No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Two areas of biblical study identified as ‘growth points’ are the sociological and narrative approaches to early Christianity and its literature. Although these two approaches may be the offspring of different departments within the university, they are intricately related: narratives relate to a social context to the extent that they reinforce or subvert socio-perspectives. This project explores the interface of the two, examining one aspect of the narrative of the Fourth Gospel and considering ways in which it might have functioned within the social context of Johannine Christianity. While some literary critics draw high walls around a text to contain the ‘text world’ and keep it from outside contamination, others work on the basis that narratives are often referential, pointing to other narratives and building their own storyline in relation to them in some fashion. The latter approach is the one taken here, as certain points in the Johannine storyline are considered in relation to two important stories within early Christian tradition and within Judaism. The starting-point for this investigation is the feeding miracle in John 6.
1 The Gospel according to St John (ET: London: Burns & Oates, 1979) 2.17Google Scholar. For convenience, I use the word ‘evangelist’ in a rather abstract manner, naively neglecting to find a more nuanced term which would allow for the possibility of a plurality of contributors and of temporal layers.
2 Mark 6.41; Matt 14.19; Luke 9.16: λαμβάνω, εύλογέω (κατα)κλάω, δίδωμι Mark 8.6; Matt 15.36: λαμβάνω εύχαριστέω, κλάω, δίδωμι.
3 Gnilka, Despite J., Das Evangelium nach Markus (EKK 2/1; Zürich: Benziger/Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1978) 261–2.Google Scholar
4 In the Third Gospel's account of the last supper, the four-verb form remains intact, but the fourth verb is emphasised (Luke 22.19). This adjustment shifts the interpretive framework, being motivated perhaps by the third evangelist's apparent concern to avoid the images of sacrificial atonement with reference to Jesus' death.
5 As J. Painter claims in relation to the feeding miracle of John 6 (The Quest for the Messiah [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991] 217–20)Google Scholar. The broader debate is reviewed by Smith, D. Moody, John among the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992)Google Scholar; idem, Johannine Christianity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987).
6 Cf. Hengel, M., The Johannine Question (London: SCM, 1989) 52–3Google Scholar; Brown, R. E., ‘“Other Sheep Not of This Fold”: The Johannine Perspective on Christian Diversity in the Late First Century’, JBL 97 (1978) 5–22Google Scholar; Quast, K., Peter and the Beloved Disciple (JSNTS 32; Sheffield: JSOT, 1989).Google Scholar
7 Even in Luke 22.19, where the telling of the last supper is at its most confused state, the six textual variants all include the same four-verb form. See Metzger, B. M., A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Society, 1971/1975) 175.Google Scholar
8 In this regard, the omission of ‘breaking’ in John 6.11 seems to have contributed to R. Bultmann's belief that sacramental imagery is absent from the original author's composition (The Gospel of John [trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971]213Google Scholar, n. 2).
9 Tanzer, S. J., ‘Salvation Is for the Jews: Secret Christian Jews in the Gospel of John’, in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester (ed. Pearson, B. A.; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991) 285–300, 285–6.Google Scholar
10 The Hour of Jesus (Middlegreen: St Paul, 1989) 124–32.Google Scholar
11 Martyn, J. L., History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (2nd ed.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Brown, R. E., The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist, 1979)Google Scholar; Rensberger, D., Overcoming the World (London: SPCK, 1988)Google Scholar; Neyrey, J., An Ideology of Revolt (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988)Google Scholar; Wengst, K., Bedrängte Gemeinde und verherrlichter Christus (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1990).Google Scholar
12 For example, his over-emphasis on the birkat ha-minim as the stimulus for the separation of the Jewish synagogue and the Johannine community. See Kimelman, R., ‘Birkat ha-minim’, in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition 2 (ed. Sanders, E. P.et al; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 226–44Google Scholar; and Horbury, W., ‘The Benediction of the minim and Early Jewish Christian Controversy’, JTS 33 (1982) 19–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Overcoming the World, 25. Cf. Smith, Johannine Christianity, 23.
14 See especially Tanzer, ‘Salvation’; Bassler, J. M., ‘Mixed Signals: Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel’, JBL 108 (1989) 635–46Google Scholar; Brown, Community, 71–3.
15 The healed man of John 9 does precisely that, and is frequently considered to be ‘acting out the history of the Johannine community’ (Brown, Community, 92). On this, see especially Rensberger, Overcoming the World, 37–51; Tanzer, ‘Salvation’.
16 R. E. Brown, Gospel according to John (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966,1970) l.lxxv. cf. Minear, P., ‘The Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John: Some Clues and Conjectures’, NovT 19 (1977) 105–23, 107Google Scholar; Ashton, J., Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 111.Google Scholar
17 ‘Mixed Signals’, 646.
18 Tanzer, ‘Salvation’, 300.
19 This view has been challenged (unsuccessfully, I believe) by Dodd, C. H., According to the Scriptures (London: Nisbet, 1952) 98–9Google Scholar; idem, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: CUP, 1965) 233–8; Robinson, J. A. T., The Priority of John (London: SCM, 1985) 152–3.Google Scholar
20 So called by Hollander, J., The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California, 1981).Google Scholar
21 Hays, R. B., ‘Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul: Abstract’, in Paul and the Scriptures of Israel (ed. Evans, C. A. and Sanders, J. A.; JSNTS 83; Sheffield: JSOT, 1993) 42–6,43.Google Scholar
22 Hays, R. B., Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University, 1989) 20Google Scholar. On the phenomenon of intertextuality in Paul, see also the various contributions in Paul and the Scriptures of Israel (cited in the note above); O'Day, G. R., ‘Jeremiah 9.22–23 and 1 Corinthians 1.26–31: A Study in Intertextuality’, JBL 109 (1990) 259–67Google Scholar; and Jervis, L. A., ‘“But I Want You to Know …”: Paul's Midrashic Intertextual Response to the Corinthians Worshipers (1 Cor 11:2–16)’, JBL 112 (1993) 231–46.Google Scholar
23 The requirement of circumcision in Exod 12.43–9 seems not to have posed a difficulty for the evangelist's reading of Exod 12.46, no doubt because this issue, which had proved so problematic in the time of Paul, was no longer of pressing concern. One might compare here the situation which gave rise to the Johannine apocalypse, wherein conflict with the synagogue is fierce (‘the synagogue of Satan’, Rev 2.9; 3.9), but the conflict does not involve matters of Jewish practice such as circumcision; the debate seems to have moved on from earlier forms.
24 Brown, Gospel, 2.955. Cf. Schnackenburg, John, 3.292.
25 Schnackenburg, John, 3.292.
26 Cf. S. Pancaro: the evangelist ‘is writing for Jews who already believe or who are, at least, “hidden believers” – only indirectly is he writing to win over non-believing Jews’ (The Law in the Fourth Gospel [Leiden: Brill, 1975] 533)Google Scholar. J. T. Sanders suggests that some lines of communication were still open between non-believing synagogue Jews and Johannine Christians who sought to convert them (Schismatics, Sectarians, Dissidents, Deviants [London: SCM, 1993] 47–8).Google Scholar
27 Pryor, J. W., John: Evangelist of the Covenant People (London: Darton, Longman & Todd) 79.Google Scholar