The Call and the Confession

Nathanael’s confession — “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel” (John 1:49) — is among the earliest and fullest in the Fourth Gospel, met by the Lord’s promise that he shall see “greater things”: heaven opened and “the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:50–51). This file reads the confession, the promise of the Bethel vision, and the later notice that places Nathanael “of Cana in Galilee” among the seven resurrection witnesses (John 21:2).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Confession

The Lord’s word about the fig tree (John 1:48; see Under the Fig Tree) overturns Nathanael’s hesitation in a single stroke. Where moments before he had doubted whether any good could come from Nazareth (John 1:46), now he confesses without reserve: “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel” (John 1:49). The speed and fullness of the confession are remarkable. On the strength of one sign — the Lord’s supernatural knowledge of where he had been — Nathanael leaps to a twofold acclamation: “the Son of God,” the title of divine sonship, and “the King of Israel,” the royal-messianic title.

The Fathers stress the magnitude of this. St. John Chrysostom observes that Nathanael, having received a lesser proof, confessed a greater thing than the proof seemed to warrant, and that his ready faith earned the Lord’s commendation and the promise of more (Chrysostom, Homilies on John 21; trans. NPNF I/14). The confession stands alongside the great Johannine acclamations — Andrew’s “We have found the Messias” (John 1:41), and at the Gospel’s far end Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28) — as a marker of the Evangelist’s purpose, “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). That a man “in whom is no guile” (John 1:47) should be the one to make this early confession is, in the Orthodox reading, no accident: the guileless heart sees and names the truth quickly, where the cunning heart hedges.

“Greater Things”: The Opened Heaven and the Angels

The Lord receives the confession and at once enlarges its horizon. “Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these” (John 1:50). And then, turning from Nathanael alone to all who are present — the “you” of verse 51 is plural — He gives the promise in solemn form: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51).

The image is unmistakably the dream of Jacob at Bethel, where “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Gen. 28:12). The Lord transposes the ladder of Jacob’s vision onto Himself: He is the meeting-place of heaven and earth, the way by which the traffic of God and man passes, the true Bethel — “the house of God” and “the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17). The choice of image binds back to the greeting of verse 47, where Nathanael was hailed as “an Israelite indeed” — a true son of Jacob/Israel, without Jacob’s guile — to whom is now promised the reality of which his forefather saw only the shadow (Brown 1966, on John 1:51; Chrysostom, Homilies on John 21). The “greater things” are thus not merely future miracles but the whole revelation of the Son of Man as the one mediator between heaven and earth, of which the resurrection appearances, including the one Nathanael himself will witness (John 21), are part.

The title the Lord uses of Himself here — “the Son of man” — is His own characteristic self-designation, drawing on Daniel’s vision of “one like the Son of man” who comes with the clouds of heaven and receives dominion (Dan. 7:13–14). Set against Nathanael’s “Son of God” and “King of Israel,” it does not lessen the confession but deepens it: the King of Israel is the heavenly Son of Man, and the way to the open heaven.

Nathanael of Cana and the Sea of Tiberias

Nathanael appears once more in the Fourth Gospel, at its very end. Among the disciples to whom the risen Lord shows Himself by the Sea of Tiberias, John lists “Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples” (John 21:2). This second notice supplies two further data. First, it gives Nathanael’s home: Cana of Galilee, the village of the first sign, where the Lord turned water into wine (John 2:1–11) — a connection the tradition has cherished, placing the guileless disciple at the town of the Lord’s first miracle. Second, it numbers Nathanael among the seven who receive the risen Christ and the miraculous draught of fish (John 21:3–14), a setting otherwise filled by members of the Twelve, which strengthens the case that Nathanael belonged to that inner circle and so supports the identification with the apostle Bartholomew (see Bartholomew and Nathanael).

That John frames his Gospel with Nathanael — present at the calling of the first disciples in chapter 1 and at the resurrection appearance in chapter 21 — has been noticed by commentators as a deliberate inclusio, the guileless Israelite standing as witness at the beginning and the end (Brown 1966, on John 21:2). Whatever the Evangelist’s intent, the effect for the tradition is to give the otherwise silent apostle a place at two of the Gospel’s most significant moments: the first confession and the resurrection.

The Apostle’s Whole Story in Two Scenes

These two Johannine passages — the calling with its confession (John 1:45–51) and the appearance by the lake (John 21:2) — contain the entire New Testament narrative of Nathanael, and therefore, on the traditional identification, nearly the whole New Testament narrative of the apostle Bartholomew apart from his name in the lists. Everything else — the missions, the apocrypha, the flaying, the relics — is the work of later tradition. The two scenes are slight in extent but weighty in content: a man without guile, who doubts honestly and believes fully, who confesses the Son of God and the King of Israel on a single sign, and who is promised the vision of the opened heaven; and who at the last stands among the witnesses of the Resurrection. This is the scriptural core to which all the later veneration of the apostle returns.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. (John 1:41, 45–51; 2:1–11; 20:28, 31; 21:2–14; Gen. 28:12, 17; Dan. 7:13–14.)
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 20–21. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 14.
  • Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John I–XII and The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI. Anchor Bible 29–29A. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–1970. (On John 1:49–51 and 21:2.)
  • The Menaion for June 11. (The office of the Holy Apostle Bartholomew.)