Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series General Editor - Dikran Y. Hadidian

Understanding Judaism and the Jews in the Gospel of John: Polemic, Tradition, and Johannine Self-Identity reopens the perennial question of the Fourth Gospel’s perplexing characterization of “the Jews.” According to the reigning paradigm, the Gospel of John witnesses to a community’s burgeoning sense of religious distinctiveness. Ethnically Jewish believers in Jesus had begun to forge a new identity in contrast to the Jews. Nathan Thiel assesses the weaknesses of the prevailing model, arguing that the fourth evangelist still saw himself as living and working within the Jewish tradition. Yet if the Gospel of John is the literary product of a self-consciously Jewish author, why would he speak so often and so critically of “the Jews”? Thiel considers the factors which have conditioned the evangelist’s choice of terminology: the Gospel’s setting, its intended audience, and, above all, John’s indebtedness to Scripture. As a first-century Jew well-versed in Israel’s sacred texts, the evangelist has modeled his story of Jesus after patterns familiar to him from the Scriptures—Scriptures in which Israelite authors consistently portray their ancestors as faithless despite God’s powerful work on their behalf. John is a relentless critic, but such cutting theological assessment had long been part of Israel’s counterintuitive way of telling its history.

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.

Compelling perspectives on the Gospel of John from a premiere scholar of the subject This multidimensional volume from the leading American scholar of Johannine studies brings together D. Moody Smith's germinal works from the past two decades along with some original articles published here for the first time. The resulting collection augments current understanding of the Gospel of John with fresh insights and research and points the way toward opportunities for new inquiry. The collection is structured around four focal issues that define contemporary studies of John. In the first section, Smith places the book within its Jewish milieu, attempting to account for the tension between the work's seeming anti-Jewishness and its familiarity with Jewish life and thought. Next Smith engages the relationship between John and the historical figure of Jesus, especially the extent to which John's representation of Jesus reflects knowledge of independent traditions as well as the self-consciousness of his own community. The third section examines John's account against the Synoptic Gospels, assessing the evidence of John's access to an independent record of the passion and the possibility that John adopted the gospel genre from Mark. Finally, Smith explores how the Gospels, and especially that of John, evolved into scripture and how they have come to be interpreted in conjunction with one another.

This study argues that the Gospel of John's anti-Judaism can be well understood from the perspective of trends apparent within the context of broader Greco-Roman culture. It uses the paradigm of collective memory and aspects of social identity theory and self-categorization theory to explore the theological and narrative functions of the Johannine Jews. Relying upon a diverse range of historical testimony drawn from Greco-Roman literature, inscriptions, and papyri, this work attempts to understand the social identities and social locations of Diaspora Jews as a first step in reading John's Gospel in the context of the political and social instability of the first century CE. It then attempts to understand John's theology, its portrayal of Jewish social identity, and the narrative and theological functions of "the Jews" as a group character in light of this historical context. This work attempts to demonstrate that while John's treatment of Jews and Judaism is multivalent at both social and theological levels, it is primarily focused upon strengthening a Christologically centered Christian identity while attempting to mitigate the attractiveness of Judaism as a religious competitor.

Series: Jewish and Christian Heritage, 1 Is the Gospel of John anti-Jewish? What would this mean in the context of the original writer, of his community, the final text and its first readers? Who, precisely, are the Ioudaioi who are so scathingly criticized in the Gospel - “Judeans”, perhaps, or some other more specific group than the Jewish nation as a whole? What are the implications for New Testament study and for Christian theology in the light of the troubled history of relations between Judaism and Christianity? The papers in this volume were presented at the special international colloquium held in January 2000 in Leuven, Belgium, which was convened to assemble the world’s leading experts on John’s Gospel and issues of anti-Judaism for a thorough assessment of the state of the question. The result is a fascinating panorama of the issues and of current approaches to them, and an extremely valuable resource for further work on anti-Judaism in the Christian tradition. Contents: 1. Wrestling with Johannine Anti-Judaism: A Hermeneutical Frame-work for the Analysis of the Current Debate - Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, Frederique Vandecasteele-Vanneuville 2. The Embarrassment of History: Reflections on the Problem of ‘Anti-Judaism’ in the Fourth Gospel - James D.G. Dunn 3. Anti-Judaism in the Fourth Gospel as a Theological Problem for Christian Interpreters R. Alan Culpepper 4. The Fourth Gospel and the Salvation of Israel: An Appeal for a New Start Stephen Motyer 5. Anti-Judaism in Revelation? A Response to Peter Tomson - Jan Willem van Henten 6. Anti-Judaism in the Fourth Gospel - Judith M. Lieu 7. Escape Routes as Dead Ends: On Hatred towards Jews and the New Testament, Especially in the Gospel of John - Simon Schoon 8. The Coming Son of Man Became Flesh. High Christology and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John - Bertold Klappert 9. “Abraham is our Father” (John 8:39)The Gospel of John and the Jewish-Christian Dialogue - Hendrik Hoet 10. Biblical Thinking as the Wisdom of Love - Roger Burggraeve 11. The Identity of the ‘Jews’ for the Readers of John - Johannes Beutler 12. The ‘Jews’ in the Gospel of John - Henk Jan de Jonge 13. The Depiction of ‘the Jews’ in John’s Gospel. Matters of Behavior and Identity - M.C. de Boer 14. Speaking of the Jews .‘Jews’ in the Discourse Material of the Fourth Gospel - Raymond F. Collins 15. ‘Jews’ in the Gospel of John as Compared with the Palestinian Talmud, the Synoptics and Some New Testament Apocrypha - Peter J. Tomson 16. ‘Jews’ and Jews in the Fourth Gospel - Adele Reinhartz 17. The Nicodemus Enigma: The Characterization and Function of an Ambiguous Actor of the Fourth Gospel - Jean Marie Sevrin - 18. “Salvation is from the Jews.” The Parenthesis in John 4:22b - Gilbert van Belle 19. John and Judaism - C. Kingsley Barrett 20. “You Are of Your Father the Devil” in Its Context: Stereotyped Apocalyptic Polemic in John 8:38-47 - U.C. von Wahlde 21. Scriptural Dispute between Jews and Christians in John: Literary Fiction or Historical Reality? John 9:13-17, 24-34 as a Test Case - Maarten J.J. Menken 22. The Farewell Discourses (John 13:31–16:33) and the Problem of Anti-Judaism - Jean Zumstein 23. The Gospel of John: Exclusivism Caused by a Social Setting Different from That of Jesus (John 11:54 and 14:6) - James H. Charlesworth 24. Anti-Judaism in the Book of Revelation - Jan Lambrecht 25. The Canon – Understanding of Revelation – History of Reception and Effects. Problems of a Biblically Oriented Theo...

In Exegeting the Jews: The Early Reception of the Johannine "Jews", Michael G. Azar analyzes the rhetorical function of the Gospel of John’s "Jews" in the earliest surviving full-length expositions of John in Greek: Origen’s Commentary on John (3rd cent.), John Chrysostom’s Homilies on John (4th cent.), and Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John (5th cent.). While scholarship often has portrayed the reception history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the Gospel’s “Jews” as simply and uniformly anti-Jewish or antisemitic, Azar demonstrates that these three writers primarily read John’s narrative typologically, employing the situation and characters in the Gospel not against contemporary Jews with whom they regularly interacted, but as types of each patristic writer’s own intra-Christian struggle and opponents.

This is the first comprehensive study of St John's Gospel for nearly forty years. The author provides new and coherent answers to its two most important questions: the position of the Gospel in the history of Christian thought, and its central or governing idea. In the course of the book, helooks at the Gospel from a variety of viewpoints: historical, literary, and theological. The discussion is balanced and comprehensive and brings into play questions of origins, content, and readership. Detailed exegetical arguments that advance scholarly debate, and intricate questions ofspecialized concern, are for the most part dealt with conveniently in five major excursuses. All non-English sources are translated.

This study elucidates the role of the Jewish feasts of Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication in John's presentation of Jesus. Gerry Wheaton examines the Fourth Gospel in relation to contemporary Jewish sources and applies his findings to the larger debate surrounding the alleged anti-Jewish posture of the Gospel as a whole.

Until the mid-1960s, most commentators of the Gospel of John were aware of a polemic against 'the Jews,' yet they did not consider it with reference to contemporary ethical discussion. A shift in focus in Johannine scholarship is noticeable from the mid-1960s and 1970s to the present, where commentators began to connect the Gospel's polemic against 'the Jews' with potential anti-Judaism in the text. As yet, very little work has been done to answer the question of how this change in sensitivity came about. This book is a historiography of one scholar's growing awareness of potential anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John with the intention of using this individual history to explain the larger trend in biblical studies. Sonya Cronin examines the published work of Raymond Brown, a prominent Catholic New Testament scholar, between the years 1960-1998. The book contextualizes Brown's work by evaluating the impact of ecclesiastical statements and the influence of earlier and contemporary Johannine scholarship on Brown's biblical interpretation, and then posits theories as to why change occurs at specific times.