Introduction

It might occasion some surprise that evidence for the synoptic evangelists' care in maintaining “an appropriate idiom and a sense of time” should be sought in the Fourth Gospel. To be sure, nearly everyone allows that John makes quite clear to the reader that his own era and that of Jesus are different. The most obvious evidence is that, since the resurrection, another Advocate takes Jesus' place (7:39, 14:15–17, 26; 16:7–15). The disciples afterwards are endowed with a heightened memory and understanding both of the Scriptures and of Jesus' teaching and action (2:22; 12:16; 13:7, 20). However, such distinction-making amounts in the main to simple periodization. How other is the idiom, how comprehensively John has distributed and integrated it throughout the narrative, how kerygmatic it is. Each of these differences warrants some elaboration, if only to underscore the extent to which the well-known “Johannine Problem” both obscures this sort of investigation and will be transcended by it.

Idiomatic homogeneity

The otherness of the Johannine idiom stems from the “wholly other” christology that one finds. Though from Nazareth, Jesus is from above (6:51, 62). He is even “from below” in the sense that he provides the “ground” of one's spiritual being as bread (6:35, 48), water (7:38), and light (8:12; 9:5) nourish one's bodily existence. But he is pre-existent as well as transcendent. Jesus outstrips John the Baptist and Abraham in rank because he existed before them in time (1:15; 8:58).