The Use Of The Jewish Scriptures In The Johannine Passion Narrative

How do Israel’s Scriptures inform the account of Jesus’s cruciform death in the Gospel of John? What does it mean for John’s portrayal of Jesus’s death to be “according to the Scriptures”? The Use of the Jewish Scriptures in the Johannine Passion Narrative: That the Scripture May Be Perfected argues that they are the focal element of the Johannine portrayal, and without them, John’s Passion Narrative simply makes no sense. Whether through the evangelist’s appeal to the fulfilment of Scripture (with such fulfilment accompanying the very moment of Jesus’s death) or whether through allusions to the narratives of Creation or Passover, Israel’s Scriptures provide the Passion Narrative’s veritable heartbeat. This book also considers the impact of John’s scriptural usage on the very concept of Scripture itself, contending that Scripture is brought to perfection by Jesus’s actions and to a new standing or status in this regard. David M. Allen examines how the use of Scripture in the Passion account impacts the Fourth Gospel’s own self-understanding, arguing that its capacity to pronounce on Scripture’s fulfilment attests to the Gospel’s own self-avowed, scriptural credentials.

This book suggests why it is that we have several accounts of the sufferings and death of Jesus, and investigates what the original passion narrative might have been as it seeks to recreate the response of the earliest Christians in their amazed contemplation of God's saving act in Christ.

This best-selling book is certain to remain in the forefront of Gospel exegesis for years to come. In it, Father Brown treats the Gospels, written thirty to sixty years after the life of Christ, as reflecting considerate theological and dramatic development and not simply as literal accounts of a historical event.

In The Fourth Gospel and the Scriptures, Bynum presents new insights from ancient biblical manuscripts 4QXII and the Minor Prophets Scroll that help unlock the mystery of John’s unique form of scriptural citation.

In this new analysis of the Gospel of John, Kari Syreeni argues that the gospel is a heavily reworked edition of an earlier Johannine work, and that the original did not include Jesus' passion. Syreeni theorizes that the original gospel ended at Chapter 12, with the notion of Jesus' disappearance from the world, and that the passion narrative was incorporated by a later editor freely using the existing gospels of Mark and Matthew. Syreeni suggests that the letters of John - written after the predecessor gospels but before the final edition - reveal a schism in the Johannine community that was caused by the majority faction's acceptance of Jesus' death and resurrection, as it was then recorded in the new gospel. By exploring the gospel's different means of legitimizing the passion story, such as the creation of the 'Beloved Disciple' to witness Jesus' passion, and the foreshadowing of the resurrection of Jesus in the miracle of Lazarus, Syreeni provides a bold and provocative case for a new understanding of John.

"A Michael Glazier book." Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Are the Writings a miscellaneous collection of books, as is so often asserted, or do they have a purposeful design or arrangement? Over the past 35 years, there has been a significant amount of scholarly interest in the shape of the Law, Former Prophets, Twelve Minor Prophets and the Psalms, while examinations of the shape of the Writings were almost nonexistent until very recently. The 11 essays in this volume explore this often-neglected issue from a variety of critical perspectives—reader-centered approaches, canonical, structural-canonical, and redactional—made more robust by the mix of German- and English-language scholarship on this question, including 4 articles translated from German into English. Essays range from the historical development of the collection, to analysis of the collection’s different arrangements, to the relationship of books and subcollections within the Writings, to the reception of the collection in Jewish and Christian sources. Every book in the Writings is discussed, with particular attention given to Job, Ruth, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The volume closes with 3 critical responses from John Barton, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, and Christopher Seitz.

The Gospel of John has been described both as the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels. This duality is reflected in the present work where, starting by looking at the Jewish liturgical year, the author seeks to suggest causes for the conflict as well as offering ways of overcoming any resulting sense of anti-semitism.