In the course of a UseNet post, I ran across a pair of Gospel harmonies that, translated, appear to turn one of the Gospel of John's "signs" into a "miracle". This was also the translational route of the King James Version. When investigating the original, I found that the Gospel referred to miracles as erga/"works" and shmeia/"signs", but in different contexts.
Investigating these might shed light on claims made elsewhere, pioneered by Robert Fortna, that the Gospel of John is a composite of a "Signs Gospel" which the (different) community of the Johannine writings made their own.
These are the verses in which John uses erga:
Immediately note that "works" never appears outside Jesus's speech. Each miracle may be a sign to the reader, but it is a work of the Father to Jesus.
In addition, the "works" passages are infused with the Johannine vocabulary and world-view. Jesus compares his work with the work of the world; he can work in the day but night is coming; he is the son whom God has sent; the world hates him; and his works show he is "in" the Father. 1 John compares God with the world (1 John 2:15,17), dark is passing but light has already come (1 John 2:8); it looks to the son whom God has sent (1 John 4:9-14); the world hates the community (1 John 3:13); and the community is in the Father (1 John 2:24, more commonly "in the light").
There is an apparent difference from the world hating 1 John's community, to the world not hating John's community but only Jesus. But the Gospel inconsistently applies this (John 15:18-19). 1 John is also more optimistic than Jesus in the Gospel, understandably.
The only "works" verse that is not aimed at the community of 1 John is John 8:39. That verse makes Abraham into God's proxy for Jews, and uses same for polemical effect. John does the same with Moses, who wrote the Law that Jesus intends to abrogate with truth (John 1:17 - see also 5:45-46).
But for all this Johanninity, a work of the Son or of any member of the "community of light" is not part of 1 John, which only has works of the devil (3:8), and more obliquely works of Cain and of his brother (3:12). Instead the community does the "commands", entolai (1 John 2:3,7,8).
Either 1 John did not have the term "works of the Father", or it had the term but did not employ it. The Enochians, including Johannines and Qumranites, preferred to think of themselves as "walking the path" rather than "doing the works". Still, duality is the name of the game in 1 John, and works of God and works of evil were not unknown to Enochians: in Qumran they are in both the Thanksgiving Psalms (1QH 5.9,14) and the Damascus Document (CD 2:14-15, 13.7-8). Therefore I think 1 John did have "works of the Father" in its vocabulary.
1 John may have thought that works were for divine and biblical agents. Another reason 1 John did not talk of them, is that 1 John is not about earthly miracles. This is striking for a movement that, we are told, claims descent from a miracle worker. The only action of Jesus from which 1 John draws example, is his walking in light. It is likely for other reasons that at the time they wrote that "epistle", most did not even believe that Jesus had walked in the flesh. (The sending of the Son in 1 John is not necessarily physical.) That would explain the absence from 1 John of both Jesus's works, and, lacking that precedent, of the works of the community's members.
So "works of God" was a legitimate Johannine term, if underused, and that is how it ended up in so many of the Gospel's "Johannine" speeches of Jesus.
Even so, the Gospel narrative does not pick up that term for any of Jesus's deeds. There, the deeds are called shmeia for "signs". The Gospel also uses its verb form "signify/semainein" when it wants Jesus to say how he going to die (12:33, 18:32); 1 John 4:9 given the opportunity used efanerwqh, "show". (The Egerton Gospel fragment 2-recto just says 'a poieiV, "the-things-which thou-doest", in place of John 3:2's shmeia.) Thus the Gospel linked signs with the Passion without 1 John's help.
The best answer is that "work of the Son" came about in the course of associating 1 John's teachings with Jesus's earthly biography, and that said biography was not initiated by 1 John's community but adopted later.
This is evidence to add to Fortna's theory that the Gospel is composite. John's discourses constitute a Gospel of Works, superimposed on the Gospel of Signs.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
The first version of this project was written 27 March 2002 as part of a rebuttal to Yuri Kuchinsky's somewhat odd theories in soc.history.ancient. 28-29 March, it became a project of its own.