Biblical Interpretation in Early Christian Gospels

Volume 4: The Gospel of John

Thomas R. Hatina

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567684110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This volume is the fourth in a set of volumes, which together explore current approaches to the study of scripture in the Gospels. Thomas R. Hatina's latest edited collection begins with an introduction surveying methodological approaches used in the study of how scriptural allusions, quotations, and references function in John, with subsequent essays grouped into four categories that represent the breadth of current interpretive interests. The contributors begin with historical-critical approaches, before moving to rhetorical and linguistic approaches, literary approaches, and finally social memory approaches. Each study contains not only recent research on the function of scripture in John, but also an explanation of the approach taken, making the collection an ideal resource for both scholars and students who are interested in the complexities of interpretation in John's context as well as our own.

1

Search the Scriptures: A Survey of Approaches to the Use of Scripture in the Fourth Gospel

Kyle R. L. Parsons

Scholars generally agree that the use of Scripture in the Fourth Gospel (FG), like that of the rest of the New Testament, is hermeneutically Christocentric.¹ However, scholars do not agree on the exact purpose or function of this hermeneutic within the Johannine context(s). While there is agreement that the Scriptures were appropriated to legitimize Jesus’s messianic identity,² one cannot be as sure about their function in relation to the intended audience—whether they were meant to convince nonbelievers (evangelical or apologetic aims)³ or to encourage those who already believed (pastoral aims).⁴ In either case, the Fourth Evangelist (FE) faces the difficult task of explaining how the Scriptures make sense of a suffering, and indeed dying, Messiah figure, which was an unusual concept, to say the least.⁵ Alicia Myers summarizes it well by writing that messianic exegesis “had to explain the scandal of the cross and the reality of the resurrection as events entirely unanticipated by Israel’s scriptural narratives.”⁶

This introduction offers an overview of the shifting trends, goals, questions, and their related approaches to the FG’s use of Scripture. The approaches are organized into “historical,” “literary,” and “media” categories that have been trends in recent years, which I label as “perspectives” for convenience’s sake. Yet, each should be recognized as fluid in the sense that each can accommodate and overlap with the other(s) and be varied in its own right. Historical-critical approaches have often focused on both the FE’s sources and his interpretive method(s) in relation to his contemporaries. Typically, these approaches have aimed at understanding the world behind the FG.⁷ Literary approaches have most often appropriated rhetorical criticism, narrative criticism, and aspects of intertextuality. As such, the text itself is privileged along with the reader/audience in contrast to the author. Media criticism covers more recent approaches that build on orality studies and investigates both how an oral performance affects textual meaning for an audience and how groups use the past for making sense of the present through the medium of social memory.

As a methodological survey, the aim of this introduction is to lay the groundwork for the essays in this volume, which are organized according to the most recent approaches. The summary of the articles is found at the end of this introduction. It is hoped that this structure will not only provide a fuller context for the following essays but also bring some degree of organization to many decades of study into the function of Scripture in the FG.

1. Historical Perspectives

Historically oriented inquiry has most often concentrated on explicit quotations in the FG.⁸ Apart from anomalies like the quotation in John 7:38,⁹ which does not correspond to any known scriptural form despite its being introduced with a typical quotation formula, most scholars have concentrated on interpretive patterns, preferred sources, and quotation formulae. A historical approach to the FG’s use of Scripture has a long tradition. Almost a century ago, Alexander Faure, for example, saw the value of subjecting the explicit quotations to form- and source-critical analysis in order to show how patterns may reveal pre-Gospel traditions. One of Faure’s key findings was that the FE switches from so-called “prooftexts” that dominate the first two-thirds of the Gospel to “fulfillment texts” in the Passion account. On the basis of this observation, Faure hypothesized that two distinct source layers were in play which a later redactor combined.¹⁰

Sources and Their Use by the FE

While Faure focused on the form of the citations in order to identify distinct pre-Gospel traditions within the early Church, others have traced the citations back to their “original” sources. The studies of C. H. Dodd, Edwin Freed, Günter Reim, and Maarten Menken aptly exemplify the aims and breadth of the historical-critical approach.¹¹ Methodologically, these studies attempt to identify not only the scriptural versions that the quotations were based on but also how they came to be constructed, especially when they do not align with extant forms. When a given quotation in the FG differs from an alleged source text or scriptural version, explanations of origins and the compositional process are proposed. Typically, the explanations have pointed to the evangelist who shaped the versions that were accessible to him in order to address his community’s theological needs and idiosyncrasies.

For Dodd, who has been particularly influential, the differences resulted from the evangelist’s reliance on testimonia, which Dodd argued were written lists of scriptural prooftexts used by the Early Church.¹² An example of this usage is found in a comparison of John and Mark’s versions of Jesus’s response to the Temple crowd. In John 2:16, Jesus tells the Temple crowd, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace (ἐμπορίου).” The form of this response, which incorporates Zech 14:21, is different from Mark’s version that uses a combination of Isa 56:7 and Jer 7:11 (Mark 11:17). Dodd explains this variance by arguing that the FE chose different testimonia than Mark’s author. While the FE could have just as easily used the same testimonia that Mark’s author used, his motivation was guided by a very different theological aim. The FE had in mind the “day of the Lord” being fulfilled in Jesus’s expulsion of the “traders,” which was different from the motivation of Mark’s author.¹³

Though Freed, Reim, and Menken depart from Dodd’s hypothesis of testimonia, they too focus on determining the FE’s source texts. The sources they suggest, however, differ depending on the specific quotation. Accumulating all these sources, then, suggests the improbable scenario that the FE had quite a vast awareness (or even possession) of written material. For Freed, the FE was not only aware of a wide array of material but also drew from it extensively. With the majority of quotations coming from the Septuagint (LXX), Freed contends that some also came from the Masoretic Text (MT), several Targumic traditions, and still others from (probably) the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS).¹⁴ Reim’s range of material, however, is much narrower. For Reim, only Deutero-Isaiah and other early Christian traditions provided the FE’s sources.¹⁵ Akin to Freed, Menken maintains that the majority of the FE’s source material came from the LXX, with the caveat that a few also originated from a Hebrew Vorlage. Bruce Schuchard nuances Menken’s view by claiming that one ought to be more precise by specifying Old Greek (OG), rather than LXX, as the more accurate designation of the Greek source material. Moreover, Schuchard goes so far as to say that the OG is the “one and only textual tradition” used by the FE.¹⁶

Menken critiques previous source-critical scholarship for not focusing enough on the editorial practices of the FE.¹⁷ As an editor, the focus shifts more to the whole of the Gospel, especially its entire theological program. Thus, for many historical critics trying to reconstruct the rationale for the use of Scripture in the FG, the differences between the meaning of the citations and their source texts expose not a faulty memory, as Charles Goodwin argues,¹⁸ but intentional changes based on a particular theological perspective held by the FE.¹⁹

The problem that ensued by pointing to the evangelist’s broader theological aims was that scholars could not agree on the key aims or even an overarching aim.²⁰ For example, Menken argues that the citation of Isa 40:3 in John 1:23, which curiously condenses the LXX version,²¹ was constructed purposely by the FE to show his disagreement with the Synoptic tradition (where John the Baptist is presented as Jesus’s forerunner rather than, as the FE prefers, a contemporary witness to Jesus).²² Freed, however, argues that the FE is motivated by wisdom traditions. As such, the FE drops ἑτοιμασατε (“prepare”) for εὐθύνατε (“make straight”) so that ὁδὸς (“the way”) may take on a “moral and ethical” meaning.²³ Although the text is subjected to the same method, different results follow.

Goodwin is a good example of the breadth of possible theological motivations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• 1 Search the Scriptures: A Survey of Approaches to the Use of Scripture in the Fourth Gospel
• Part I Historical Perspectives
• Part II Rhetorical and Linguistic Perspectives
• Part III Literary Perspectives
• Part IV Social Memory Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of References
• Copyright Page