The Fourth Gospel

About this Book: Gail R. O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel set the stage for a new literary paradigm in Johannine studies, which has carried over into disciplinary advances in gospel criticism overall. With the addition of eight key Johannine essays and a state-of-the-art introduction by Alan Culpepper, this new publication as Volume 9 in the Johannine Monograph Series advances a fuller appreciation of her important work on John and new-literary biblical analyses overall. From the Preface: What becomes apparent in an overview of Gail O’Day’s work is her keen analysis of relations and functions of literary themes and features within the Gospel of John, as they further its rhetorical thrust, elucidating its meaning. Whereas diachronic approaches to John have tended to compartmentalize and divide sections and literary forms, O’Day shows time and again how things worked synchronically within John’s story of Jesus, challenging misinterpretations and opening doors to understanding more fully its message. The present collection highlights the dialectics between narrative and theology, time and space, and characters and plot in the Fourth Gospel, clarifying their tensive presentations within this classic narrative.

Arguing that the thought-world of the Gospel is Jewish, not Greek, and that the text is composed over an extended period as the evangelist responded to the changing situation of the community, this book offers a partial answer to a key question: how did Christianity emerge from Judaism?

The Fourth Gospel is deeply shaped by its remarkably high Christology. It depicts the earthly Jesus, the incarnate one, as fully divine. This unrelenting Christology has led interpreters, both ancient and modern, to question the historical value of John's Gospel. For many, the Gospel is just theology. It is to the vexed relationship between history and theology that Jörg Frey turns in Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel. John's theological obsession with Christology might suggest that history counts for little in the Gospel. But, as Frey argues, the Gospel's clear and central claim is that John narrates the story of Jesus of Nazareth, his ministry, and his death, as "factual," and that this narrated "history" is foundational for the Christian message. Frey traces the Gospel's use of the available historical tradition by chiefly drawing from Mark and the Johannine community. Even if the Gospel of John used this received witness in a remarkably free manner, replotting and renarrating traditional episodes and even creatively staging new episodes, Frey contends that the historical life and person of Jesus remain central to John's enterprise. In the end, Frey warns that Johannine interpretation will miss the intention of the Gospel and the interpretive perspective of the evangelist if it remains preoccupied merely with questions of historical accuracy. The interpretive goal is to "let John be John," and, as Frey shows, readers will always yield to the priority of theology over history in the Fourth Gospel. In John's telling of the Christ story, the significance of history lies precisely in its disclosure of theological meaning, just as the significance of the historical Jesus is only understood in the theological language of Christology.

Craig Koester's respected study uses the symbolic language of the Gospel of John as a focus to explore "the Gospel's literary dimensions, social and historical context, and theological import." This edition is fully revised and updated and includes a number of new sections on such topics as Judas and the knowledge of God. Fresh treatments are given on a number of issues, including the Gospel's Christology. This new edition offers both new insights and proven worth for students and scholars alike.

Using various narrative approaches and methodologies, an international team of forty-four Johannine scholars here offers probing essays related to individual characters and group characters in the Gospel of John. These essays present fresh perspectives on characters who play a major role in the Gospel (Peter, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, and many others), but they also examine characters who have never before been the focus of narrative analysis (the men of the Samaritan woman, the boy with the loaves and fishes, Barabbas, and more). Taken together, the essays shed new light on how complex and nuanced many of these characters are, even as they stand in the shadow of Jesus. Readers of this volume will be challenged to consider the Gospel of John anew.

Essential classroom resource for New Testament courses In this book, a group of international scholars go in detail to explain how the author of the Gospel of John uses a variety of narrative strategies to best tell his story. More than a commentary, this book offers a glimpse at the way an ancient author created and used narrative features such as genre, character, style, persuasion, and even time and space to shape a dramatic story of the life of Jesus. Features: An introduction to the Fourth Gospel through its narrative features and dynamics Fifteen features of story design that comprise the Gospel of John Short, targeted essays about how John works that can be used as starting points for the study of other Gospels/texts

This volume investigates the early, second-century reception of the Fourth Gospel. This is an era when its fortunes are surrounded by silence and mystery. It was assumed, until quite recently, that Gnostic and other so-called heterodox groups were the first ones to appreciate this gospel, and hence the mainstream Christians avoided using it until Irenaeus rescued it for the church. Lately, this view has been challenged by several scholars for several reasons. The contributions in this volume, written by leading specialists in their respective fields, offer an approachable, fresh, comprehensive and up-to-date view of the second-century reception of John s Gospel, in a situation where new understandings about various forms of early Christianity and its multiformity have started to emerge.

This volume, a part of the New Testament Library series, surveys the scholarly work that has been done concerning the book of John. J. Louis Martyn also provides his own reading of the forth Gospel. The New Testament Library offers authoritative commentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, as well as classic volumes of scholarship. The commentaries in this series provide fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, offer critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, pay careful attention to their literary design, and present a theologically perceptive exposition of the text.