Dear John...

There was a short article in the December 1 Christian Century by William H. Willimon called "Dear John," which is a fictitious rejection letter for the Gospel of John. Unfortunately, it's not available on the Web, so I can't point anyone to it. It is tongue-in-cheek, and quite amusing. When I read it, I thought if I wrote this, it would have a very different flavor. So here's mine.

To: John

From: Karen Oberst, editor

Re: Your submission

Although are not rejecting your gospel out of hand, we feel there needs to be some work done before we include it in our larger anthology tentatively entitled The New Testament.

First, before we can consider adding your gospel beside the gospels already written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we need you to add at or near the beginning, a statement that this is not written by someone who actually witnessed the events, but is instead the views held by the leadership of the church in and around Rome now at the turn of the century. We think it will be confusing for people if they were to assume what you have written was actually said by Jesus, instead of words put in his mouth by the church hierarchy.

We like some of your stories, such as the Woman at the Well, and Blind Bartimaeus, but please remove the story of Nicodemus in the third chapter. We feel this could cause untold trouble down the road, with the statement "born from above." (We believe our publication will be in print for many years.)

Please do also indicate that you are not presenting Jesus' life and ministry in anything like chronological order. Readers could be confused by the fact that you put the cleansing of the temple so early in his ministry, for example.

Lastly, while we will allow it to remain in, we do feel that taking the word logos, which has been used to refer to Wisdom, the female part of God, and instead using it to refer to Jesus is rude, but does fit in with the patriarchal views currently held by the Roman church hierarchy.

Likewise, all the places you have Jesus referring to himself in divine terms, we do understand are currently the views of the church in Rome. We feel you are muddying the waters by inserting those comments, but as it is beginning to look likely that the Roman version of Christianity will prevail over all the other types, I don't see how we can insist you remove them, though we would like to go on record as believing it would be best.

We look forward to receiving your corrected manuscript at your earliest convenience.