” and from there (possibly with Peter) “to the other disciple,” and said the same thing to each. They could not have been far away, either from Mary or each other. Simon Peter has been out of the picture ever since we heard him denying Jesus for the third time in the Chief Priest’s courtyard as the rooster crowed (18:27). He was there with the help of “another disciple … known to the Chief Priest” (18:15). Now he is again in the company of “the other disciple,”* and it is tempting to assume because of the definite article (as if to say “the aforementioned other disciple”) that it is the same person. But the assumption is precarious at best. The “other disciple” there was explicitly identified, both times he was mentioned, as someone “known to the Chief Priest” (18:15, 16), while “the other disciple” here is identified as one “whom Jesus loved,”* recalling rather the “one whom Jesus loved”* at the last meal together (13:23), and the disciple at the cross “whom he loved” and into whose care he entrusted his mother.* If the Gospel writer’s intention is to identify the “other disciple” in the Chief Priest’s courtyard with “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” he is going about it in an extremely subtle way, demanding great ingenuity from the reader. More likely, the one “whom Jesus loved” is remembered here as “the other” (although the word was not used) in the drama that unfolded when Jesus predicted that one of them would hand him over, and Peter nodded to him “to inquire who it might be that he meant” (13:24; this is the point of reference in 21:20 as well, when we last see the two together).*

3–4 Just as Mary seems to come to the two disciples one at a time at their respective dwellings (v. 2), so the two of them seem to respond one at a time, running together for awhile, but then arriving at the tomb separately: “So Peter went out, and the other disciple, and they were coming to the tomb. The two were running together,* but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and came first to the tomb” (vv. 3–4). The implication is that Peter started out first, perhaps because Mary reached him first, but that “the other disciple” soon accompanied him and then overtook him en route to the tomb. The foot-race has no obvious significance beyond the fact that it is something that someone—evidently the beloved disciple himself—was apt to have remembered. Inferences that this disciple must have been younger than Peter because he was fleeter afoot, or that he was more eager to see the tomb are beside the point. If there is any significance at all in the order of their arrival, it lies in what comes next.

5 What comes next is that the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” having reached the tomb first, seems to defer to Peter: “And he stooped down and sees the linen cloths lying, yet did not go in” (v. 5). “The linen cloths”* were part of the burial (19:40), and the sight of them lying in the tomb with no sign of a body must, at the very least, have aroused his curiosity. If someone stole the body, as Mary has assumed (v. 2), they have left something behind. The effect on the reader is to begin a process of revealing in three stages (vv. 5, 6–7, and 12) what is, and, more important, what is not, in the tomb. Instead of satisfying his curiosity at once, the beloved disciple holds back and waits for the arrival of Peter, so that Peter might enter first. Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, if it is known, seems not to have damaged his standing among the disciples.

6–7 Peter’s arrival at the tomb affords the Gospel writer the opportunity to give a fuller description of what is inside: “Then comes Simon Peter also following him, and entered into the tomb, and he looks at the linen cloths lying, and the cloth which was at his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up separately in one place” (vv. 6–7). The detailed description sounds like an actual eyewitness report. Because “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is eventually identified as the witness behind much, or all, of what is found in this Gospel (21:24), we would have expected that the contents of the tomb would have been described as viewed through his eyes (see vv. 5 and 8), but it is presented first of all as what Peter saw. This is surprising, yet consistent with Luke 24:12, where it was Peter who “got up and ran to the tomb, and stooped down and sees the linen cloths alone, and went home, amazed at what had happened.” This notice, lacking in some important manuscripts of Luke,* is the only instance outside of the Gospel of John in which any of Jesus’ male disciples actually visit the tomb of Jesus. If the author of John’s Gospel knows of such a tradition (whether as part of Luke’s Gospel or not), he may well have deferred to that tradition, just as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in the narrative deferred to Peter by allowing him to be the first to enter the tomb. But if, as the Gospel claims (21:24), the author is himself that disciple, then he in fact may be the very source of the tradition preserved in Luke as well.*

In any event, the description here is far more detailed. In Luke, Peter sees little more than what the other disciple saw in John’s Gospel (v. 5). Like that other disciple, he does not even enter the tomb but merely “stoops down”* and “sees the linen cloths alone.” In our Gospel, he sees also “the cloth which was at his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up separately in one place” (v. 7). “The cloth” with the definite article* (as if to say “the aforementioned cloth”) is odd because, in contrast to “the linen cloths,” no head cloth was mentioned in connection with the preparation of Jesus’ body for burial—just as no “stone” was mentioned in connection with the burial itself. The only such “cloth” we know of was wrapped around the face of Lazarus nine chapters earlier,* as he emerged from his tomb. Possibly the intent here is precisely to contrast this tomb with the tomb of Lazarus, and these empty graveclothes and head cloth with the very much present and still bound Lazarus hopping from his tomb! The whole scene—the empty “linen cloths,” with the head cloth “rolled up separately in one place”—speaks eloquently against Mary’s hasty conclusion that “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (v. 2). “The Lord” is indeed missing, but who would carefully unwrap a body, separate the head cloth, rolling the latter up by itself, and then make off with the naked and mutilated body? It makes no sense, and yet we are not told what conclusion Peter drew from what he saw. His silence here is quite consistent with Luke’s description of him as “amazed* at what had happened” (Lk 24:12). The conclusion is left to Peter’s companion.

8 Having stepped aside to make room for Peter, the beloved disciple now takes his turn: “So then the other disciple who came first to the tomb went in, and he saw and believed”* (v. 8). If this disciple is indeed the author of the Gospel, this verse stands as a kind of personal testimony, as if to say, “I went in, and I saw, and I believed.” What he does not tell us explicitly is what he saw, and what he believed. The first is not normally discussed in commentaries because the answer seems obvious: he has already told us what he saw, only he told it as if seen through Peter’s eyes rather than his own. That is, presumably he saw exactly what Peter saw a moment before: “the linen cloths lying, and the cloth which was at his head, not with the linen cloths but rolled up separately in one place” (v. 7). From this, drawing the conclusion that Peter did not draw (at least not explicitly), he “believed.” The aorist tense implies not that he came to faith, having been previously an unbeliever, but that he became convinced or persuaded of something on the basis of what he had just seen.

The brief notice raises two other questions. First, does this disciple’s stated “belief” imply Peter’s unbelief,* or is he in some sense testifying on behalf of both Peter and himself?* While his belief contrasts sharply with Peter’s “amazement” according to Luke 24:12, it should not be too quickly assumed that Peter is intended to suffer by comparison. The author is, after all, telling Peter’s story as an external observer and the beloved disciple’s story, presumably, as his own. Quite possibly the reason he does not give Peter’s reaction is simply that he is not in a position to do so. He ventures to speak only for himself. In the end, he and Peter are on the same page as far as their faith is concerned (see vv. 9–10), even as the so-called “doubting” Thomas and the other ten disciples (as we will see) end up on the same page, with Thomas finally (and belatedly) speaking for them all (20:28). The second question is, what exactly did this disciple “believe”? Did he believe in the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of the empty tomb and that alone, not having yet seen Jesus alive?* There is no other example of such belief in any of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. He cannot say, as Mary will say later (v. 18), or as the disciples will say to Thomas (v. 25), that he has “seen the Lord.” Did he then merely believe Mary’s report that “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (v. 2).* That would be a strange kind of “belief,” actually more like unbelief, in a Gospel in which “believing” is of such supreme importance. It would be a case not so much of false or inadequate faith in Jesus (as, for example, in 2:23, or 8:30–31, or 12:42), as of sincerely or genuinely believing something that was not true—that is, that the body of Jesus had been stolen. Moreover, as we have seen, the presence and position of the linen cloth and the head cloth in the tomb have sent just the opposite message: the body cannot have been stolen. What then did the disciple “believe”? Is there a third alternative, a middle way between full-fledged resurrection faith on the one hand and Mary’s confusion and near despair on the other?

A number of commentators, while acknowledging that in some sense the disciple did believe in the resurrection, nevertheless argue (particularly in light of v. 9) that his understanding of it was still limited.* The best answer, perhaps, is to be found in Jesus’ farewell discourse: “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going off to the Father, because the Father is greater than I” (14:28), adding, “And now I have told before it happens, so that when it happens you might believe”* (14:29, italics added). The disciple “whom Jesus loved,” when he entered the tomb and saw what Peter saw, had only to remember those words in order to “believe” that Jesus had in truth gone to the Father, just as he said he would.* While his belief is exactly what Jesus intended (14:29), it is not full-fledged resurrection faith, at least not in the Johannine sense, for the latter (as we have seen) involves not only Jesus’ departure to the Father but also his return to the disciples (for example, “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you,” 14:18, and “You heard that I said to you, ‘I am going away and I am coming to you,’ ” 14:28a).* It is by definition an experience of faith, in response to actually seeing Jesus again (“the world no longer sees me, but you see me,” 14:19; “again a short time and you will see me,” 16:16; “I will see you again,” 16:22). It is not a response to seeing what is not there (“but him they did not see,” Lk 24:24). True resurrection faith comes to expression in this chapter not when the beloved disciple “saw and believed,” but only when Mary is able to say, “I have seen the Lord” (v. 18), and later when the gathered disciples “rejoiced at seeing the Lord” (v. 20; also v. 25). The faith of “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” while no less genuine, is to that extent a limited faith.

9 The limitation of the beloved disciple’s faith is made explicit in one of his characteristic narrative asides: “For they did not yet know the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (v. 9). The plural “they did not know”* confirms the notion that the Gospel writer is not setting Peter and the disciple “whom Jesus loved” sharply against one another. They both shared the same limitations, limitations inevitable in the very nature of the case, and for which they are not necessarily being blamed. Twice before we have heard that only after Jesus had been “glorified” (12:16) or “raised from the dead” (2:17, 22) did the disciples “remember” and come to understand the scriptures that pointed to him. Even more explicitly in Luke, it is only when the disciples have met the risen Jesus that he “interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things about himself” (Lk 24:27), and “opened their mind to understand the scriptures,” telling them that “Thus it is written that the Christ is to suffer and rise from the dead the third day” (24:45–46).* This has not yet happened in John’s Gospel, for the risen Jesus has not yet made an appearance, and it never happens explicitly, as it does in Luke. At most it can be inferred, possibly from verse 22, when Jesus breathes on the disciples and tells them, “Receive Holy Spirit,” and certainly from the earlier promises that the Advocate, or Holy Spirit, “will teach you all things and remind you of all things that I said to you” (14:26), and “lead you in all the truth” (16:13).* The disciple “whom Jesus loved,” and perhaps Peter as well, “believed” purely on the basis of what they “saw” in the tomb, not on the basis of what Scripture led them to expect.

10 The two disciples, having each entered the tomb, now abruptly depart (just as they came) together, not to appear again individually until chapter 21: “Then the disciples went away again to themselves,” or more literally, “to them,”* that is, to their respective living quarters. Not a word is spoken. If the beloved disciple alone believed, he is not said to have shared his faith with Peter or with Mary, and if both disciples believed, they seem to have said nothing to Mary, who is left crying at the tomb alone (v. 11). The other disciple’s reticence is consistent with his silence in chapter 13 after he found out who it was who was going to hand Jesus over to the Jewish authorities (see 13:25–30). Whatever faith he or Peter may have had, it does not seem to have moved them to immediate action. They merely went home, the beloved disciple presumably to care for the mother of Jesus (see 19:27), and Peter just as he did in Luke’s Gospel, where, after looking into the tomb, he “went home,* amazed at what had happened” (Lk 24:12).

11–12 Mary has not been heard from since she summoned the two disciples (v. 2). She had no part in the footrace, and we have not even been told that she returned to the tomb. But with the departure of the men, her story resumes: “Now Mary was standing at the tomb outside, crying. Then as she was crying, she stooped down into the tomb” (v. 11). What she saw was strikingly different from what Peter had seen on entering the tomb. She saw not “the linen cloths lying, and the cloth which was at his head … rolled up separately in one place” (vv. 6–7), but “two angels in white, seated one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain” (v. 12).* Her “vision of angels” (see Lk 24:23) is to some extent reminiscent of what the women see in the other three Gospels, Luke in particular (Lk 24:4–7, but also Mk 16:5–7 and Mt 28:5–7), but in this Gospel it comes belatedly, only after two male disciples have looked into the tomb. Because they have said nothing to her, Mary is unaware of the stark contrast between what she sees and what Peter saw, but the reader cannot help but notice it. The two descriptions of the contents of the tomb are only moments apart, at least in narrative time, but one is forced to wonder: What are we supposed to conclude was actually in that tomb, a few scattered grave clothes, or two angels in white? Why does Peter see one thing, and Mary Magadalene another? And Mary’s vision prompts us to revisit another question that we thought was already answered: What did the beloved disciple “see” that led him to “believe” (v. 8)? Did he see what Peter saw a moment before, or what Mary saw a short time after? Why is he so reticent about what he himself saw, contenting himself with describing two different scenes through the eyes of two different people? The questions multiply, and there are no obvious answers.

Most commentators ignore such questions, solving the problem instead by the use of source or tradition criticism, and in the process sacrificing the coherence and integrity of the narrative. We do not have to ask why the male disciples and Mary viewed contrasting scenes within the tomb, they reason, because their differing visions originally belonged to two different stories. Raymond Brown is a good example. Brown isolates three distinct traditions behind the Johannine narrative:*

(a) A story about women disciples coming to the tomb, finding it empty, and seeing a vision of some kind (Jn 20:1 and 11–13; this is comparable to the opening verses of Mark 16, Matthew 28, and Luke 24).

(b) A story about male disciples visiting the empty tomb and going away puzzled (20:2–10; this is comparable to Lk 24:12, 24).

(c) A story about a resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene (20:14–18; this is comparable to Mt 28:9–10, and to the Markan appendix, 16:9).

Mark’s Gospel has only the first of these; the appendix to Mark adds the third; Matthew has the first and the third; Luke has the first and the second; only the Gospel of John includes all three. John’s Gospel also differs from the others in postponing Mary’s vision of angels in the tomb until after Peter and the other disciple have entered the tomb and seen the graveclothes, thus creating the odd discrepancy between what they saw and what Mary sees. In all three synoptic Gospels, by contrast, Mary’s vision comes first, and a considerable body of scholarly opinion assumes that this was originally the case in the Johannine tradition as well—as if to say that verse 11 was originally intended to follow verse 1.* At that stage of the tradition, Mary saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb (v. 1), and instead of running to tell Peter and the other disciple (v. 2), she stood “at the tomb outside, crying,” and then “stooped down into the tomb” and saw what she saw (vv. 11–12). Because nothing precedes it, her vision stands on its own. There is no need to compare or contrast it with anything that someone else saw.

Such constructions make for fascinating reading, and something of the kind may even have happened. But a commentator’s job is not to interpret a text by describing how it came to be, but by describing it as it actually is, in its present form. When all is said and done, if the Gospel of John has made the kind of adaptations and rearrangements that are proposed, what is the effect of its artistry? What are we left with? Are we absolved of all responsibility to understand Mary’s vision in relation to what has preceded it? No. The way to interpret a text is to interpret the text, not its sources or what preceded it.* When Mary’s “vision of angels” is read seriously in its present context, certain parallels are evident between her experience and that of the male disciples, even though what she saw was quite different. Like the beloved disciple at first (v. 5), she did not enter the tomb but “stooped down,”* and like Peter (who did enter the tomb, v. 6), she “looked” in.* The two angels, positioned as they were “one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain” (v. 12), sent the same message that the empty linen cloths and the head cloth had sent. They did not need to say, like the young man in Mark (for example), “He is risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him” (Mk 16:6; compare Mt 28:6; Lk 24:5–6). Their body language said it all, more eloquently (if not more plainly) than the scattered grave clothes a few verses earlier. Jesus’ body was gone, and the presence of angels implied that God had something to do with it.

And yet Mary’s remarkable vision did not lead her to “see and believe,” as the beloved disciple had done just moments before. Instead she kept on “crying.”* It becomes evident that the disciple “whom Jesus loved” had not alleviated her tears by sharing with her his newfound faith that Jesus had gone to the Father (v. 8). Instead, he had simply gone home with Peter (v. 10). He showed the same reticence toward Mary that he showed toward the reader in not revealing exactly what he himself “saw” in the tomb that led him to “believe,” and the same reticence he showed toward all the disciples at the last meal, when he learned who would hand Jesus over, yet did not share with them that information (see 13:25–30). Whatever we may say of his silence here, it is in keeping with what little we know of this disciple’s character and behavior. If he is, as the Gospel claims, the author of the Gospel (21:24), he has left us with two cameo glimpses of what was in the tomb of Jesus: one through a man’s eyes (v. 6) and one through a woman’s (v. 12), one consisting of so-called hard evidence, the other a “vision of angels” (see Lk 24:23). The first is a stereotypical “male” vision, the second just as stereotypically “female.”* The question of which vision the beloved disciple himself saw, or (to put it another way) what was “really” in the tomb, is left to the reader to decide. More important by far is what was not there: the body of Jesus (“but him they did not see,” Lk 24:24). Ambiguities remain, but ambiguities are part of the reading experience. They should not be made to disappear by source or tradition criticism.*

13 Instead of stating the obvious (“He is not here. See the place where they laid him”), the two angels ask Mary a question,* “Woman, why are you crying?” (v. 13a), addressing her in the same way Jesus customarily addresses women (2:4; 4:21; 8:10; 19:26; see v. 15). The question is simply a corollary of “He is not here.” His absence from the tomb is a reason for joy, not tears. Why then the tears? Mary’s reply is surprisingly (and depressingly) familiar: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (v. 13b), simply echoing verse 2, in slightly more personal language: “my Lord,” and “I do not know” (italics added). In sharp contrast to the disciple who “saw and believed” (v. 8), Mary sees but does not believe. Her vision of two angels in white trumps Peter’s vision of scattered graveclothes (v. 6) and possibly the beloved disciple’s vision as well, yet it produces no faith. It does not enter her mind that Jesus has gone to the Father. Instead she clings to her misguided assumption that someone (an indefinite “they”) has taken away the body for reburial. And yet she, not Peter and not even “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” will be the first to experience and articulate true resurrection faith.

14 How does this happen? Only at the initiative of Jesus, who stands behind Mary, waiting for her to “turn around”: “And having said these things she turned around and looks at Jesus standing there, and she did not know that it was Jesus” (v. 14). Because she has not actually entered the tomb, Mary has only to “turn around”* in order to see him. Having “looked” into the tomb (v. 13), she now “looks” in the opposite direction and sees him, yet “she did not know that it was Jesus.” The transition from seeing one or more angels to seeing Jesus is found also in Matthew, where an angel tells the two women (Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”) not to fear because Jesus is risen, and sends them to the disciples, and as soon as they start on their way, Jesus himself meets them and tells them much the same thing (Mt 28:5–10). Here, however, instead of recognizing him and falling down to worship him (Mt 28:9), Mary “did not know that it was Jesus,” confirming her own admission that “I do not know where they have laid him” (v. 13). Her failure to recognize him, while not paralleled in Matthew, is consistent with certain other resurrection appearances in which the risen Jesus’ identity is similarly concealed, at least temporarily, from his disciples (see 21:4; Lk 24:16).

15 Just as in Matthew (28:10), the risen Jesus says to Mary just what the angels said, “Woman, why are you crying?” (v. 15a, as in v. 13). But he adds, “Whom are you seeking?”* not “What are you seeking?” as he once said to his first potential disciples (1:38), but “Whom,” as he said to those who came to arrest him in another garden (18:4, 6). His words recall those of the young man at the tomb in Mark (16:6) and the angel in Matthew (28:5), “You are seeking Jesus, the Crucified One,” and even more the question of the two men at the tomb in Luke: “Why do you seek the living with the dead?” (Lk 24:5). Whether she knows it or not, Mary is looking for a living person, not a dead body, as she has already intimated in speaking of “the Lord” (v. 2) and “my Lord” (v. 13).

Mary’s answer confirms this: “She,* thinking that he is the gardener, says to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him off, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away’ ” (v. 15b, italics added). Always “him”* and not “it.”* Like the man born blind after he was healed (see 9:36), Mary is talking to Jesus about Jesus, without realizing to whom she is speaking. Nothing that she has seen—not the stone rolled away from the tomb, not the sight of two angels in the tomb guarding an empty space, not even the sight of Jesus himself—has shaken her stubborn conclusion that he has been taken away and reburied. In contrast to the beloved disciple, Mary has seen but has not believed. She is seeking and not finding, but at least she has named the Object of her search correctly—“my Lord” (v. 13). Ironically, she addresses the Stranger she believes to be “the gardener” as “Sir,” the same word she might have used had she known who he was.*

16 What sight could not do, hearing finally accomplishes. Only one word is necessary: “Jesus says to her, ‘Mary!’ Turning, she says to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ which means ‘Teacher!’ ” (v. 16). Once again (as in 11:43), Jesus puts into practice the principle that the Good Shepherd “summons his own sheep by name” (10:3).* This time he is not calling someone out of a tomb (as he did Lazarus), but away from an empty tomb and toward himself. The sound of her own name awakens Mary as if out of sleep—the sleep of despair. Again she is described as “turning,”* a term that sounds redundant after she has already “turned around” from the vision in the tomb to face Jesus. This time, perhaps, it refers to her state of mind no less than to her body language,* yet, as we will see (v. 17), she may have turned her body toward Jesus as well.*

As one who “knows his voice” (see 10:4–5), she responds to his one word, “Mary!” with a one-word answer of her own. “Rabbouni,” literally “my Teacher,” is often regarded as a more personal and affectionate title than “Rabbi,” yet the difference should not be pressed. The Gospel writer translates the “Hebrew” (actually Aramaic)* title for his Greek-speaking readers simply as “Teacher,” exactly as he translated “Rabbi” on the lips of those who would become his first disciples (1:38). Jesus later told his male disciples, “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you say well, for I am” (13:13), and there is every evidence that his female disciples spoke of him in the same way. At Bethany, Martha “summoned Mary her sister, and told her privately, ‘The Teacher is here, and is summoning you’ ” (11:28). Mary Magdalene, like Mary of Bethany, and like the sheep in 10:3, has also been “summoned” (although the word is not used),* and she responds accordingly.*

17 Jesus immediately cautions Mary, “Don’t take hold of me, for I have not yet gone up* to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God’ ” (v. 17). He seems to have interpreted her “turning” toward him (vv. 14, 16) as an attempt to embrace him, or perhaps to “clasp his feet” in an act of worship (see Mt 28:9).* “Don’t take hold of me”* could mean either “Let go of me,” implying that she had already taken hold of him, or (more likely), “Do not attempt to hold on to me.” The reason he gives recalls his repeated statements to the male disciples earlier that “Where I am going, you cannot come” (13:33), or “Where I am going you cannot follow now, but you will follow later” (13:36), except that instead of “going,” or “going off” (14:2, 3), he speaks here of “going up” to the Father (as in 3:13 and 6:62). Mary must not “hold on” to him. Like the male disciples, she must prepare for her Lord and Teacher’s absence. She has already wept because “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (v. 13), and now she must learn that her reunion with him is a momentary reunion, one that cannot last.

The reader who reads on will be tempted to contrast this warning to Mary with Jesus’ bold invitation to Thomas a few verses later to “Bring your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it in my side” (v. 27). Why is Mary forbidden to take hold of him and Thomas explicitly invited to do so? Is it because she is a woman and Thomas is a man? Or does the contrast mean that somehow by the time Jesus appears to Thomas, he has already gone up to the Father and come back again, so that they are now free to touch him? One must be careful about such assumptions, for the two situations are not comparable. Mary wants to take hold of Jesus (at least if the analogy with Mt 28:9 is in play) as an act of devotion or worship, while Thomas wants to do so (as we will see) for verification (v. 25). While worship is appropriate—even before Jesus’ resurrection (see 9:38)—the time is not right. Jesus has other plans for Mary. The point is not that she is in danger of preventing Jesus from ascending—how could she do so even if she tried?—but that the longer she stayed with Jesus, the later she would be in delivering the message Jesus gave her. The command, “Don’t take hold of me,” is strictly preliminary to the main thing Jesus wants to say to Mary, “But go to my brothers* and tell them, ‘I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God’ ” (v. 17b). He has “not yet gone up to the Father,” but now he is “going up* to my Father.” It is unclear whether the present tense actually refers to something in the near or immediate future, like “going” or “going off” in the farewell discourse, or whether the process of “going up” has in some sense already begun.

Whichever it is, it involves a change in his relationship to the Father, a change involving the disciples as well. Up to now, Jesus’ “brothers” and his “disciples” have been clearly distinguished from one another (see 2:12). His disciples “believed in him” (2:11), while his brothers did not (7:5). Yet now, abruptly, the term “brothers” refers to the disciples, for it is to them that Mary will deliver the message (v. 18). Once again, the statement recalls the risen Jesus’ command to Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” in Matthew, “Don’t be afraid. Go tell my brothers* that they should go away into Galilee, and there they will see me” (Mt 28:10), yet with significant differences. Here, instead of “Don’t be afraid,” which is more or less expected (after 28:5), we have “Don’t take hold of me,” which is quite unexpected. Also, instead of promising a visit to Galilee, where the disciples will see him, he merely confirms that he is going away—more specifically, “going up” to the Father—and makes no promise about seeing him again. Yet the two stories have in common the sending of the woman (or women) to the disciples with a message, and—more remarkably—Jesus’ reference to his male disciples as “my brothers.” Matthew offers no explanation for the abrupt change in terminology, for the angel at the tomb had referred previously to “his disciples” (v. 7). At most, the shift could be inferred (if the reader had a good memory) from Mt 12:49, where Jesus “pointed his hand at his disciples and said, ‘Look, my mother and my brothers!’ ” John’s Gospel, however, provides a definition of “brothers” in the immediate context, for Mary is to “say to them, ‘I am going up to my Father and your Father,* and my God and your God’ ” (v. 17b). Jesus’ disciples are his “brothers” in that they have the same “Father” in heaven, the God of Israel whom they worship. One of them, as we have seen (19:27), even has the same mother! This is a milestone in the Gospel, for it is the first and only instance (out of 120 in all!) in which God is explicitly identified as “Father” of anyone except Jesus himself. Once or twice Jesus has come close to such an identification, as when he told the Samaritan woman of a day “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth” (4:23), or when he called the disciples his “friends” (15:14–15), and reminded them that “the Father himself loves you,* because you have loved me” (16:27; also 14:21, 23). Still, it has always been either “the Father” or “my Father,” never until now “your Father”—this despite the designation of believers as “children of God” (1:13; 11:52). It is almost the exact opposite of the other Gospels, notably Matthew and most notably the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus begins by referring to God over and over again (beginning in Mt 5:16) as “Your Father,” or “Your Father in heaven,” and only near the end discloses that the key to it all is “doing the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 7:21; see also Mt 11:27). In John’s Gospel, by contrast, “the Father” is Jesus’ Father first of all, and only by virtue of his resurrection the Father of those who believe.*

The question remains, Is the message Mary is to deliver a message for her as well? Is she included among those to whom Jesus says, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God”? If the male disciples are his “brothers,” is she numbered among his “sisters”?* What does the message mean for the messenger? Perhaps the answer depends in part on whether Jesus is using direct or indirect discourse. It is a matter of definition. Strictly speaking, he is using direct discourse, in that “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God,” is exactly what he wants to tell his disciples. Yet it is indirect, in that Mary will not use just those words, and those alone. She will not presume to speak for Jesus in the first person, like a prophet speaking for God. Rather, she will speak for herself, referring to him in the third person as she repeats what he told her to say: either “Jesus is going up to his Father and your Father,” and so on, or (more likely) “Jesus said to me, ‘I am going up to my Father and your Father.…’ ”* The words are spoken, after all, first to Mary, representing all who believe or would believe, male or female—not least the presumably male and female readers of the Gospel! It is Mary’s job to pass the message along in her own words to the male disciples, wherever they might be, thereby making them the first of Jesus’ honorary “brothers.” If the pronouncement elevates humankind to the point of being able to address God directly as “Father,” even as Jesus has done, it confirms at the same time Jesus’ humanity, to the point of worshiping “my God and your God” as any human being might do, even though he has been introduced from the very beginning of the Gospel as himself “God” (see 1:1, 18).*

18 We are not told how the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene ended. Having said, “I am going up to my Father,” did he take his leave and visibly ascend in her presence, as the angel Raphael did in the book of Tobit?* Or did she obey him and immediately take her leave, with Jesus still standing in the garden? As far as we know, it was the latter, for we see her next delivering her message to the disciples. That she does not simply repeat Jesus’ words verbatim is confirmed by what follows: “Mary Magdalene comes, announcing to the disciples that ‘I have seen the Lord,’ and [that] he said these things to her” (v. 18). Her first words are, “I [Mary] have seen the Lord,” not “I [the Lord] am going up to my Father and your Father,” and when she goes on to convey the Lord’s message, she does so by switching abruptly to indirect discourse—so abruptly as to attract attention, whether in Greek or in English. She delivers the message, but in her own words, making it unmistakably clear that Jesus “said these things to her”* first. Clearly, she implies, the words “my Father and your Father” were meant for her no less than for the male disciples.

Who were “the disciples” to whom Mary came, and whom Jesus has called his “brothers” (v. 17)? The last we knew, “the disciples” were just two in number, Peter and the one “whom Jesus loved,” returning to their quarters after visiting the tomb (v. 10). Mary knew where to find them before (v. 2), and it is natural to suppose that she would know where to find them again. If the present narrative were all we had, we would assume that they were “the disciples” to whom she came. As it is, the scenes that follows (vv. 19–23 and 24–29) virtually require that Mary brought the message to a larger group, perhaps as many as ten or eleven. In any event, we learn nothing of how “the disciples,” however many they may have been, reacted to her message, nor what the message may have led them to expect. All we know is that they will echo Mary’s words—her own words, not the ones she was given to deliver—making them their words as well: “We have seen the Lord” (v. 25).

19 The scene shifts from one enclosed space—the garden, with the enclosed tomb inside it—to another, a locked room: “Then when it was late on that first day of the week, and the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and says to them, ‘Peace to you’ ” (v. 19). The expression “late* on that first day of the week” establishes continuity with the opening lines of the preceding section: “On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes early, while it was dark” (v. 1). “That first day” is unmistakably the same day, now drawing to a close. Yet there is also a disconnect. Mary has delivered the message Jesus gave her to deliver (v. 18), but we have no information as to how, or even if, the disciples received it. Has she been to this locked room “where the disciples were for fear of the Jews”? Odd as it is, the disconnect is to some degree common to all the Gospels. In Mark (16:8) the women “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”; in the longer ending to Mark and in Luke they delivered the message, but the male disciples did not believe them (see Mk 16:11; Lk 24:11); in Matthew they ran to deliver the message (28:8, 10), and the disciples went accordingly to a mountain in Galilee (28:16), but nothing was said as to when or how the message was received, or whether it included any mention of a mountain. Similarly here, we do not find the disciples rejoicing in Mary’s good news that she has “seen the Lord” (v. 18). Instead, they are hiding out behind locked doors.* For the moment at least they are reduced to being, like Joseph of Arimathea, disciples “secretly for fear of the Jews” (see 19:38)—this even though Jesus has taken every precaution to ensure their safety (see 18:8–9, 19–21).

Still, their reception of the message is likely presupposed even though not explicit. Assuming that they had heard the words, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God” (v. 17), and that Mary had seen the risen Lord, this would not have led them to expect that they would see Jesus. On the contrary, if he was on his way to the Father, as he had told them again and again before, and as the beloved disciple already believed (v. 8), they would not have expected to see him immediately. At least “a short time” (16:16) would have to pass, a time of mourning and weeping, before they would see him again (see 16:16–22). His coming, therefore, is unexpected, and possibly miraculous, although nothing is made of its miraculous character.* Did he just appear suddenly behind the locked doors, or did he knock and gain admission (like Peter in Acts 12:13)? Miraculous it may well be, but if it is a miracle, the miracle is not the point.* The accent is not on how he came but on the simple fact that “Jesus came* and stood in the midst and says to them, ‘Peace to you.’ ”* The language echoes the farewell discourses: “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you” (14:18); “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you” (14:27); “I am going away, and I am coming to you” (14:18); “These things I have spoken to you so that in me you might have peace” (16:33). What he promised in departing comes to realization anew in what might otherwise have seemed a routine greeting, “Peace to you” (see Lk 10:5–6), one that we will hear twice more (vv. 21, 26).

E. The Second Appearance: The Disciples and Thomas (20:19–31)

Then when it was late on that first day of the week, and the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and says to them, “Peace to you.” And having said this, he showed them the hands and the side. Then the disciples rejoiced, seeing the Lord. Then Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you. Just as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” And having said this, he breathed, and he says to them, “Receive Holy Spirit. Whosoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven to them; whosoever’s you retain, they are retained.”

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, the one called Didymos, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples were saying to him, “We have seen the Lord.” And he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe.” And after eight days the disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus comes, the doors being locked, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you.” Then he says to Thomas, “Bring your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and be no longer faithless but faithful.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus says to him that “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who did not see, and believed.”

Now Jesus did many, and other, signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name.

In this Gospel, in contrast to Matthew, Jesus has given Mary no promise that the disciples will see him again, whether in “Galilee” (Mt 28:10) or anywhere else. She herself has “seen the Lord” (v. 18), but the message she delivers is that he is on his way to the Father (v. 17), not that he will appear to them. Nothing that she tells them, but only what they might have remembered of Jesus’ own words (for example, 14:3, 18–19, 21, 23, 28; 16:16–23), gives them hope of seeing him once more, and they seem not to have been expecting him. Yet he does appear to them, and quickly verifies first that he is their crucified Lord (v. 20) and second that he is nonetheless alive (v. 22), at the same time empowering them by the Holy Spirit to carry on his mission (vv. 21–23). Like Mary (v. 18), they are able to say “We have seen the Lord,” passing the testimony along to their absent companion, Thomas (vv. 24–25). Thomas demands the verification they themselves have been given, and more (v. 25), and when Jesus comes back again eight days later, he offers Thomas the verification, just as before (v. 20), without being asked (v. 27). Thomas can only say, “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28).

The two appearances are best viewed as a single appearance in two parts. In the other Gospel traditions the disciples reacted with unbelief to the report of the women (see Lk 24:11; Mk 16:11), and even when Jesus appeared to them, “on seeing him they worshiped, but some doubted” (Mt 28:17; also Lk 24:41; Mk 16:13, 14). In this Gospel, the doubt is shifted to Thomas alone, yet he is in no way differentiated from the other disciples. Their “joy” at seeing Jesus, and their experience of having “seen the Lord,” is incomplete without Thomas’s participation in it, and in the end his decisive confession, “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28), is theirs as well. Who would want to argue that they but not he are “sent” (v. 21), that they but not Thomas “receive Holy Spirit” (v. 22), or that the power to forgive or retain sins belongs to all of them but Thomas (v. 23)? No, what is said to the rest of the disciples in verses 19–23 is, in effect, said to Thomas as well, and what is said to him in verses 26–29 is said to them all. Jesus’ concluding words, “Because you have seen me, you have believed” (v. 29), are just as true of them as of Thomas. Clearly, he functions as their representative and spokesman both in his skepticism and in his faith. It is hard not to wonder if there is just a touch of skepticism in the disciples’ joy on “seeing the Lord” (v. 20), just as in Luke, when he “showed them his hands and feet” (see Lk 24:40–41).

In contrast both to Thomas and the rest of the disciples, Jesus reserves a beatitude for those who believe without the need of such verification (v. 29), and finally, echoing this beatitude, the Gospel writer tells the reader that he has given only a sampling of Jesus’ many “signs in the presence of his disciples.” He could have provided many more, he implies, but “these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name” (v. 31). It has become almost a commonplace in the interpretation of John’s Gospel that these words at some stage of the tradition concluded the Gospel. They sound so much like an ending that something close to a consensus has developed that chapter 21 was added later to the Gospel, either by the author of the first twenty chapters or by someone else. This is quite possibly the case, but going even further such interpreters frequently treat these verses as if they were even now the Gospel’s last words—as if chapter 21 did not exist. The trouble is that there is no evidence in any existing manuscript of the Gospel of John that it ever circulated without chapter 21. If 20:30–31 were at some point prior to the Gospel’s circulation intended to be its conclusion, they are no longer. The job of a commentary is not to interpret what the Gospel might have been “at some point,” but what it was by the time it was released into the world.

Consequently, the last two verses of this chapter are not quite so momentous as some modern interpreters have made them out to be. The Gospel writer is not so much summarizing his overall purpose in writing the Gospel as simply turning to his readers to explain to them that Jesus’ beatitude on “those who did not see and believed” (v. 29) applies to them, for they have seen none of these things firsthand. They are asked instead to believe what is “written.” The question of whether the Gospel was written to convert unbelievers or to strengthen the faith of those who—like Thomas and the others—have already “believed” should not be settled on the basis of these verses, and these alone. As for the “signs in the presence of the disciples” (v. 30), another near consensus among scholars identifies them as the series of “signs” or miracles that Jesus performed in the first half of the Gospel, beginning with the wedding at Cana (2:1–11, the “first sign”) and the healing of the nobleman’s son (4:43–54, the “second sign”), and continuing with the healing of the sick man at Bethsaida (chapter 5), the feeding of the five thousand and walking on the water (chapter 6), the healing of the blind man (chapter 9), and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (chapter 11). This too, as we will see, is open to question.

20 With the greeting goes an action: “And having said this,* he showed them the hands and the side. Then the disciples rejoiced, seeing the Lord” (v. 20). The apparent purpose of showing the disciples “the hands and the side”* is to verify that he is indeed Jesus, who was crucified. Yet it is a strange kind of verification, for the piercing of Jesus’ hands was not even mentioned in the account of his crucifixion, and the puncturing of his side (19:34) was witnessed by only one of them (at most), the disciple whom he loved—if indeed that disciple was still on the scene (see 19:25–27), and if he is present here.* Obviously, the account presupposes that the circumstances of the crucifixion had somehow become generally known among the disciples, and the now absent Thomas will shortly confirm that this was the case (v. 25).

The disciples’ only reaction to anything Jesus does in the entire scene is stated immediately and concisely. They “rejoiced,* seeing the Lord.” The echo of 16:16 and 22 could hardly be more explicit: “A short time, and you no longer see me, and again a short time, and you will see me” (16:16), and “I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one takes your joy from you” (16:22). The promise of the farewell discourse is fulfilled both in Jesus’ “coming” (v. 19) and in the disciples’ “seeing”* (v. 20). Joy is the only emotion attributed to the disciples here—not fear and not surprise—and in contrast to Luke (24:41), their joy is not mixed with unbelief, at least not explicitly (that will come later, v. 25). The expression “seeing the Lord” is a rare instance in which the Gospel writer himself uses “the Lord” as his designation for Jesus.* We would have expected either “Jesus” or simply “him.” The most likely explanation is that the writer is deliberately echoing in his own words Mary’s announcement, “I have seen the Lord” (v. 18), in order to anticipate the disciples’ announcement in turn to the absent Thomas that “We have seen the Lord” (v. 25). In a subtle way, the vocabulary confirms that the disciples have indeed received Mary’s message, even though their explicit reaction to it is never stated. We are reminded of the Samaritan villagers who, on verifying the report of the woman who had met Jesus at the well, said to her, “We no longer believe because of your speech, for we ourselves have heard, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world” (4:42).

21 Jesus repeats the greeting of peace: “Then Jesus* said to them again, ‘Peace to you. Just as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.’ ” The added words are something he has not said to them explicitly before, yet they come as no surprise to the reader, who has heard him acknowledge to the Father in prayer, “Just as you sent me into the world, I also sent them into the world” (17:18).* Nor can the disciples themselves be surprised, for their mission was everywhere presupposed in Jesus’ last discourses. For example, “a slave is not greater than his lord, nor is a messenger greater than the person who sent him” (13:16), and “the person who receives whomever I send receives me, and the person who receives me receives the One who sent me” (13:20, both prefaced by “Amen, amen, I say to you”); also “You did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you that you might go and bear fruit, and that your fruit might last” (15:16), and the section that follows on how they will be treated in the world (15:18–25).* The salutation, “Peace to you,” is all the more necessary in the face of what they will encounter in the course of their mission (see 16:33, “These things I have spoken to you so that in me you might have peace”).

22 Just as before (v. 20), words are followed by action—and this time by more words, interpreting the action: “And having said this, he breathed, and he says to them, ‘Receive Holy Spirit’ ” (vv. 22–23). “Having said this” echoes verse 20,* where it introduces Jesus’ act of showing the disciples his hands and side to verify who he is and the reality of his death. Here it introduces a second act of verification: “he breathed”* (v. 22a). What does breathing verify? That he is alive. It is the triumphant sequel to the notice that on the cross, just after he received the sour wine, Jesus “handed over the Spirit” (19:30). As we saw there, the “Spirit” he handed over was the Holy Spirit that came down on him and “remained” (1:32–33), and was his “without measure” (3:34). When the Spirit left him, he stopped breathing and died, but now he “breathed” again, and again we are reminded of a text from the farewell discourse, “you see me, because I live—and you too will live” (14:19). The Spirit, who once rested on Jesus alone, is back, not for him now but for the disciples. Accordingly, having “breathed,” Jesus added, “Receive Holy Spirit”* (v. 22b), and for this reason it is customary to translate the text, “he breathed on them,” presumably conferring on them the Spirit with his very breath, much as God in the beginning, having “formed the man from the earth, breathed* in his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7, LXX).* While it is doubtful that this biblical text is explicitly in view, Jesus has laid down the principle that “The Spirit is that which makes alive” (6:63), that is, that the Spirit brings about resurrection.* Here the Spirit is both the evidence of resurrection—that is, that Jesus is alive—and the empowerment of the disciples to do what he has just sent them to do.

The tantalizingly brief notice of the Spirit’s coming raises two difficulties, one having to do with the internal consistency of the Gospel of John itself, and the other having to do with its relationship to other New Testament witnesses, Luke-Acts in particular. First, the notion of the Spirit as an empowerment, as that which can be “breathed” on the disciples from Jesus’ mouth, seems inconsistent with that of the Spirit as Advocate (or “another Advocate”), a divine Person who will teach the disciples after Jesus’ departure, leading them into all the truth (see 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:7, 13). The masculine “Advocate,”* implying personality, is repeatedly linked to the neuter “Spirit,”* either “the Holy Spirit” (14:26) or “the Spirit of truth” (14:16; 15:26; 16:13). Here, as in the first half of the Gospel (1:32–33; 3:5, 6, 8, 34; 4:23–24; 6:63; 7:39),* only the neuter “Spirit” is used (without even the definite article!), leaving little room for the Spirit’s personality. Marianne M. Thompson addresses this issue helpfully and at considerable length.* She understands the Spirit theologically (as the Spirit of God), not christologically (as Jesus’ “replacement”), and concludes with an analogy between the coming of the Word of God into the world as a Person, Jesus the Son, and the coming of the Spirit of God into the world as a Person, the Advocate.* In the Gospel itself, a variety of expressions have been used for the Advocate’s coming: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you …” (14:16); “the Father will send in my name” (14:26); “whom I will send to you from the Father” (15:26); “if I go, I will send him to you” (16:7). None of these quite match the present scene in which “Holy Spirit”* comes on the disciples as breath from Jesus’ mouth. The description here is better attuned to the promise John received that Jesus would baptize “in Holy Spirit”—as here without the definite article (1:33)—or to the experience of being “born of water and Spirit” as the qualification for entering the kingdom of God (see 3:5–6).* In short, the accent is on “Life,” even as Jesus is alive (14:19), not on a new personal Companion to be with them forever and lead them into all the truth. And yet, this is the only “Spirit” that comes on the disciples within the pages of this Gospel. Perhaps the best answer to the riddle is to acknowledge that this “Life,” this empowerment, becomes “the Advocate” in a personal sense only later, in the course of their mission and its accompanying persecutions, when, as we learn in this Gospel (15:26–27) and in others as well, “the Holy Spirit will teach you in this hour what you must say” (Lk 12:11; see also Mk 13:11, “for you are not the ones speaking, but the Holy Spirit”).

The second difficulty is that another, better-known, tradition places the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples fifty days later, on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4). In the other three Gospels, the baptism “in Holy Spirit” (Mk 1:8), or “in Holy Spirit and fire” (Mt 3:10//Lk 3:16), promised by John the Baptist remains unfulfilled as the Gospel story ends. According to Luke, the risen Jesus tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem “until you are clothed with power from on high” (Lk 24:49) because “John indeed baptized in water, but you will be baptized in Holy Spirit after not many days” (Acts 1:5). “You will receive power,” he adds, “when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). And so they wait. In John’s Gospel, by contrast, they are not waiting for anything. The Holy Spirit comes here and now, right from Jesus’ mouth. Nothing remains unfulfilled. And obviously, the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost in the book of Acts cannot be made to correspond to the emergence of “the Advocate” in the course of the disciples’ mission to the world. In both passages the role of the Spirit is to equip the disciples for mission; the difference between them is not that the Spirit is personal in Acts 2 and not in John 20. It is rather that the Spirit is represented in Acts 2 as “Power” and in John 20 as “Life.” That (aside from the phenomenon of speaking in tongues) is the only real difference between them. Thus when Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive Holy Spirit,” it is not an anticipation of Pentecost, but “Pentecost” itself—the only coming of the Spirit of which this Gospel knows.

The same cannot be said of the book of Acts, for there, at the very beginning, the writer speaks of “all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up, having commanded through the Holy Spirit* the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts 1:1–2, italics added). Although John’s Gospel seems to know nothing of Luke’s Pentecost, Luke here shows just a trace of knowledge of John’s. Nothing in Luke 24 (for example, 24:31–32) explains this notice in Acts 1 quite as well as what we find in John 20:22. In John’s Gospel, the coming of the Spirit—the baptism in the Spirit, if you like—is within the story, not beyond the story, in the same way that Jesus’ own coming, and the experience of seeing him again and realizing the peace and joy that he brings (vv. 19–20), are within the story. It has to be that way because, unlike Luke, he has no second volume, and unlike Mark, he is not content to leave the story unfinished.

23 Jesus has told the disciples much already about what their mission entails, and what the Spirit will do for them and through them in the course of their mission to the world (see, for example, 14:12–14; 15:18–16:13). There is little to add, and what little there is he adds here: “Whosoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven to them; whosoever’s you retain, they are retained” (v. 23). As we have seen, this may well be what Jesus had in mind when he promised that they would do works “greater” than his own (see 14:12). Elsewhere in the Gospel tradition, Jesus claims for himself “authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mt 9:6//Mk 2:10//Lk 5:24), yet in this Gospel he never exercises that authority, at least not explicitly. He has come close once (5:14), and in material added to the Gospel (8:11) even closer, and he has hinted at the disciples’ own need for forgiveness and responsibility to forgive in the washing of their feet (13:14), but when he has spoken of “sin” explicitly, it has been to retain and not forgive sin (see 8:21, 24, “you will die in your sin[s]”; 9:41, “Your sin remains”; 15:22, “they have no excuse for their sin”). The Gospel writer has consistently characterized Jesus’ redemptive ministry positively as the giving of life, rather than negatively as the forgiveness of sin. The promise still stands that the Lamb of God “takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), but as we have seen, that promise only comes to realization when Jesus “baptizes in Holy Spirit”—that is, from now on. The Gospel remains true to its apparent assumption that sin is not truly “taken away” (whether in forgiveness or in judgment) until Jesus dies on the cross. That work is now “finished” (19:30). He that was dead is alive again (20:22), and now the risen Jesus commissions his disciples to carry out the “greater” works of forgiving sin and preparing for judgment.

The pronouncement, “Whosoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven* to them; whosoever’s you retain, they are retained,”* is generally acknowledged to be linked in some way to the pronouncement in Matthew, “Whatever you bind on the earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on the earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 18:18).* The similarities are substantial. Both passages have to do with the forgiveness of sins (see Mt 18:15–17, 21–35).* In both, conditional relative clauses* are followed by main clauses with verbs in the perfect or future perfect, signaling that something definite has been accomplished. Also, in each instance a signal is given (without explicitly mentioning God) that this accomplishment is in fact the work of God—either by the use of the passive voice (“are forgiven,” and “are retained”),* or (even more explicitly in Matthew) by the passive voice combined with a reference to “heaven” (a circumlocution for God: “bound in heaven,” and “loosed in heaven”). Moreover, the verbs “forgive” and “retain” are widely regarded as at least rough equivalents of “bind” and “loose” on the basis of presumed Aramaic or Hebrew originals.* Yet Matthew’s context is very different from the present one: preresurrection not postresurrection, and focused not on a mission to the world but on relationships within the Christian community, more analogous to the footwashing and the responsibility to love one another in the Gospel of John than to the present passage. Moreover, it is unlikely that John’s Gospel is simply editing Matthew (or a text that uses Matthean vocabulary), and substituting his own terminology for Matthew’s. While “bind” and “loose” are not John’s vocabulary, neither are “forgive” and “retain.” As we have seen, nowhere else does this Gospel mention the “forgiveness of sins,”* and the verb translated “retain,” that is, to hold or seize,* is nowhere else used in just that sense in the New Testament. It is likely, therefore, that John’s Gospel is drawing independently on a source, oral or written, other than Matthew, a source in fact that Matthew himself may have used.*

What exactly, then, is Jesus promising his disciples? It appears to be a corollary of 13:20, “the person who receives whomever I send receives me, and the person who receives me receives the One who sent me,” while taking into account as well the negative equivalent now preserved in Luke 10:16: “The person who hears you hears me, and the person who rejects you rejects me, but the person who rejects me rejects the One who sent me.” In short, the disciples are being given authority to act as Jesus’ agents in the course of their mission, and consequently as agents of God himself. Through them the Holy Spirit, or Advocate, will both “convict the world of sin” (16:8) and forgive sin. The sins they will forgive are not sins against them personally (as, for example, in Mt 6:14–15, 18:21–35, Mk 11:25; Lk 17:3–4), but the sins of the world generally (see Lk 24:47), unbelief in particular (see 16:9) but sins of every kind. Those whom they forgive (because their message is accepted), God will forgive; those whose sins they “retain,” as Jesus sometimes did (because the message was rejected), God will not forgive. In short, God will ratify and validate their mission because God is their Father (see v. 17). He has given them “authority to become children of God” (1:12), and consequently to act on his behalf.

24 Nothing is said of how the disciples reacted to any of this. No explicit confession of faith in Jesus. No report of how he made his departure from the locked room.* Instead, we learn (belatedly) that one of “the disciples” (v. 19) was not present: “Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, the one called Didymos, was not with them when Jesus came” (v. 24). We have met Thomas twice before, in 11:16, where he was identified similarly as “the one called Didymos,” and 14:5, where (with three other disciples) he questioned Jesus about his departure. Here, for the first time, he is identified further as “one of the Twelve,” the only disciple other than Judas Iscariot (6:71) to be so identified. Why just these two, when we have reason to believe that Simon Peter, Philip, Andrew, Nathanael, and the other Judas (and perhaps “the disciple whom Jesus loved”) also belonged to “the Twelve”? As for Judas Iscariot, it is clear that he is so identified because even though he was “one of the Twelve,” he handed Jesus over to the Jewish authorities. Similarly, in the case of Thomas it appears that he is so identified because even though he was “one of the Twelve,” he was not present with the others in the locked room when Jesus appeared to them. This suggests that those who were gathered there in the five preceding verses were precisely “the Twelve,” still bearing that identity even after the departure of Judas (in Mt 28:16 and Mk 16:14 they are called “the Eleven”).

25 The ten other disciples bring their testimony to Thomas in the same words Mary used (v. 18) in bringing her testimony to them: “So the other disciples were saying to him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’* And he said to them, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe’ ” (v. 25). The form of the pronouncement echoes—one might even say mimics—certain classic sayings of Jesus himself about salvation, with “unless”* and a strong negative: for example, “unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (3:3, italics added); “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life” (6:53).* It is unclear whether or not Thomas has heard the same testimony (“I have seen the Lord”) from Mary’s lips (v. 18) that he now hears from his fellow disciple, and just as unclear how he knew about “the print of the nails” and the wound in Jesus’ side. James Charlesworth argues from Thomas’s knowledge that Thomas himself is the anonymous witness who testified to the spear thrust and the blood and water from Jesus’ side (19:35),* but this is surely to argue too much from too little. As we have seen (v. 20), Jesus showed his hands and side to the other disciples for verification, even though they did not ask for it, implying that the nature of his wounds had by that time become common knowledge—whether through the testimony of a Roman soldier, the beloved disciple, the women at the cross, or Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Thomas is by no means alone in knowing about the wounds even though he alone demands verification. Whether the other disciples would have demanded the same verification had Jesus not given it freely remains an unanswered question. Any reader familiar with the other Gospels (see Mt 28:17, “but some doubted”; also Mk 16:13–14; Lk 24:41) may well suspect that there is something unfinished about the revelation that has just taken place (vv. 19–23), that there is still a little matter of unbelief to be dealt with. If sin is defined chiefly as unbelief (as in 16:9), then the unbelief of the disciples themselves must be addressed before they can deal with the sins of those to whom they are sent.* While the issue is addressed in the person of just one of them, the unbelief of one is in some sense the unbelief of all, just as the final confession of faith attributed to just one (see v. 28) belongs finally to them all.*

26 For this reason, the drama enacted in verses 19–23 is repeated. What was left unfinished is now finished: “And after eight days the disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus comes, the doors being locked, and stood in the midst, and said, ‘Peace to you’ ” (v. 26). The account repeats verse 19 almost verbatim. The doors are still locked, and although the reason is not repeated (“for fear of the Jews,” v. 19), the reason is unquestionably the same. They are still afraid of the Jewish authorities. Nothing has really changed, and a repeat performance is necessary.* “After eight days” probably means a week later, thus again on the next “first day of the week” (see vv. 1, 19),* the exchange between Thomas and the other disciples having taken place in the meantime. Jesus comes and stands among them, and says “Peace to you,” now for the third and last time (see vv. 19, 21).

27 Jesus speaks to Thomas as if he has heard exactly what Thomas said to the other disciples two verses earlier. Responding to Thomas’s demand to both see and touch “the print of the nails,” and put his hand into Jesus’ side (v. 25), he says, “Bring your finger here and see* my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side”; then, responding to Thomas’s emphatic “I will never believe” (v. 25), he adds, “and be no longer* faithless but faithful”* (v. 27). The invitation to believe (as, for example, in 14:1, “Believe in God, and believe in me!”) is explicit. A popular interpretation of Mark 9:24 (“I believe; help my unbelief”) implies that belief and unbelief can somehow rest side by side in the same heart, but that is no more the case there than it is here.* Thomas must choose between being “faithless” and “faithful.” To believe is to renounce unbelief. There is no middle ground. Nor is Jesus asking Thomas to believe without verification. On the contrary, he is asking for faith based on seeing what the other disciples saw, and beyond that on physically touching Jesus’ wounds.* He is offering Thomas exactly what Thomas demanded.

28 Instead of taking advantage of the offer, Thomas responds immediately and emphatically to the invitation to “be no longer faithless but faithful.” In reply he “answered and said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ ”* (v. 28). The disciples have routinely called Jesus “Lord” (see 13:13), and Mary Magdalene has spoken of him as “my Lord” even in death (v. 13), but this is the first time anyone (aside from the Gospel writer) has called him “God,” or “my God.” Finally the introduction of Jesus to the reader as “God” (1:1), or “God the One and Only” (1:18), is confirmed from within the narrative. He has not “made himself God” (10:33), or “equal to God” (5:18), as his opponents charged, yet he is God, and now at last his disciples know it. The confession is all the more striking because the message Jesus sent to the disciples through Mary Magdalene was “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God” (v. 17). Even Jesus recognized the Father as “my God,” and he invited his disciples to do the same. Yet Thomas does not hesitate to address Jesus himself in exactly the same way. He realizes that at the end of the day, “Believe in God, and believe in me!” (14:1) amount to the same thing. Those commands were addressed to all the disciples, not just one, and Thomas’s confession too (like Peter’s in 6:69) is best understood as representing the conviction of all the disciples gathered behind locked doors on those two successive first days of the week.

Admittedly, the identifications of Jesus as God (1:1 and 20:28) form an admirable pair of bookends framing the whole Gospel and contributing to the commonly held notion that the Gospel at some stage ended with chapter 20. But caution is necessary because the story is not only about Jesus but about the disciples whom he has just sent out into the world. How will they carry out their mission to “forgive” or “retain” sin? How are they themselves forgiven? What are their responsibilities to one another? Who will their leaders be? These questions have not been fully answered, and whether the answers finally given (chapter 21) were an afterthought or planned from the beginning is not obvious at this point. That can be determined only by looking carefully at the verses that follow, and at chapter 21 itself.

29 As a rule, Jesus does not respond with enthusiasm to confessions of faith in him in any of the Gospels. The exception is Peter’s confession in Matthew, to which Jesus replies with a beatitude, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father in the heavens” (Mt 16:17). Here too is a beatitude, but not for Thomas: “Jesus says to him that ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed* are those who did not see, and believed’ ” (v. 29). Yet it should not be read as a rebuke to Thomas either.* He believed because he saw, just as John did (1:34), just as the anonymous witness to the spear thrust did (19:35), just as the beloved disciple did (v. 8), just as Mary Magdalene did (v. 18), and just as the other disciples did (v. 20). The only real exception within the narrative is the royal official who “believed” simply on the basis of Jesus’ word that his son would live (4:50), and even he had his faith eventually verified by sight (4:53). As we have seen, his faith stands as the paradigm for the faith Jesus commends here, on the part of those who “did not see, and believed.”

To whom is Jesus referring? Quite clearly to the readers of the Gospel, and others of their generation, whether Jews or Gentiles, who now believe in Jesus without having lived through the events of his ministry. Yet the aorist participles are surprising: “Blessed are those who did not see, and believed.”* We might have expected, “Blessed are those who will believe—or even just ‘believe,’ as in 17:20—without having seen.” How seriously are we to take the past tenses? The only past example of such faith is, as we have noted, the royal official at Cana (4:50). It is as if Jesus is speaking here not in narrative time—a week after his resurrection—but in the reader’s time, looking back on his ministry from the reader’s perspective long after the fact. The reader knows of “those who did not see, and believed,” because the reader is, almost by definition, one of them. The beatitude is for the reader’s benefit. In that sense, the pronouncement parallels Revelation 1:3: “Blessed is he who reads [aloud], and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and keep the things written in it, for the time is near.” And yet, the aorists also have a certain credibility within the narrative as well, for Jesus has said, “other sheep I have, which are not from this courtyard” (10:16), and the Gospel writer has spoken of “the children of God who are scattered,” and yet to be “gathered into one” (11:52). Here Jesus speaks of these “other sheep” or “children of God” as if they have already believed, knowing that when they do believe, it will in fact be without seeing, at least in the way Thomas and his fellow disciples have seen. The beatitude is one of just two in the Gospel of John, the first for those who “do” (see 13:17), the second for those who “believe.”

30–31 The reader of the Gospel, implicitly in the picture in the preceding verse, is addressed quite explicitly in the two verses that follow: “Now Jesus did many, and other, signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name” (vv. 30–31). As in the book of Revelation (22:18–19), the self-reference to what is “written” and to “this book” (v. 30) hints that the “book” is now drawing to a close.* A corollary of this conclusion could be that the “many, and other, signs in the presence of his disciples” are the signs or miracles that Jesus performed throughout the course of his ministry, and that those “written” are the series of seven miracles (several of them explicitly identified as “signs”) that comprise much of the first half of the Gospel. It is clear from certain summary statements throughout the first half of the Gospel that Jesus indeed performed “many, and other, signs” beyond those seven (2:23; 3:2; 6:2; 7:31; 9:16; 11:47).* Yet the last of the seven to be explicitly “written” occurred nine chapters earlier (with the raising of Lazarus in chapter 11). The series has been formally terminated and the verdict on it pronounced: “Even after he had done so many signs before them, they would not believe in him” (12:37). Those signs, moreover, were done not (at least not solely or primarily) “in the presence of the disciples,” but “before them” (12:37)—that is, in the presence of either “the crowds” or “the Jews”—for the most part those who did not believe. One time-honored theory is that the summary here in chapter 20 originally terminated a pre-Johannine “Signs Source” consisting of those miracle stories and little else. Whoever created the “Signs Source,” so the theory goes, believed that signs produced faith, so that simply enumerating Jesus’ impressive signs, one after the other, would bring people to believe that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of God.” The Gospel writer knew better, and relegated the signs to the first half of the Gospel with a negative verdict attached, accenting the blindness of the world (perhaps of “the Jews” in particular). The Gospel writer then took over the more positive summary as a formal conclusion to chapters 1–20 as a whole, which at that stage of composition was the whole of the Gospel of John.* The difficulty is that “signs” by itself is not a particularly apt term for the content of John’s Gospel as a whole. Jesus’ miracles have long since yielded center stage, first to his words (chapters 14–17) and then to his passion and resurrection (chapters 18–20).

It is wise, therefore, to look at another possibility—that the “many, and other, signs in the presence of his disciples” (v. 30) are resurrection signs verifying that the Crucified One is alive, and that the Risen One is indeed Jesus who was crucified. He has rolled away the stone, made himself known to Mary in the garden, appeared suddenly within a locked room (twice), showed the disciples his hands and side, breathed on them proving that he is alive, and invited them to touch him. What more is needed? This, the writer insists, is only a sampling of all that Jesus actually did, yet it is—or should be—more than enough to engender faith among those who have not seen any of it, but who now read what is “written in this book.” In short, the “many, and other, signs”* in the Gospel of John correspond to the “many convincing proofs” mentioned at the beginning of the book of Acts (1:3).* If so, the notice to the reader (vv. 30–31) is intended to conclude and summarize a series of resurrection appearances of Jesus, not necessarily the Gospel as a whole.* The Gospel writer first claims that these appearances to Mary and the male disciples are enough (out of all he could have told) to verify Jesus’ resurrection—yet for good measure he adds one more (see 21:1–14)! Whether the “one more” is an afterthought or planned from the start has yet to be determined.

To the reader, the Gospel writer promises that “these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name” (v. 31). As in 19:35, there is a textual problem as to whether the verb, “so that you might believe” is present or aorist subjunctive, but the evidence for the present is stronger.* The consequent debate over whether the Gospel of John is written primarily to convert unbelievers to faith in Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God,” or to confirm and strengthen the faith of Christian believers is largely beside the point. The aorist is supposed to support the former and the present the latter. But both here and in 19:35 (the only other instance in the Gospel in which the readers are addressed directly), the point is rather to encourage readers—whoever they may be—to emulate the faith of those mentioned in the narrative, the anonymous witness at the cross in the first instance, Thomas and his fellow disciples in the locked room in the second. In this way, readers are invited to claim the mantle of honor as “those who did not see, and believed” (v. 29). This is not necessarily to emulate the terminology of the narrative. In the case of the witness to the spear thrust there was no terminology; he simply “testified” (19:35), even if one wishes to infer that he may have confessed Jesus as “Son of God.” In Thomas’s case the terminology was “my Lord and my God” (v. 28), but the conclusion here is not “so that you might believe that Jesus is both Lord and God.” Rather, the more familiar titles, “the Christ, the Son of God”* are retained, probably because they were the titles best known to readers of the Gospel, whether in connection with Christian initiation or Christian worship.

That Jesus is “the Son of God” or God’s “One and Only” has been part and parcel of this Gospel’s witness from the start (see 1:14, 18, 34, 49), and has been the predominant way in which Jesus has spoken of himself, whether as “the Son,” or “the Son of man,” or simply by continually referring to the God of Israel as his “Father.” As for “the Christ,” this title was mentioned first as that which John was not (1:20), and then as the translation of “the Messiah” (1:41), that is, Israel’s coming Anointed One, he “of whom Moses wrote in the law, and of whom the prophets wrote” (1:45). This is who Jesus’ first disciples took him to be, because of John’s introduction of him to them as “the Lamb of God” (1:36; see also 1:49, “the King of Israel”), yet he himself explicitly embraces the designation only once, in the presence of the Samaritan woman at Sychar (4:26). Among “the Jews,” the debate goes on and on as to whether or not he has the qualifications or meets the expectations; the prevailing suspicion is that he does not (see 7:26–27, 31, 41–42; 9:22; 12:34). Jesus himself, when challenged to “tell us plainly” that he is “the Christ,” refuses to do so in so many words, appealing instead to “The works that I do in my Father’s name” (see 10:24–25) and pressing his claim to be “Son of God” (10:36). At the end of the day, the title “Son of God” decisively interprets “the Christ,” rather than the other way around. It is Martha finally, at Bethany, who puts into words the full confession that the Gospel writer wants to elicit from his readers: “Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (11:27). Thomas’s confession may be more profound and climactic, but Martha’s is the explicit paradigm for faith among Johannine Christians.

The last clause, “and that believing you might have life* in his name” (v. 31b), goes to the very heart of this Gospel’s theology (for example, “so that everyone who believes might have eternal life in him,” 3:15; “so that everyone who believes in him might not be lost but have eternal life,” 3:16; “whoever believes has eternal life,” 6:47)—not to mention that of 1 John (“These things I wrote to you so that you might know that you have life eternal, you who believe in the name of the Son of God” (1 Jn 5:13).

If this interpretation is correct, then the things specifically “written so that you might believe” are the resurrection appearances of Jesus, not the Gospel as a whole and not the seven signs performed in the first half of the Gospel. Of course, it must be admitted in the same breath that the same thing is nevertheless true of the Gospel as a whole. It too is “written so that you might believe,” and so for that matter are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This Gospel is no more entitled than any of the others to be called the “Gospel of Belief.” But are “these,” that is, “these signs,” to be identified only as the resurrection appearances recounted so far, or do they have a forward reference as well, so as to include to Jesus’ appearance at the lake of Tiberias and the extraordinary catch of fish in the following chapter (21:1–14)? As we will see (in 21:1 and 14), chapter 21 is aware of chapter 20, but is chapter 20 aware of chapter 21? Is chapter 21 an afterthought, or something already in mind as chapter 20 concludes. It depends on what is meant by an afterthought. The transition from chapter 20 to chapter 21 is not so different from two earlier transitions within the Gospel: the writer concluded the narratives of each of Jesus’ first two signs in Galilee with summary formulas introduced by the pronoun “this”:

“This Jesus did in Cana of Galilee as a beginning of the signs” (2:11).

“And this Jesus did again as a second sign when he came from Judea to Galilee” (4:54).

In each instance the pronoun “this” refers back to what has just preceded, yet in each instance the narrative continues, with the expression “after this” (2:12) or “after these things” (5:1). If the present passage is in any way analogous, “these” does refer back to the appearances described in chapter 20, not forward to chapter 21, and yet a continuation of the narrative is by no means unexpected. Similarly in Jesus’ discourses, a summary introduced by “these things” or “these words” does not necessarily terminate anything; see, for example, “These words he spoke in the treasury, teaching in the temple” (8:20), followed by, “So again he said to them” (8:21); “As he was speaking these things, many believed in him” (8:30), followed by “So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him” (8:31). In short, the transition between John 20 and 21 is not inconsistent with other narrative transitions in the Gospel. If it is a less-than-smooth transition—particularly given the shift from Jerusalem to the lake of Tiberias in Galilee—it is no more difficult than the transition from chapter 5 to chapter 6 (from Jerusalem to the same lake in Galilee!).

This, together with the fact that no manuscript evidence exists for separating chapter 21 from the rest of the Gospel as an appendix (much less assigning it to a different author or a redactor), suggests that John’s Gospel be read canonically, with no thought that 20:30–31 is intended as a conclusion or definitive statement of purpose for the Gospel as a whole.* Afterthought or not, chapter 21 continues the narrative of chapter 20 in much the same way as chapter 5 continues that of chapter 4, chapter 6 that of chapter 5, and chapter 7 that of chapter 6—all with exactly the same phrase, “After these things.”*