The HSH in the Context of Johannine Studies

I thought I'd finally put this post up--I wrote it last fall as part of my ongoing exploration of the role that the Signs Gospel plays in the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis, but got busy with other things and it's been sitting for a while.  But I'd like to explain how the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis relates to the study of the Gospel of John, so I've revised this post and here it is.  


The HSH, at least with regards to the role of the Signs Gospel, does fit into a previously-established tradition of Johannine scholarship, though this tradition is perhaps not a mainstream one.  The Signs hypothesis in general (that is, that there was a source for the Gospel of John that contained a sequence of symbolic miracles called "signs") is not universally accepted, and indeed one might argue that it has never been mainstream opinion.  I wanted to explain that I am aware of this, but that there is nevertheless an ongoing thread in Johannine studies that does assume the existence of a Signs document (of some sort or other), even one that relates to the Gospels of Mark and John in the way that I claim it does.


I'll present this as a more-or-less chronological study of the concept of a Signs source in the history of New Testament criticism.

A Brief History of Scholarship on the Relation of GJohn to the Synoptics

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 6: The Storm-Stilling

In my last post on the subject, I showed how the Catch of Fish truly belonged on the list of the seven signs originally found in the Signs Gospel (and now found in GJn, as well as heavily redacted and edited in GMk).  We were still left with only six signs, however, since I eliminated the Raising of Lazarus as directly taken from the Signs Gospel (or SG).  Instead, that was composed by John out of elements from the Markan raising of Jairus' daughter, along with the raising of the man in what is now known as "SGM1", or the first fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark in the Mar Saba manuscript.  Mark, for his part, based those two raisings on the original sign of the Healing of the Official's Child/Son.  In other words, the Raising of Lazarus is just a heavily-redacted, third-generation copy of the Healing of the Official's Child.   

I also promised I would eventually deal with the true identity of the remaining sign.  So, what was it?   

So far we have six signs on our list:

The Seventh Sign, Pt 5: The Catch of Fish

Like the Water into Wine, the Catch of Fish also leaves traces behind in GMk.  It will turn out that they're harder to find, because the sign has actually gone missing, but nevertheless they're still there.

The first location is found in Mk 1, towards the beginning of Mark's gospel.

A Catch of Believers

When the first disciples are called in GMk, we find Simon and Andrew casting a net in the sea.  We also meet James and John in a boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. Jesus tells them that they will become "fishers for men" and makes them an offer: "follow me".  They abandon their nets and follow him. 

These elements all have parallels in the Catch of Fish as we have it in GJn.  There, Simon, James, and John--the last two identified as the "sons of Zebedee"--are all fishing.  Jesus tells them to cast their net into the sea.  After he reconciles with Peter, he tells him "follow me". 

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 4: Water into Wine (Revised)

(ETA: Sorry, I originally published an incomplete version of this post--I've now posted the complete version, which includes a section on Th 47.)

Before we investigate the real identity of the seventh sign in the Signs Gospel, we'll have a look at the other two apparently missing from GMk: the Water into Wine and the Catch of Fish.  We'll find that neither is missing from GMk at all--the Markan author has simply reused them, in just the way that I describe in my research criteria: he has split them in two, and relocated them.  The Markan author frequently used splitting, duplicating, and re-using to create the Markan effect of "doubling" that is so famously present in his gospel.  These pericopes are no exception.

The Water into Wine technically does not appear in GMk.  But notice something interesting: there's a Markan parallel to the Water into Wine right where we might expect it, towards the beginning of Mark's gospel, in Mk 2:19-22:

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 3: Recap

In this post, I showed how the author of Mark used a characteristic feature throughout his gospel, particularly in his healings, namely: Jesus heals with his touch.  I argued that this was a feature deliberately introduced into the narrative by the original Markan author, in order to combat the docetism of Simon Magus.

So in this post, I subtracted those touch-healings out from the miracles found in GMk to see what we might find in terms of pre-Markan source material.  We then discovered that there was another, smaller group of related miracles among those remaining, namely: the Markan exorcisms (and there was another exorcism on the touch-healing list).  These all seemed closely linked to the Markan theme of the Messianic Secret, so we then subtracted those out, too.

From the penultimate list, we also subtracted out the doubled miracles of the Water-Walking and the Feeding of the 4000, since they look like just a doubled copying of the Storm-Stilling and the Feeding of the 5000.  We also subtracted out one piece of material that was probably post-Markan: Michael Turton has shown that the healing of the Syro-Phonecian woman's daughter probably isn't Markan at all, because it lacks a chiastic structure (I argue it was likely added by the canonical redactor). 

We were then left with the following miracles:

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 2

(REVISED)

With this post, I'm starting to add headers to the sections of my posts, which are growing rather long and unwieldy.  It's my hope that these headers will help guide the reader through the argument in a more step-by-step manner.

Healing a Child: The Fourth Sign

GMk actually has four of the signs; the missing sign from this list is the raising of Jairus' daughter.  That was in the first list of healings, in this post, for Jesus heals her by taking her by the hand.

I have shown previously how the raising of Jairus' daughter is related to the healing of the Centurion's servant in Q, and the healing of the official's son in GJn.  And in fact, I argue all three of these derive (one way or another) from the original story in the Signs Gospel, a healing of an official's child.

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 1

Let's look now at the healings in GMk that don't involve touch (leaving aside the ambiguous healing of the man with the withered hand, which I include in the touch-healings).  They are as follows, with their precise locations in GMk:

The Unclean Spirit (1:23-26)
Healing Many in Capernaum (1:34)
Healing Many in Galilee (1:39)
The Paralytic (2:3-12)
The Storm-Stilling (4:37-39)
The Gerasene Demoniac (5:2-13)
Feeding the 5000 (6:41-43)
The Water-Walking (6:48-51)
The Syro-Phonecian Woman (7:29-30)
Feeding the 4000 (8:6-8)
The Blind Man of Jericho (10:52)

Four of these are healings of demoniacs:

The Unclean Spirit
Healing Many in Capernaum
Healing Many in Galilee
The Gerasene Demoniac.