Why the Gospel of John is Fundamental to Jesus Research (Chapter One of Jesus Research: The Gospel of John in Historical Inquiry)

The constellation of the Johannine riddles—theological, historical, literary—and their implications for understanding the Jesus of history as well as the Christ of faith, and thus the historical and religious basis of western civilization, comprises arguably the most difficult set of biblical critical issues and discussions in the modern era: full stop. Just as John’s theological tensions precipitated and contributed to the most intensive and extensive of theological discussions in the patristic era, so John’s literary and historical tensions have contributed to most intensive and extensive literary and historical biblical discussions in the modern era. Understandably, the issues are complex. The discussions are multidisciplinary; the implications are momentous. That is why this study is needed and why it is needed now

Incidents Dispersed in the Synoptics and Cohering in John: Dodd, Brown, and Johannine Historicity (Chapter Ten of Engaging with C. H. Dodd on the Gospel of John: Sixty Years of Tradition and Interpretation)

Excerpt: Between C. H. Dodd’s two landmark magna opera on John, addressing the religious background behind and the historical tradition within the Fourth Gospel (1953; 1963), Raymond Brown published several essays in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, later appearing in his New Testament Essays.1 In doing so, Brown picks up where the appendix to Dodd’s first major work left off – the central subject that Dodd expanded in his second volume. Both Dodd and Brown challenged inferences that similarities between John and the Synoptics suggest John’s literary dependence upon one or more of the Synoptics, inferring instead John’s essential autonomy as a historically grounded rather than derivative tradition. While Dodd sought to demonstrate the many ways in which Johannine similar-yetdifferent parallels to the Synoptic accounts argued for the Fourth Evangelist’s use of independent historical tradition of comparable historical value as that which underlay the Synoptic traditions,2 Brown worked more with analysing the character of the similarities and differences among the traditions, making critical deductions as a result. Lest it be imagined that Johannine narratives were cobbled together out of synoptic-type material, serving the theological interests of the Evangelist rather than historical ones, Brown’s early analyses effectively challenge several of the bases for preferring Synoptic over Johannine historicity, thus bolstering Dodd’s overall programme

Menorah Review (No. 39, Winter, 1997)

An Interpretive Methodology With Supersessionist Forebodings -- Through a Glass Brightly: Seeing the Unseeable -- The 12th Annual Selma and Jacob Brown Lecture -- Controversy and the Dead Sea Scrolls -- Book Listing -- Jewish Civics -- Leah -- Book Briefing

From One Dialogue to Another: Johannine Polyvalence from Origins to Receptions

Throughout the ages, one of the primary mistakes committed in studying the Gospel of John has been to read the text monologically instead of dialogically. This error has often led some readers of the Fourth Gospel to “get it wrong,” needing correction by later interpreters. Put otherwise, many an ecumenical council or more nuanced interpretation has restored the tension that had been lost by interpreters who had sided with one aspect of John’s witness without considering another. Likewise, one flaw of modern literary-critical theories is that they have often sought to ascribe the sources of the Fourth Gospel’s theological tensions to sets of imagined literary poles, failing to consider the possibility that the origin of those tensions was been integral to the thinking and style of the Evangelist. John’s material developed dialogically, and it must be read dialogically if its epistemological origin, developmental character, and rhetorical design are to be adequately understood. Indeed, there are different levels and types of dialogical operation underlying the Johannine text—from origins to receptions—and these involve theological, historical, and literary factors that require a polyvalent approach to Johannine interpretation

Why this Study is Needed, and Why it is Needed Now (from John, Jesus, and History, vol. 1)

Few scholarly developments have been an interesting as the modernistic dehistoricization of John and the de-Johannification of Jesus. To a certain degree, each of these trends has bolstered the other, and the assertion of many a scholar claiming the authoritative weight of critical and scientific study is that the one thing we know for sure is actually two: the Fourth Gospel is of no historical value, and historical Jesus research must be performed untainted by any Johannine influence. The question is the degree to which either of these assertions is true, a solid platform upon which to base the frameworks of further studies

Peder Borgen’s Bread from Heaven—Midrashic Developments in John 6 as a Case Study in John’s Unity and Disunity (A Foreword to Bread from Heaven)

Among the weighty treatments of the Gospel of John over the last half-century, one of the most incisive has been Bread from Heaven, by Peder Borgen. As the unity and disunity of the Fourth Gospel had been debated extensively among Johannine scholars for the previous half-century, approaching this issue from a text-based comparative standpoint posed a new window through which one could assess key issues and contribute to the larger discussions. Whereas Rudolf Bultmann and Wilhelm Bousset had envisioned the context of John’s composition as Hellenistic Christianity leading into Gnostic trajectories, Borgen focused on particularly Jewish writings as John’s primary backdrop—albeit within a diaspora Hellenistic setting. More specifically, the writings of Philo and the Palestinian midrashim offer a text-based way forward in discerning the origin and development of John’s presentation of the feeding and sea-crossing in the ministry of Jesus in John 6, followed by ensuing discussions and the confession of Peter. Given the numerous explicit and implicit cases of John’s citing of Jewish biblical motifs, if the case could be made for the Johannine narrator’s following Jewish patterns of thinking and writing, then implications would extend to understandings of the Johannine tradition’s origin and contextual development, elucidating also its character and meaning