A Psychological Profile of John the Apostle

Copyright 1990 by John R. Mabry

The Apostolic tradition boasts few figures as enigmatic as John. He was born to a successful, even wealthy, fisherman, Jonas. He was one of the twelve disciples whom Jesus chose to be in his "inner circle" to receive his intensive teaching. He was even one of the three disciples that made up an "inner circle within the inner circle," (the other two being Peter and John's own brother, James). John also had the special distinction of being "the disciple whom Jesus loved;" though it is only John himself who uses this phrase and we can only speculate as to what was meant by that. John was the only disciple present for any portion of Jesus' trial, and certainly the only one recorded as being at the foot of the cross during Jesus' crucifixion. At that time Jesus gave his mother into John's care, and tradition reports that John and Mary eventually settle in Ephasus, where they were the center of a flourishing Christian community. John also has the distinction of being the only disciple who dies a natural death.

The Gospel attributed to him has many features that set it apart from the other three canonical Gospels. It is generally believed to be the latest recorded (probably around 90 BCE)1, and although some dispute John's actual authorship, there is also much reason to believe that he is, at the very least, the major source for the material therein. Unlike the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Gospel of John records no parables. One finds plenty of similes and metaphors, but no actual teaching stories so heavily relied upon by the synoptics. John's Jesus is very different from the character reported in the others' accounts. As biblical scholar Robert J. Miller points out, "In John there is nothing of Jesus'...associating with the outcast. He performs no exorcisms and barely gives [any] ethical teaching."2 Jesus in John's account is long winded, and talks about himself much more than in the synoptics, and he makes it very clear that he is the Messiah. As John Sanford records, in John, Jesus "is more the divine Christ than the human Jesus."3 Whereas in the synoptics, Jesus heals out of compassion, and is always loathe to make a spectacle-he goes about warning people not to tell anyone what he had done-in John's Gospel Jesus positively binges on miracles, for the expressed purpose of persuading people to believe in him. J.B. Phillips in his introduction to his own startling translation of the Gospel suggests that it might have been written as a "deliberate corrective" to the humanistic Jesus of the synoptics.4

John's account has a very different feeling tone to it, as well. It is more mystical, more miraculous than the synoptic accounts. John views everything through the lens of his later understanding, whereas in the others', the reader discovers Jesus as the disciples did, piecing together the clues of his true identity. John has a tendency towards hyperbole (which is not a criticism; Jesus had the same), and is, in a way, the Gospel "writ large." Once, when someone had asked me to quickly sum up the difference between John and the synoptics, I responded that if the synoptics had reported that Jesus had farted, John would have recorded it as Jesus having issued "billows of glory." Though crude, this is the important distinction: everything in John's Gospel glows with transcendence. It's luminous quality is consistent throughout, giving one a feeling of being in the presence of the Divine at all times. In John, God's immanence is felt, implicit in the text.

Many commentators feel that John is written for the purpose of comforting and teaching a community of Christians in a particular situation, and is not meant to be a factual account of Christ's life.5 Whereas this might be true, and John certainly had a lot of responsibility as a leader, one gets the impression that John is most sincere, however fantastic his account might seem. B.H. Streeter suggests that "John's stories and discourses may have been seen and heard by him in a mystic trance,"6 for his Gospel is top-heavy with mysticism, myopic in its single-minded bludgeoning of its peculiar message. What can we discern about John, the man, from this? What makes him tick? He is by no means a charlatan, it is doubtful that he fabricates his accounts, yet his writing is that of an exceptionally eccentric man with a mission.

In order to help answer these questions, it would be expedient at this time to break character and to tell a story:

The closest I have ever been to a person like the author of John's Gospel was in my undergraduate years. It was then that I met a most exceptional young woman whom I will call Kelly. Kelly was a truly talented person; she was charismatic, yet very shy due to a severe lack of self-esteem. Unfortunately, she was shunned because of her loud way of speaking, and, frankly, bizarre way of relating. Kelly would often break into a conversation and within moments take it to some seemingly irrelevant tangent. Her "talent" for non-sequitors was annoying enough, yet she also spoke frequently about her dreams, which were of epic length and cosmic significance. Some people got to the point where, once Kelly launched into one of her dreams, they would simply leave the room. Others voiced their doubt (usually in her absence) as to whether she actually dreamed what she claimed, and believed her to be "making it all up." In addition, when she would recall events to others, her accounts would often differ significantly (and sometimes, quite irreconcilably) from those of others present, even if the events were as recent as the very same day.

I do not believe Kelly ever intentionally misrepresented these events, nor do I think she manufactured her dreams out of some misguided quest for attention. What I do believe is that the window to the unconscious which we all possess was in her case a garage door. Whatever aperture exists between the conscious and the unconscious mind, whatever interface connects them, was in Kelly's psyche abnormally large, unusually sensitive. The unconscious continually seeped into her waking life, and she, powerless to control it, suffered from a complete inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, or perhaps more accurately, objective reality from her own subjective extremity.

I believe John the apostle was very similar to Kelly in many ways. His accounts differ so radically from the others, not because they are manufactured after the fact, but because of the peculiar personality of the person relating the events. John is telling the truth, but the truth as experienced by himself, through the filter of his own exceptional psyche. Streeter comments that

"these visions have a certain quality which, both at the moment of experiencing them and in subsequent reflection, compels conviction that they are veridical-that is, that they are not dreams or guesses, but revelations of actual fact."7

The Unconscious breaks into John's world at every turn. Indeed, the Unconscious is the main character in his account. This theory is supported by the existence of John's last known writing, the Revelation. Here, the Unconscious and the archetypes residing therein come forth with frightening intensity. The Revelation is not just visionary, it borders on psychosis, evidence that John's psychological condition advanced as his age increased. It is no wonder he was revered as such a visionary, such a mystic. His sight into the unseen realities was probably as uncontrollable as it was acute. I have no doubt that what he saw, the events he related, were "real," in that they were actually seen by him, but I also believe that they were far from what others perceive as "objective reality."

Also like Kelly, John is an artist. This is clear to the reader in the way he organizes his material, "his systematic way that he introduces various motifs in the Prologue and then weaves these motifs throughout the chapters that follow: light vs. darkness, above and below, seeing and not seeing, truth and falsehood, life and death, flesh and spirit;"8 the skillful way the plot builds, his use of dramatic effect. Indeed, his prologue, in the Greek, is quite self-consciously poetic.9 His foreshadowing regarding Judas' betrayal in chapter six is an obvious dramatic device, as is his absurdly polarized portrayal of Judas throughout. And John's Baptist in chapter three clearly knows too much, but his speech is used to heighten the drama, and to appeal to authority (the Baptist was viewed as a legitimate prophet, often considered equal to Elijah). John paints Jesus as passionate (the cleansing of the temple, found twice in John's account), reflecting his own emotional sensitivity. Some writers have suggested a homosexual relationship between John and the Lord, based on John's self description as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." While we should not dismiss the question of John's homosexuality out of hand, since it often manifests in those men who tend toward the artistic, and in emotional sensitivity. However, John need not have been gay to exhibit these traits.

Still, John's respect for the feminine principle is profoundly evident throughout the Gospel, in which women figure far more prominently than in the synoptics. Jesus does the culturally unthinkable in speaking to the Samaritan woman by the well (Chapter 4), and it is Mary Magdalene who first encounters the risen Lord (chapter 20).

All of these things point to an unusual capacity for feeling and aesthetic, symbolic sensitivity. But like many, this sensitivity manifests in a profound spiritual sensitivity as well. A fine example of John's capacity for visionary projection is found in the end of chapter one of John's Gospel, where John's Christ promises "Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." (John 1:51)

Another example is found in the synoptics. It is most curious that the story of the Transfiguration is omitted in John's Gospel, for this is precisely the sort of vision we should like to attribute to him. I would like to suggest that although the story is not found in John's gospel, the story is still indigenous to him, as only he, James and Peter were present at the event, and obviously one of the three told the story to someone. It may very well be that John did in fact relate what he saw to the other disciples, but neglected to provide an account in his own Gospel to avoid redundancy (it was, we recall, the last written down, and John surely had access to others).

John is aware of his visionary tendency, and seems to have a reactionary need to ground his experiences in reality. The early Gnostic Christians loved John's account, no doubt due to its transcendent mystical qualities. The Gnostics taught that matter was evil and God far above it. They did not believe that the holiness of God could co-exist with the gross nature of the material world, and taught that Jesus, sent from the Father, could not possibly have taken a real body, and that Jesus only appeared to be here in the flesh. (One Gnostic sect believed that although Jesus could "appear to" urinate, he could not "appear to" defecate!)10 Subsequently, the horrified apostle spent no mean energy defending the flesh-and-blood reality of his experience against the growing Gnostic numbers. Thus the prologue of John's Gospel reads "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." (John 1:14) In his first epistle, John makes a point of his personal experience with the physical Christ, telling his readers

"It was there from the beginning; we have heard it; we have seen it with our own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have seen it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us." (1 John 1:1-2. Emphasis mine.)

John is the only account in which Thomas refuses to believe the Lord had risen until he was able to put his fingers in the holes of Jesus' hands, and put his hand into the Lord's side. Again, John makes it clear that Jesus was tangible, flesh and blood. Time after time, John records Jesus' contact with the material world and his power over it: the loaves and fishes, walking on water (chapter 6), etc.

Albert Schweitzer in his book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, tells us of his research which suggests that the Apostle John and his own disciple, Ignatius, concocted the doctrine of transubstantiation in order to keep the Lord's incarnality ever before the faithful, so they would not fall into the Gnostic heresy. Schweitzer writes "In the bread and wine the becoming-one of matter and spirt is effected in the same way as in the coporeity of Jesus. They continue the existence of the Redeemer in a form capable of appropriation."11 This is believable, especially in light of such lines in John's Gospel as Jesus' "I am the bread which came down from heaven." (John 6:41)

John is a brilliant man, an artist, a mystic, a dedicated servant and a prophetic theologian in his own right. I in no way mean to belittle his ideas or visions by my suggestions of his unique psychological state. In fact, I believe that everything John saw truly exists on some plane, even if such a plane is exclusive to himself. And his wisdom regarding spirituality is notable (for example, in his account of Jesus' meeting with Nicodemus, Johns exhibits a keep knowledge of the spiritual path in his Christ's refusal to nail down any dogmatic descriptions of the Spirit). (John 3) But we cannot deny that his psyche was very different from most. It is clear that he saw things in a "glorified" manner, more befitting of a mystic than a fisherman. As Sanford points out,

"the author of our Gospel was a religious genius who was uniquely in touch with the Christ... The Christ whose words we hear in the Fourth Gospel is not the historical Jesus from whom we hear in the synoptic Gospels, but the Risen or Cosmic Christ."12

This is John's gift. The other evangelists give us Jesus as a man, but John gives us God. It is fitting that it is the last Gospel, for it is the crown, the true Breath of the spirit, and like John's Jesus, whose words are often cryptic and difficult, it is this Wind which we cannot ever fully comprehend.

Footnotes

1 Alexander, David and Pat, eds. Eerdmans' Handbook to the Bible (Carmel: Guideposts 1973), p. 533.

2 Miller, Robert J., ed. The Complete Gospels (Sonoma: Polebridge Press 1992), p. 195.

3 Sanford, John A. Mystical Christianity (New York: Crossroad 1993), p. 5.

4 Phillips, J.B. The New Testament in Modern English (New York: Macmillan1976), p. 179.

5 Alexander, p. 532.

6 Streeter, B.H. The Four Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1936), pps. 391-392.

7 Ibid., p. 392.

8 Sanford, p. 6.

9 Ibid., p. 13.

10 Leyton, Bentley The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: ??), p. ?

11 Schweitzer, Albert The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle ( London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1953), p. 344.

12 Sanford, p. 8.