The worldview that dominated ancient cultures was that creation was divided into three tiers: the heavens, the middle plane of earth, and the underworld. In ancient Semitic tradition, earth has some sort of barrier that separates it from the heavens. God “sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (Is 40:22 NRSV). The heavens’ location, although distant, could still be calculated and even reached. Genesis recounts the story of the Tower of Babel. The tower’s peak was to be situated in the heavens. Resentful of this intrusion of his domain, God disperses them throughout the world. For the most part, nearly all gods of the ancient world lived in the high heavens of the three tiers portion. These were usually located on the tops of mountains. For example, Moses received the commandments at the top of mount Sinai. In ancient Hellenistic culture, the gods lived on Mount Olympus, a mountain with a peak of only about 10,000 feet. Not all gods lived on high. The keepers of the dead inhabited the lower regions of the three tiers. Odysseus, for example, is depicted traveling by way of boat to the realm of Hades, god of the underworld where he entreats the dead to speak with him.[1] In Egyptian mythology, a person’s soul travels to the underworld after death to be judged by a council of gods. The soul’s heart is weighed against a feather; if it is found heavier, the soul is gobbled up by the polymorphic monster, Amamet.[2] If it passes judgment, then it is allowed to travel from this underworld place to paradise.
For the people of antiquity, the idea of gods having a physical domain meant that they also had physical bodies. In near eastern traditions going back to around the first millennium BCE, gods were often found consorting with humanity. In Mesopotamian text, the great god Shamash, is accused of spending too much time with certain humans as fellow god Enlil exclaims, “much like one of their comrades, thou didst daily go down to them.”[3] Borrowing from Mesopotamian religion, Israelite culture carries on this tradition in its own writings about God. Adam and Eve, fearful of God’s wrath, hide themselves when they “heard the sound of the lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” (Gen 3:8). Here, not only is God’s footfalls able to be heard, but, as if having eyes, he can even be hid from as well. Notions of gods with bodies were not restricted to near eastern traditions; they could also be found in other cultures. In Egyptian lore, Isis had to essentially rebuild Osiris after he was torn apart by his brother Set. After being reformed, Osiris comes back to life, becoming ruler of the underworld.[4] In Greek prose, Dionysus, god of wine (among other things), walks among humans leading his Maenads to drunken ecstasy. In one instance, he has his would be princely captor, Pentheus, torn apart by his followers in a blind frenzy.[5]
In John’s gospel, a different conception of the world was forwarded. Jesus taught that God’s world was not the world of materiality. From the start, John’s writer states, “In the beginning was the word…and the word was God” (Jn 1:1). Where one would expect to see a bodily presence is instead replaced by an idea conceptualized as ‘the word.’ Gods with bodies should be perceivable by everyone. Here, however, “No one has ever seen God” (Jn 1:18). This is in sharp contrast with earlier religious traditions, especially early Hebrew literary traditions where Moses went to God to receive his many commandments. After his resurrection, the limits of the physical world did not apply to Jesus. He was capable of becoming anyone he wished, even to the point of fooling his closest followers. For example, “Supposing him to be the gardener, she [Mary] said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him” (Jn 20:15).
The idea of Jesus’ ability to appear as others came from a docetic worldview. The notion of illusory appearances, or docetism, was also an influence from early religious traditions. The Greek gods’ ability to change into different forms was an accepted notion that carried over into the Johannine traditions concerning Jesus. One early example of a type of docetism can be found in the Odyssey when Athena tricked Odysseus by disguising herself as a young herdsman.[6] Only after some time was Odysseus able to uncover who she really was. In other Johannine texts, Helmut Koester notes: Jesus is one “who appears in constantly changing shapes, sometimes as a small boy, sometimes as a beautiful man, then again as bald-headed man with a long beard.”[7]
In the early Johannine tradition, present in John’s gospel, a tension in ideology existed between a physical and spiritual conception of God and reality. John’s community did not accord with other Christian communities of the time on particular doctrinal conceptions of Jesus. More importantly for this discussion is that even within the Johannine community itself there was disagreement. Greg Riley points out, the author of John’s gospel “speaks to the rival community of Thomas Christians and to his own community concerning issues of conflict between them through the figure of Doubting Thomas.”[8] While John manages to maintain God’s incorporeal nature in the gospel writings, he cannot let go of the ancient worldview idea of gods with bodies. In one example, God is given a body in his son, when Jesus says, “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30). Later, after Jesus’ return from death, he appears to disciples. Thomas, arriving on the scene late, has doubts as to Jesus’ bodily appearance. To prove his substantiality, Jesus directs Thomas’ attention to his post crucifixion wounds, commanding, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (Jn 20:27).
The Johannine tradition that prescribed to a more material-oriented doctrine found its expression in Revelations, where the notion of divine entities having bodies and living in a physical location not far from humans is prevalent. John, writing to the seven churches, saw Christ not only as the savior, but establishes him as a physical manifestation of God early on in Revelations’ text. Hearkening back to second Isaiah, Christ reveals himself as God, saying, “I am the first and last” (Rev 1:17).[9] Despite his divinity, John wants to emphasize his physicality, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me.” An instance later, the risen Christ emphasizes that he is “the living one.” The word ‘life’ here is seen in the robust sense of what it means to be physically living. In this sense, he contrasts, “I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever” (Rev 1:17-18).
Like the gods of the ancient worldview, God’s place was a physical place with physical objects. John could see heaven and see its more mundane aspects:
I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open…and there in heaven stood a throne…and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches,…and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like a crystal. (Rev 4:1-6)
Also in heaven, are places that have God’s buildings in it. “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple” (Rev 11:19). After the beast’s destruction and the vanquishing of evil, some of these buildings will descend from heaven. John reveals, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2).Not all Christians of John’s community were in agreement as to which type of divine realities they were committed. In John’s gospel, what is can be seen is a tension in an early Christian community’s ideology between a sense of physicality over and against one of spirituality. In Revelations, the Johannine community favoring doctrines oriented more towards materiality can be said to have made a final split from its more docetic, spiritually oriented group. What can thus be seen in Revelations is a sharp regression into the old worldview that not only did gods have physical bodies bit they also lived someplace high in the clouds.
[1] Homer, Odyssey, 11f.
[2] Gregory J Riley, The River of God (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2001), 140.
[3] The Epic of Gilgamesh in James B. Pritchard ed., The Ancient Near East: An anthology of text and pictures (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1971), 56.
[4] See Plutarch of Chaeronea On Isis and Osiris in Marvin W. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 162-165.
[5] Euripides, The Bacchae, 1115-1137.
[6] Odyssey 13.220ff.
[7] Helmut Koester, History and Literature of Early Christianity (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2000), 203.
[8] Gregory J. Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 82.
[9] See for example, Isaiah 41:4; 44:6; 48:12 NRSV.
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