Adventist Today writer Olive Hemmings
Presents a rather peculiar view of the “beloved disciple” here is what
she says in the excerpt
of her article and presentation
Tradition
The idea that John the son of Zebedee is the beloved disciple is based on tradition. The internal Biblical evidence points elsewhere to the “beloved disciple”. The entire investigation about this disciple requires a hermeneutic of suspicion.
This is what we have to show that John is the “beloved disciple”.
In John 21: 20, ff., Peter turns and sees the disciple whom Jesus loves following them. The text says that it is this disciple who reclined next to Jesus and enquired about who would betray him. Peter sees him and continues to interrogate Jesus concerning this disciple. Then the author of the Fourth Gospel says: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” The assumption is that John wrote the Fourth Gospel, therefore John is the beloved disciple.
But in fact we do not know who wrote the Fourth Gospel. Even the commentary saying: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things…” appears as a comment by the actual author about the ‘beloved disciple”. This suggests that the beloved disciple, an eye witness, was the source of the author’s work.
Dr.Olive Hemmings presentation at the zoom Sabbath
School took the position That the beloved disciple was Mary Magdalene. Due to
the use of some extra-Biblical works namely Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In order
to use those books for her theory (the same theory that you can read about in
Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code) Ms. Hemmings assumes that we can discount the
tradition of the author of the book of John as actually being John. Which in
fact may be the case and yet it would not negate the meaning that John was the
beloved disciple in any way. So there is very little reason to entertain the
idea of Mary Magdalene being the meaning of the beloved disciple in the book of
John
Contrary to
Dr. Hemmings statement above, in fact, this is not the only thing we know to
give us an idea of who the beloved disciple was. There are 6 references in the
book of John:
1. John 13:23: “One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him.”
2. John 19:26: “When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son.’”
3. John 20:2: “So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’”
4. John 21:7: “Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’”
5. John 20:20: “Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them.”
In addition to this, John 21:24 describes the Beloved Disciple as the “disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down.”
https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/who-wrote-the-gospel-of-john
By the internal evidence of the book of John we can
rule out the beloved disciple as being Mary Magdalene Using John 20: 1-4:
20 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!” 3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
Thus Mary Magdalene could not be the person referred
to in the book of John as the beloved because she in fact speaks to that
person. Then after Mary Magdalene having run from the tomb, if she was the
beloved she would have had to run back to the tomb beating Peter.
Let’s look at Dr. Olive Hemmings Biography
“Olive Hemmings has been teaching in Seventh-day Adventist higher education since 1982. She began teaching at her Alma Mater West Indies College (now Northern Caribbean University) in 1982, one year before graduating, and continued teaching there until 1998, when she moved to California to further her studies. She earned the M.A. in New Testament and Biblical languages from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University in 1989, and the Ph. D. in Theology, Ethics, and Culture from Claremont Graduate University in 2004. She taught at Northern Caribbean University for 15 years, and has been teaching at Washington Adventist University for the past eleven years in the areas of New Testament Bible and Greek, World Religions, Social, Biblical, and Theological Ethics, and Dogmatic Theology both in graduate and undergraduate programs.”
It might
be interesting to know how Dr. Hemmings arrived at this decision to support the
idea that Mary Magdalene was the beloved disciple. Perhaps if a person watches the Adventist Today
YouTube presentation when it posts they can see. Check for it in the future.
"The entire investigation about this disciple requires a hermeneutic of suspicion."
Here is the definition of hermeneutic of suspicion which to me sounds like gnostic reasoning.
"The hermeneutics of suspicion is a style of literary interpretation in which texts are read with skepticism in order to expose their purported repressed or hidden meanings.[1]
This mode of interpretation, invented by Paul Ricoeur, who was inspired by his interpretation of the works of what he called the three "masters of suspicion"[2]—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche— Ricoeur's term "school of suspicion" (French: école du soupçon) refers to his association of his theory with the writings of the three, who themselves never used this term.[3] This school is defined by a belief that the straight-forward appearances of texts are deceptive and that explicit content hide deeper meanings or implications.[1][4]
In reference to the last post I made this may reflect what is going on with Dr. Hemmings.
The Gospel of Thomas has become popular in recent decades in relation to a populist Christian movement known as Liberation Theology, which also teaches self-reflection of each person as the Christ within you. Gustavo Gutierrez coined the term in his 1971 CE book, A Theology of Liberation. He criticized the Catholic Church in Latin America for corrupting the original teachings of Jesus. Jesus. https://brewminate.com/secret-knowledge-a-history-of-christian-gnosticism-in-the-ancient-world/
