Abstract
This paper aims to compare and contrast what Heidegger’s says about ‘ecstatic temporality’ in section 65 of Chapter III of Division Two of Being and Time with two particular moments in The Gospel of John- the famous opening or prologue on the ‘Preexistent Logos’ and the end of chapter of 16 of The Gospel of John and all of chapter 17; in the latter, Jesus is transitioning from his discourse with the disciples about departing from the world and returning to the Father to just addressing the Father alone. Both involve complex sets of interrelations in the event of the transition itself, specifically the discourse with the Father repeating what is said earlier to the disciples, but obviously with a different intention and relationality to which only Jesus and the Father engage. There is a complex question of relationality, repetition, secrecy, and transcendence that exceeds any subject-object and subject-predicate distinctions and syntheses. The temporalizations at work in the New Testament Greek cannot be simplified. Phenomenologically, we need to bracket what we know about the ending of the story with the death, resurrection (in the sealed tomb), the appearances and vanishings to the disciples and others, and the ascension back into heaven; that means we have to pretend we don’t know the ending or like those coming to the story for the first time; that is, we must like some of the Gnostic Gospels, like the non canonical Gospel of Judas stop at the scene of the Last Supper in the dawning of Jesus’s would-be Passion. We need to forgo the ‘picture-thinking’ of those grandiose concluding moments that found the religion of Christianity in the climatic moments of the canonical Gospels, which Hegel questioned first in the penultimate chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit namely “Revealed Religion.”