“The way a story begins is important…. the stories we believe about who we are and where we come from shape our worldview and the way we see ourselves and value others.” (page 43, Redeeming Eden: How Women in the Bible Advance the Story of Salvation)
Barely one month in and the beginning of the story of my reading year in 2026 is taking me to some interesting and unexpected places. While I started off in the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel that my Church is working through this year and which I am complimenting with James R. Edwards Pillar New Testament Series commentary, it is the Gospel according to John that keeps muscling its way into the conversation. Beginning with Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible, where Leslie Baynes‘ express interest in the ways Lewis saw and used the scriptures emphasizes his particular obsession with the Gospel according to John. As Baynes points out, it is his understanding of this Gospel that ultimately leads to specific tensions, giving us an inroad to both his points of weakness (interpretation applied without imagination) and strengths (imagination applied to interpretation) when it comes to the role of the scriptures in his larger body of work.
It’s an excellent book, especially in the latter half where the author walks through each entry in the Narnia series, the place where she believes Lewis was at his most astute and profound when it came to his application of the scriptures within his imaginative work. That’s worth the price of the book alone. What I didn’t expect is that it would end up being an inroad into Hugo Mendez’s new buzzy book, The Gospel of John: A New History. A book that’s becomming all the rage right now in certain scholarly circles. It’s a book that follows in the footsteps of Bart Ehrman, largely transplanting Ehrman’s specific take on Paul as gnostic writer and thinker immersed in Greco-Roman ideas of secret knowledge attained through special access to the spirit on to fresh observations about the Gospel according to John as a single author composition reflecting the voice of its creator working to invent a false pseudonym (the beloved disciple) as a means of advancing what would become known as the “Johannine” tradition. In other words, Mendez approaches the Gospel according to John by imagining it being unearthed today as a long lost Gospel in the same manner that happened with the Nag Hammadi library, likewise assuming the same soil that Ehrman believes gave us Paul’s writings as well. Does cutting through the noise of centuries of tradition surrounding John uncover some simple truths about the nature and shape of its composition in line with these gnostic texts? Mendez says yes. He believes John bears all the shared markings of such a gnostic text.
Full disclosure- I take a lot of issues with Mendez’s working theory. First, in suggesting that his work looks to strip away the obstacle of centuries of tradition so as to be able to see the Gospel through a more objective lens, he completely buries the fact that he is imposing the lens of his own specific tradition, one anchored in the assumptions Ehrman makes regarding Paul. The story Ehrman tells about Paul shapes how one sees everything else, and as Mendez suggests at one point, he wanted to write a book on the Gospel according to John for this specific circle (my emphasis) of Pauline scholarship. There is however a glaring issue here- if one disagrees with Ehrman’s interpretation of Paul and his writings, as I largely do, successive arguments shaped by these assumptions become challenged as well.
Perhaps the more interesting question then, for a reader like me, is to ask whether Mendez’s successive theory regarding John supports or challenges Ehrman’s assumptions about Paul. That becomes the important starting point. This is what I found occupying my mind as I read through his new theory on the authorship and composition of the fourth Gospel. What I found ultimately unconvincing here was Mendez’s express efforts to isolate and reduce John to its hellenized langauge. Not unlike what Ehrman does with Paul, Mendez reads the Gospel of John as though its completely detached from its second temple Jewish roots, which of course is easy to do when you punt it entirely to a much later world and context. In fact, he largely handwaves entire swaths of the current scholarship out of the picture, labeling anything that disagrees with his working assumptions “evangelical,” thus completely ignoring one of the key facets of that present conversation, which is uncovering and recovering what scholars are recognizing as a deeply rooted Jewish concern in John’s Gospel reflective of that second temple context. This is the key quality and nature of the Gospel according to John that expressly challenges Mendez’s particular readings of the text as reflecting an internal soteriology of secret knowledge being obtained by an inner transformation by way of an exclusive access to the spirit (a key motif and marker of the gnostic traditions). What Mendez fails to consider are the ways in which John is using Hellenized language and symbols to expressly critique this Greco-Roman way of thinking with his specific Jewish (or Judean) concerns, concerns that bring these conceptions of heaven and earth together, not splitting them apart (as Ehrman popularly assumes Paul does in his shared context).
Saying all of this, while I certainly feel more qualified to express thoughts and opinions regarding the Gospel according to John (full cards on the table, I hold to a view that contrasts with Mendez’s operative theory by seeing it as a product of a community shaped over successive generations and reflecting three disctinct periods in time, something we can see in the overall structure of the Gospel itself- three distinct and visible editing phases reflecting different voices but, by its nature, anchored in a source tradition), I felt far less qualified to speak on the Gnostic Traditions themselves. Beyond Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) and King (What is Gnosticism), I haven’t really delved deeply into the subject, and both of those above sources tend to be bound to a specific lens (not unlike Ehrman). Thus, if I could note why I disagree with Mendez’s specific interpretations regarding the text and composition history of John, I couldn’t say with the same degree of awareness how and why the Gnostic Gospels themselves should be made or kept distinctly seperate from that Gospel beyond appealing to easy rhetorical marks. Which led me to ask some of my online comnunities for recommendations on the Gnostic Gospels. Thus far I have David Litwa (The Gnostic Archive), Yamauchi’s Pre-Christian Gnosticism, and a class called Early Church History: Gnostic and Valentininans (available in podcast form through the Early Church History podcast).
While I was putting those together, I also started (and have almost finished) the book The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth by Meggan Watterson. A book which is all about reclaiming the Gnostic and extant writings as revelatory works over and against a history of canonization led by a very real patriarchy which has taught us to fear and exclude them. The inroad to this conversation is the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, a letter (or book) which remains in the conversation within Eastern Traditions as a vital part of this larger portrait of the world of the N.T. and its vision regarding specific customs and views of women in the ANE.
There’s actually a lot that I agree with regarding Watterson’s essential plea, which is to let go of the tightly guarded restraints of the patriarchal systems that has handed us a canon disavowing such extant writings, and subsequently a scripture that could be more controlled and abused by said patriarchy under the guise of the divinely inspired “inerrant” word that singular interpretations could dictate and enforce (read: western christianity). It should not be the case that the scriptures represent some kind of closed book where all extant conversations and dialogues are no longer able to enter in. And if Watterson is correct, there should be no reason to be fearful of engaging Gnostic and extant and apocryphal texts as part of our engagment with that larger conversation. What makes the scriptures powerful and inspired and sacred is the way it invites us into that larger and ongoing conversation rooted in a singular confession- the resurrected Jesus. That we are able to find disagreements and disputes within the pages of scripture regarding how this plays itself out in different contexts, which reveal the multi-faceted world of its writers, should make this all the more real not challenged. And certainly the Gnostic Traditions are good and important windows into the different responses that we see shaping the second century world.
But I will say, I take a slightly different path than Watterson towards some shared conclusions. A path I was struggling to fully clarify until I started reading Redeeming Eden: How Women in the Bible Advance the Story of Salvation by Ingrid Faro. Where Watterson tends to get weighted down (in my opinion) by her own express interests in tackling the very real issue of patriarchy, often conflating particular cultural readings and realities with the world of the scriptures themselves (even her “history” of canonization ends up being fairly reductive to this end, wrongly misappropriating the process as a singular aim of the patriarchy, which is not really true), Faro is expressing similar concerns but with an express interest in cutting through the noise of cultural impostions and getting at the world of the scriptures themselves (in her case, the text of Genesis). And in a very real way this brought me full circle back to the book Between Interpretation and Imagination, ironically a book that is all about one of the great historical voices of our modern age writing on the relationship between myth and Christianity (whom famously came to see Christianity as the true myth that made sense of all the world’s stories).
If Watterson’s approach I think erronously leads her to see the revelatory work as a gnostic practice of embracing inner truth and transformation by way of elevating the power of the self, something that I find leaves her sailing on the real and important waters of her subject matter without much of an anchor, and likewise continually leads her to find the liberative power of Thecla’s story as an act of individualization and an elevation of the self or self-made truth (which detaches her from all of the oppressive forces around her, in this line of thinking, robbing her of a truly self made identity), Faro reminded me of the freedom that comes from fiunding our imagination through the act of interpreation that seeks the source of our identy. Right from the get go her book takes a decicidely different turn, where instead of elevating a conception of the self or the individual suggests that the self can only be known when we know the true nature of God. And for Christians that is all about the story that we find Jesus embodying within the world (and pages) of the scriptures. Which I think will be a good fit for a recently announced upcoming release from one of the most formative authors in my life- God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal- Biblical Theology from Genesis to Revelation on the New Creation by N.T. Wright.
This is where I find myself in this moment, looking ahead to February, and not inconsequently looking forward to another notable upcoming releases by a hugely formative author for me personally- Paul and John in Harmony: A Theological and Historical Exploration by Michael J. Gorman. It’s almost like he knew this would be the book I would be needing right now in the early months of 2026.
Or to wade into the world of potential cliche and yet somehow still true, “… in the beginning (of the story), God had a plan.” (page 42, Redeeming Eden)
A couple things that have really been sticking with me from Faro’s book:
- She brings us into one of the most studied and looked upon and scrutinized portions of the scriptures (Genesis 1-3) by imagining (in conversation with a robust interpretation of the text) Adam and Eve emerging within an already unfolding story (which is the essential thesis of Kaitlin Curtices Everything Is a Story, another book I finished this month and which suggests all of us are born into a story already in play). A story which, in express critique of the surrounding ANE conceptions of a God in conflict with creation, finds God both acting for and dwelling within the created order and creative practice. An unfolding story that finds the particular story of Adam (humanity) and Eve (the living one, or the breathing one) being awakened in their emergence (birthing) on the scene to a pre-existing cosmic divide. Thus what we find in the narrative of the garden is the story of humanity being tasked to guard God’s good creation from this division precisely by imaging (closely related to imaginging) the true nature of God to creation rather than imaging the lie (the serpent). Rather than the trees reflecting a test that brings about the conflict they instead represent a means for humanity to partner with God in guarding creation in the midst of a pre-existing conflict between the spiritual Powers. As she notes, in ancient myths, “after an idol was formed it was taken to a garden or by a stream to complete a vivification process to bring life into the world… when the mouth and the eyes of the statue were opened, it would be inhabited by a spiritual entity, making it a god.” Thus we find one of the key distinctives of the Genesis narrative among a world of creation myths- rather than image bearers being contained to deified rulers, the Judeo-Christian narrative sees all of humanity as image beaerers intended to reflect the true name or nature of God to a world enslaved to those spiritual Powers. To have their eyes open upon eating the fruit is to align themselves with the image of Empire. Idol or image in relationship to human is a word only used positively in this context- all others are attached to idolatry.
- With this as the backdrop for the story, she helps us to see how the seven day framework is a literary device denoting sacred space and sacred time around which a temple is constructed. The creation story “is a temple inauguration.” (page 48) And this is what really had my attention turned. In this temple text, the human (man and woman) are to serve together and protect the garden as sacred space, a place where God could abide with creation- this evokes the idea of being alert to the story that they have entered into, and thus are now emobyding, where spiritual forces have already rebelled against God. Ezer (helper) is a word that everywhere else evokes a military conotation- to guard against. But the imagery here gets blown even more wide open over and against much of our cultural constructs when we recognize what it means for the woman to be birthed from the side of Adam. Tsela (which sometimes is side or rib in translations) is always a special architectural term relating to the sides (walls) of sacred spaces (temples)- the sides must be able to bear the weight together to guard and protect the sanctuary. Here then we have the proper portrait that evokes of “all” humanity imaging the true nature of God over and against the divisions of the Powers that seek to distort what creation is through the deification of the individual, a central facet of Empire, Equally so the way the story gets rewritten to have modern man standing over and above the woman. Or in a more literary sense, to imagine a temple space (creation) where humanity is set against its life source (the unifying nature of God) is to bring us to the idol rather than the revealed God. To be bound to the curse, which is given to the de-creating nature of the spiritual Powers not God’s act of creation, rather than the promise, which is given to creation, is to be left with a story of exile rather than new creation.
- This is something which comes truly aware and alive when we consider how Seth, the seed that comes to reflect the promise of new creation, means “annointed one,” while Seth’s son (Enosh) means “mortal one”. God’s redemptive and restorative work breaking into the mortal human presence in a world enslaved to the Powers of Sin and Death. an act which has a fascinating interplay with the shared word for “universe” and “hide” an act that we find first in Adam and Eve (hiding in the garden) and then parlayed on to God whom is now breaking into the world outside of the garden as a way of occupying this promised and concieved marriage of Heaven and Earth in a world divided- what is hidden is being made known.
- Something which comes even more alive yet when we consider the intentional connections between words which all become a literary interplay between the word “build”: the building of humanity leads to the building of a son leads to the building of a city leads to the building of a temple (tower). As Faro writes, “The creative process involves envisioning something that inspires actions to create something new (page 43).” Meaning, humanity is meant to particpate in the act of “creating.” At the heart of the problem in Genesis 13 is precisely the question of which image we are creating (building) in, or what these creative acts are imaging and what reality it is naming. Or more to the point- what story is this act of building telling regarding the true nature of God, and thus the true nature of creation. As Faro writes, “The God who concieves (also) speaks, and his thoughts become reality.” So it is with us as we are called to participate in this creative process, yet the question for us remains: do our thoughts conceive the reality of a God who is for the world, for creation or against it. This story matters to the way we see the world and value others.
The Stories of my Life 