The study of the Gospels must endure a perpetual crisis. This crisis consists of a tension animating the development of any thesis in the Gospels, when by virtual definition no such thesis can admit of "development"--what are being described in the Gospels are not ideas being developed, but rather ideas being displayed as the world's accretions upon them are removed.
The business of displaying the theses of the Gospels is bedeviled by the fact that each stage of removal of such accretions is open to competing contentions about what is happening--and stage upon stage of such a process can lead to fatigue in any originally neat premise. Things, unsurprisingly, can tend to get jumbled up.
Things in the Gospels can get so jumbled up that it is tempting to imagine the Gospels--or at least major strains in them--as satires, so flagrantly do they seem to entertain risks in apparently invited interpretations. We will examine this in an episode from chapter four of John.
In John chapter four Jesus travels from Judea to Galilee and back again. The trip is occasioned apparently by Jesus' assessment of the progress of the Baptist's parallel ministry--a progress that seems to be described in varying terms by the various gospels, though such disparities are peripheral to us here. What matters here is that John's gospel describes Jesus leaving for Galilee.
John also describes Jesus as being constrained to make that trip through Samaria--a debatable contention. Jesus the Jew does not merely travel through Samaria, but particularly through the area where he will encounter a well of Jacob--a well that is uncontested in this gospel as part of the patrimony of the Samaritans.
A Samaritan woman approaches, and Jesus says to her, "Give me to drink." The woman replies, "How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria?" (The notion of "to ask" seems a bit strained here, especially as the simplest reading of the text would have the unaccompanied, unprotected woman alone with Jesus. How easily do interpretive scenarios arise when the encroaching presuppositions of the world make their appearance.)
The notion abroad here, of course, is that Jews would properly have no "dealings" with Samaritans--though that does not seem to have dissuaded the disciples from entering that "city of Samaria" to buy food. Jesus and the woman enter then on the tantalizing, though unenlightening (to her, at least) discussion of the "living water," a discussion in which Jesus leaves uncontested the Samaritan woman's claim to "our father Jacob."
Jesus then brings up the embarrassing topic of the woman's marital status, to which the woman replies with, "I perceive that thou art a prophet," and brings up the question about whether worship of God ought to happen at the Samaritan Mount Gerizim or at the Jewish Temple Mount. The commentators, of course, are quick to note that the woman seems to want to change the subject, though they are less rapid in noting (if at all) that Jesus' preceding command, "Go, call thy husband, and come hither," seems to have no necessary connection to her yet previous entreaty, "Sir, give me this water."
Jesus and the woman are talking largely at odds with each other, but the more fundamental realization is that the text is persistently talking at odds with itself. This is, in a certain view, unsurprising. As I described above, the theses developed in the Gospels are not so much developed as thrust out into the open. Jesus' discussion with the Samaritan woman is leading up to his declaration:
"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father." And Jesus says, "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."
All the talk about so-and-so's well and such-and-such mountain is ultimately to no point. Moreover, Jesus' contention about how worship ought to be does not rely on the development of a new and more embracing theology. Jesus says that, "the hour cometh, and now is"--and, as his references elsewhere to the Patriarchs reveal about their faith, it is plain that "the hour" has always been.
In the text between the verse of "the hour cometh" and the verse of "the Father seeketh such" is Jesus' statement, "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews." Again, while this verse seems of great portent, like the rest of this section it involves not the development of a thesis, but rather a peeling-away of accretions. "Salvation is of the Jews" is essentially a tautology, but it gets at an essential underlying point.
It was not the original intention of God that there be a people called "the Jews." "Israel" might be the best conceptuality of the people of God, though indeed this seems linked inextricably with the patriarchy of Abraham. And while Abraham was yet Abram, the headship of the family to go to the Promised Land was apparently not Abram, but his father Terah, who unaccountably settled in Haran. This same Terah apparently fathered Sarai, from which circumstance arises the unsettling marriage of Abram to his half-sister.
"The Jews," then, came tumbling out of centuries of turmoil that saw most of their brethren--whether the children of Jacob, or of Abraham, or even of Terah--separated and admixed with other peoples (though after a few centuries of turmoil it would have been largely unaccountable who was mixing with whom.) Hence the part-Jewish, part-Assyrian, perhaps part-something-else Samaritans. Of course, if the cousins produced by Shem, Ham, and Japheth had married each other instead of their siblings, then the whole idea of some favored "line" of descent even from Noah (and therefore from all of humanity) would be ludicrous.
Emerging from all of this were the competing conceptualities of patriarchy versus matrilineal descent (that is, the child is a Jew if the mother is a Jew.) Of course, reliance on matrilineal descent is faulty if no Jewish women are available (and "descent" is understood biologically), and indeed we see the outline of this problem in Abraham's insistence that Isaac marry one of Abraham's "own" people--that is, that he marry one of the pagan offspring of the tarrying Terah. Understood in the larger context, the Samaritan Woman at the Well is a virtual royal figure in the world-encompassing conceptuality of a "people" of God. It is only in this self-same context that we can truly understand the implication of "salvation is of the Jews": Judaism, in the conceptuality presented by Jesus, has preserved the essential nucleus of the salvific message of revelation.
Jews, on the other hand, share with all people the chance (if that is the word) to merit individually Jesus' assessment as Children of the Devil. "Salvation is of the Jews" seems to mean something besides itself, but that is not really so when it understood that to be a Jew can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.
The progress of the Baptist's ministry can mean everything, and it can mean nothing. The choice of Samaria as a place for Jesus to talk with a non-Jewish woman can mean everything, and it can mean nothing. Nearly every aspect of the story can be shown open to some quibble or to some contention that it cancels out some other aspect of the story. This is the essential tension between the presentation of a story that can seem nothing more than a collection of insubstantial errors and half-truths, and a story meant to give a glimpse at a frustratingly vaporous sensation of truth against which all of the objective world is but a jumble of insubstantial errors and half-truths.
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