DeConick A.D

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JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
birth, for that matter. Instead, the fourth Gospel has a baptism story
reminiscent of that in the Gospel of Mark, in which the Spirit descends
from heaven and takes up residence in a man from Nazareth named Jesus.
This is the moment of incarnation, when the divine Logos appears as a
human (1:32–34).
We never learn in the Gospel of John how the world came under the
control of resident demons or how humans ended up mired in this miserable
situation where “the flesh is of no avail” and they are “slave[s] to sin”
(6:63, 8:34). But we do know that the Son was sent by a loving Father
to be the light in the dark cosmos. His job is to incarnate as Jesus and
awaken the spirits of humans with his light, so that they will be empowered
to become children of God by being filled with the spirit of truth
(1:9–13). They are meant to know the Father directly through his embodiment
as the Son.
But the world and its dark entities are not kind to the community that
identifies itself as the Children of Light (John 12:36) and their leader,
Jesus. Like John Murdoch and his friends, they are pursued by sinister
forces throughout the story. Because evil is active in the world of the
fourth Gospel, the world hates Jesus and his followers (15:19, 24–25,
17:14). Like the covert aliens in Dark City , the sinister cosmic forces in
the fourth Gospel work behind the scenes, through rival human subjects,
to harm and kill Jesus and his followers.
On this point, the Gospel of John is not kind to those the author identifies
as “the Jews.” Its hostile portrayal of the Jews is a painful testament
to the competition emerging out of Second Temple Judaism between
Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, which were sibling rivals, each claiming
the biblical scripture of Israel as its own. The author of the Gospel of John
thinks Christianity surpasses and supplants Judaism, and because he thinks
Christianity is superior to Judaism, he feels that the rejection of Christianity
by the majority of Jews has to be explained. The author explains this
rejection by viewing it as part of the cosmic conflict between the forces
of good and evil, light and darkness. In the author’s mind, the Jews he
knows who rejected Christianity have sided with the cosmic forces of evil
against the truth that Jesus proclaimed.
So in this Gospel Jesus is constantly pursued by “the Jews.” The author
identifies them as the Gospel’s antagonists, portraying them as men who
looked for every opportunity to kill Jesus, which they eventually accom-