The Fourth Gospel, Refutation of Rabbi Akiba?

Got this book yesterday in the mail by John Bowman called, The Fourth Gospel And The Jews, A Study in R. Akiba, Esther, and the Gospel of John.
The premise of the book is that John was written at the time of Akiba and that Rabbi was responsible for deciding what official Judaism was, what the official books of the Jews would be, and at that time, who the Messiah was.
The thing that got my interest in this book was a reference to it, in another book I was reading, where Bowman was saying that the unidentified festival in John, chapter five, was Purim. It may not have been called that in John because it may not have been historically accurate for the time of Jesus, but may have been a more regular celebration in the time that John was written.
Another thing I can mention to start with is the use of the word, Jews, in the book by Bowman, that it is significant in that the word, Jew, as written and used in John, would not have been used in the same way in the time that the story was happening that was being described by John. The terms used by various groups before (the late '30's of the first century AD?) the destruction of Jerusalen in 70 AD were different than what would have been used in say, the '90's, of the latter first century AD.

reply to post by jmdewey60

John was written at the time of Akiba and that Rabbi was responsible for deciding what official Judaism was, what the official books of the Jews would be, and at that time, who the Messiah was.

The Wikipedia entry for Akiba, which "incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain." is under:

Akiva ben Joseph
Akiva ben Joseph (ca.17–ca.137 CE) simply known as Rabbi Akiva (Hebrew: רבי עקיבא‎), was a tanna of the latter part of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd century (3rd tannaitic generation). He was a great authority in the matter of Jewish tradition, and one of the most central and essential contributors to the Mishnah and Midrash Halakha. He is referred to in the Talmud as "Rosh la-Chachamim" (Head of all the Sages). He is considered by tradition to be one of the earliest founders of rabbinical Judaism.[1] He is the seventh most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah.[2]

I've noticed that the most highly respected rabbis, those influential in Mishnah, are said to have lived 120 years. Hillel is also listed as living to 120. Is that to make a connection to Moses? As if they, "being like Moses", are entrusted with the oral tradition, so that even if the original Moses never heard something, that a later Moses could invent some new variation, then claim it was "handed down"? Just some questions raised about the "handing down of oral tradition".

But "When Akiva would see bar Kochba, he would say: "Dein hu Malka Meshiecha!" ("This is the King Messiah"; Jerusalem Talmud, Ta'anit 4:8)." Is that to distinguish a Prophet(scribe) Messiah from a King Messiah?

reply to post by pthena

But "When Akiva would see bar Kochba, he would say: "Dein hu Malka Meshiecha!" ("This is the King Messiah"; Jerusalem Talmud, Ta'anit 4:8)." Is that to distinguish a Prophet(scribe) Messiah from a King Messiah?

I think this is what Bowman was getting at in this book about John. It has to do with what we have discussed previously, about the use of apocalyptic literature to instigate war to bring it about, and how John was against Jewish nationalism, and was supporting Jewish universalism. Both forms were in existence at the time and Akiba represented the pro-war, nationalistic faction, John represented a counter to that by having the apocalypse already accomplished in the crucifixion, and Jesus saying that his kingdom was not of this world, as a counter-balance to Bar Kochba.
I think people now days are more open to the idea that most of the New Testament books were later additions that were attached to the four original Paul canon, so people should be more likely to accept that John was a new canonical book, representing itself as the word of God, to be immediately accepted into the Christian canon as being given by god, just as Esther was accepted into the Jewish canon, thanks to the influence of Akiba.
This book like blew the lid off my mind. Bowman is a German who is an expert on the rabbinical writings and in his day was the top expert in the Samaritan writings. So he knows what he is talking about, better than probably anyone else in the world, on this subject.
So, blow your mind? John 1:1 is the claim to canon of the book, not a claim of godhood of Jesus! Wow!

reply to post by pthena

As if they, "being like Moses", are entrusted with the oral tradition, so that even if the original Moses never heard something, that a later Moses could invent some new variation, then claim it was "handed down"? Just some questions raised about the "handing down of oral tradition".

You know, Bowman gets into all that but it is so complex to me that my eyes kind of glaze over and I get really sleepy, if you know what I mean. The guy is so knowledgeable but it goes over my head. I really don't know what to say right at the moment until I can make sense of it myself. I could say that anyone who cares even a tiny bit about the New Testament and the Bible and Christianity and Judaism, needs to have this book, absolutely!
I should note that there is a preview page for this book in Google Books and might be worth looking at for anyone considering a purchase. I got annoyed when it skips the pages where it gets really interesting and found a really nice copy used that came out of the Bangor Theological Seminary Moulton Library, apparently replaced by the newer edition (I checked their catalog and they have the later paperback edition which has a better typeset while my earlier, hardcover copy looks like it was printed straight off a PDF file, with a computer font).

reply to post by jmdewey60

I could say that anyone who cares even a tiny bit about the New Testament and the Bible and Christianity and Judaism, needs to have this book, absolutely!

That answers the next question I was going to ask, whether I should get it or not.

4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

17 For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has seen God at any time. The one and only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.

So the author of John is presenting the light from God, which existed long before Moses, as the presenter of truth, or as Paul wrote, "a righteousness from God, apart from the Law." So the author presents as his authority to write as much higher than the authority of those who manipulate, add to, subtract from, Moses.

reply to post by pthena

So the author presents as his authority to write as much higher than the authority of those who manipulate, add to, subtract from, Moses.

I think you got it without having to explain it since you know the Bible inside and out. The writer of John was very disturbed about the Megillah of Esther being put next to and equal, or higher even, than the Torah, where it is commanded to be read aloud twice every year, which makes it read twice as many time as the Torah.
Esther points out how people who are self-righteous can make themselves messiahs and act with the authority of God, without actually being given that authority but just assume it themselves.
John on the other hand recognizes that there should be an authority given by God before assuming the position of messiah (I think I got the intention of Bowman, here).
I should post some examples of the parallels between John and Esther to show how it is almost a line for line refutation of it. I need to do a little work to take the points from Bowman's book and show a direct, side by side comparison between the verses.
The important thing to note is how earth shaking of an event it was in Judaism to have another book supersede the Torah, which is exactly what happened with the introduction of Esther into the canon. (which by the way, is also in the Christian canon)

To start out a little on my exposition of Bowman's book, an important part to understanding the connection between Esther and John is the banquets. There are six banquets in both books. One good one to look at is the marriage banquet at Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine. The one in Esther is the king celebrating for seven days the marriage to the queen who was before Esther. There is an immediate split which occurs and results in the king making a proclamation that every man should be the head of his own household. So this is where you get this otherwise inexplicable snub by Jesus of his mother where he calls her "woman".
Esther says the drinking of the wine by the Jewish characters in the story was done in accordance with the Law. So in the Cana wedding, you have Jesus ordering jars used for purification rituals be filled with water. Anyway, it goes on through the book with lots of these examples which wakes you up all of a sudden to what all these things are referring to, things that the people in the time of its writing would have picked up on but we are so enmeshed with fundamentalism that we are blind to. Bowman says that John could not make it any more blatant than it does, since, after all, Esther was at this point, already canonized.

I had turned my computer off and had gone to bed but had to jump up when I read this one bit of information in Bowman's book. Now I am making my own conclusion until I find some confirmation in the book further on, but there is this thing that keeps coming up on this forum about Jesus saying, "Before Abraham was I was (or some translations render it, I am)."
If you understand John as being against what I just now made into the unholy trinity, of the Beast, the Image of the Beast, and the False Prophet, coming from a view one might have at the time of the writing of John, of Akiba, Bar Kokhba, and the Book of Esther; then you can understand why John might say that, knowing that in the rabbinic writings, it claims that Adam saw Akiba.

The note given as a citation is: T. B. A. Z. 5a which I interpret to mean it is from the Mishnah, the Talmud Bavli Avodah Zarah, so whatever all that means, and when it was written I don't know. But apparently, somewhere in this, a student of rabbinical Hebrew could find something about Akiba and Adam, where Adam somehow saw Akiba. If this was already something believed at the time that John was written, then it may explain why you have this odd saying coming from Jesus, that makes Jesus at least on a par with this venerated rabbi.
John 8:56
Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad."

Here is something I found doing a word search on Amazon:

The Apocalypse of Baruch
by R. H.Charles
Page 82 footnote.
According to the Othioth, 17c, of R. Akiba (Weber, 352, 353),
God was to sound a trumpet seven times at the end of the world.

It makes me wonder if someone looked at how successful John was and decided to do the same sort of thing with Revelation.

Here is something controversial, at least with fundamentalists, the woman taken in adultery.
Critics don't like it because it seems too absurd, and it may have been too absurd even for the Church, long ago to where some manuscripts omitted it. Here is part of the translator's note on it from NETBible:

This entire section, 7:53-8:11, traditionally known as the pericope adulterae, is not contained in the earliest and best mss and was almost certainly not an original part of the Gospel of John. Among modern commentators and textual critics, it is a foregone conclusion that the section is not original but represents a later addition to the text of the Gospel.

Guess what, how absurd is the story of Esther where Haman is caught by the king lying in her bed in an apparently adulterous situation? Does this story of the entrapment of Jesus using an adulterous woman all of a sudden make sense now that you understand John is an almost parody of the book of Esther?
I don't know about you, but I am ready to embrace this little story as being a for real part of John! Of course this bit comes from reading Bowman's book, and not something I noticed myself but it does make me happy to see good evidence that this story is genuine because it is too good to throw away for some trumped up technicalities.
John 21:25
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

There you go! There is the rationale behind the book of John, right in the book of John, the author had at his disposal a vast amount of data concerning Jesus that he had to cherry pick from them to write a Gospel, so he found the ones that fit his purpose, which was to counteract another book being canonized which sent an entirely wrong message, in the author's opinion.

As an aside; I don't know what kind of school the Bangor Theological Seminary is, but there is a tag or small sheet of paper in the back of the book where they would stamp the return date and it seems to have only been checked out six times ('76 to '96, the book was published in '75), and none since they probably acquired the newer edition. One reason why I own it now, but a little sad that none of the professors at that school ever recommended to their students to read the book.

reply to post by jmdewey60

It makes me wonder if someone looked at how successful John was and decided to do the same sort of thing with Revelation.

I could make the case that Revelation in conjunction with Esther is a call for World War. On some designated year, on Purim, all the Jews in the world were to rise up in arms, North Africa, Asia Minor, Rome; and attack the Romans(Haman). Meanwhile, when the Euphrates dries up (according to Revelation) making way for kings of the East, aka Parthian Empire, spurred on by some new Mordechai (bearer of imperial signet ring), massive army raised to intercept Roman Legions at Armageddon.

World War plain and simple. That would make Revelation a Zionist document, uniting Jews and Christians in Asia Minor to rebel against Rome for the benefit of Jerusalem. Revelation 11:10 has always struck me as a Purim celebration.

reply to post by pthena
I left that open ended, thinking you would maybe see it that way.
Kind of like I was saying in your "they Stole His Body" thread, where you have a back and forth going on between the publishings of these now canonical books, where I said Revelation was written in retaliation to the Gospel of John, to have him writing the Apocalypse John neglected to add to the Gospel.
What you are saying makes sense, and take into consideration what Bowman's premise is, that a lot of Christians up to this point were in fact Jews and felt themselves to be Jews, so why John was so important. What you may be seeing is their last gasp to prevent the schism and to try to reunite the Christians to their cause. Of course it ended in failure on their part, but no so fast, we have a new generation of the fool-hearty to take it up now.

OK, I just ordered the book from B&N. 6 days probably.

Originally posted by pthena
OK, I just ordered the book from B&N. 6 days probably.

I hope you could find a good used one, since this book has been around for a long time. I noticed last night in the Preface he said this was a manuscript he found while moving which he had forgotten about and submitted it to the publisher who helped with editing it and getting it ready to print. It was based on another paper he had done in honor of so-and-so (something these academics seem to do a lot, publishing combined essays with a theme, based on a particular person's work). He said people had been urging him to write a commentary on John, and he never was able to get around to it. I think what he did was took the opportunity with this book to add enough to it to where it ended up being a commentary of sorts.
My point of saying all this is that the book has what is to me a bit of filler, meaning he filled it out into a more comprehensive book on John, beyond the central topic of its relationship with Esther. I do have some confidence in his picking things out from the Talmudic writings and relating them to parts in John, so it is an interesting commentary that I doubt anyone else could make the likes of.

BTW: I used this post, plus the one above on the woman caught in adultery to make a comment on the book on Amazon. Wow, that was fast. Maybe the more reviews you write on Amazon the faster they get put up because they know you are not a spammer, or whatever. My Review I probably should have cleaned up the grammar a bit and made some things a bit clearer as to what I meant but I'm not too worried about that and it is good to have any sort of review of book, to have it get noticed. I know I will skip some books if there is no review because I think no one cared much about it. This is just the sort of book I like, where you have someone who is a true expert applying some of that knowledge where normal people can take it and put it to use.

On my thread on spelling Jesus' name, I asked the question why it was important that the Greeks at the Temple came to Philip. I found a answer to this question in John Bowman's book, which makes sense (all his arguments seem to make sense, at least to me) though it does not have anything apparently to do with the central topic which is this idea of canon and how it was a factor in the conversation which Bowman believes was in the background and was the impetus for the writing of the Fourth Gospel.
The argument he presents, if I understand it correctly, is that Jesus is now in the place where The Baptist was at the beginning of the book, where the Pharisees and whatnot from the temple came to him to find out what the message from God was. So instead of that, you see now the Greeks coming for the same purpose but this time to Jesus. In the story that included the Baptist, you had Jesus finding Philip, who in turn finds Nathaniel and tells him about the news of the Messiah. In the Jesus story towards the end of the book, you now have Philip coming to tell Andrew (Andrew, who had earlier told his brother, Simon Peter about Jesus) that these seekers have come, then they both went to tell Jesus. So it is the reversal of this chain of passing the news, where at the first it went in one direction, then later, it went the opposite way.
I thought that was an interesting explanation and thought I would share that since I had brought up this very thing earlier, as a question. I think anyone who was to get this book would be glad they did since every page seems to present a new revelation (such as this one example) and a new insight into the meaning of this Gospel.

I want to put a link on this thread, to some posts I make on another thread, where I was discussing the book which is the topic of this thread.

I want to do this because, I want the information available and easily found, by anyone who might happen onto this trad for some reason, and would like to have some more important information on the subject.

In this post I was giving a quote from Bowman in the book where he says that "Jesus is God's name".

That will get you on the right page in that other thread. Further down that page, I give a partial description of Bowman's explanation for Pilate's rather enigmatic question, "What is truth?".

reply to post by jmdewey60

I think anyone who was to get this book would be glad they did since every page seems to present a new revelation (such as this one example) and a new insight into the meaning of this Gospel.

Yaaa! I finally got the book. page numbers for comparison are:
chapter pg
1 1
2 25
3 45
4 99

reply to post by pthena

The page numbers match so they don't seem to have revised the book, or only in a minor way.
Anyway, I think you should find enough usable information to at least feel like you got your money's worth. I think the author has a unique perspective and is interesting even if you don't completely buy into his premise.