Otherness and Identity in the Gospel of John and Beyond
In the context of an increasingly globalized world, a multicultural society wrestles with the presence of cultural others as they relate to racial, ethnic , gender, religious identities, and the like. The Bible and its interpretation at the local, national, and international levels are often, if not always, misused to perpetuate negative stereotypes of othersâsay, immigrants, foreign workers, refugees, women, Muslims, Jews, and so forthâin the dominant society. Seen in this light, Johannine scholarship in particular has a tendency to reinforce the rhetoric of exclusion prevalent in ecclesial settings by emphasizing a dualistic worldview. By contrast, the current project scrutinizes an interpretive model for inclusive theology yet to be applied to the Gospel of John. It seeks to enhance tolerance of others by exploring otherness in solidarity across differences in the biblical world.
This theological enterprise examines the otherness of minor characters in the Gospel of John beyond a hierarchical binary opposition, which draws a clear-cut line between two mutually exclusive terms. Such otherness can be understood as a discursive process through which the dominant group (âusâ) establishes its own cultural identity by positing a difference, real or imaginary, from minority groups (âthemâ). As William E. Connolly puts it, âIdentity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.â1 Along this line of reasoning, the term âotheringâ is referred to as âthe act of emphasizing the perceived weaknesses of marginalized groups as a way of stressing the alleged strength of those in positions of power.â2 More than any other historical event, the Holocaust of the Second World War has raised the social and ethical issues at work in the negative conceptualization of otherness. Within the New Testament, the Gospel of John is well known for its use of binary oppositions (e.g., life/death, light/darkness, and belief/unbelief). Within such a dualistic framework, the Gospel can be considered as exploiting the minor characters, notably âthe Jews,â as part of a strategy to establish Christian identity.3
This enterprise challenges this recurring tendency in Johannine scholarship. Drawing upon insights from the deconstructive and postcolonial imagination, I contend that the minor characters in John lend themselves to polyvalent understandings of otherness beyond what traditional scholarship has proposed: otherness in-between (Nicodemus), otherness from within (the Samaritan woman), otherness from without (the Jews and Pilate), and otherness beyond (the mother of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple).4 Such a reading reimagines otherness as diversely ambiguous , internal, external, and transcendent through the examples of the minor characters.5 This reworking of otherness provides an alternative understanding of the self and the other in a multidirectional, flexible, and interrelated fashion, which can foster mutual understanding in a globalized world.6
The Social Location of the Reader and Biblical Interpretation
This project starts by contextualizing my social location as it pertains to the interpretation of Johnâs minor characters and Jesus.7 As Daniel Patte suggests in the Global Bible Commentary, no biblical interpretation can ever be separated from the context of the reader.8 This project derives from my lived experience of othering, or being marginalized, in the wider religious context. I identify myself as a member of a religious and cultural minority group whose experiences have traditionally been marginalized within the othering process of racialization and ethnicization, according to alleged biological or cultural differences, respectively.9
As an heir to the legacy left behind by the Western mission movement in East Asia during the early twentieth century, I am conscious of the power relations at work between missionaries and natives in the Korean peninsula.10 My denomination, the Korea Evangelical Holiness Church, was founded under the influence of American missionaries, a part of the expansionist movement of Euro-Americans all over the world as travelers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11 The power dynamics between the American missionaries and the Korean natives poignantly served to centralize the experiences of the former and to marginalize those of the latter. As a result, the voice of indigenous peoples tended to be suppressed by the voice of missionaries. Against this background, I emphasize the voiceless in both the biblical text and the context of reading. It is the history of the missions in Korea, therefore, that drives meâas a âflesh-and-blood readerââto engage critically in biblical scholarship as proposed.12
As a minoritized reader within a dominant religious-theological context, I underscore colonized others in texts, such as the minor characters in John. This experience with minoritization allows me to critically engage with the otherness of Johnâs minor characters, whom I regard as constantly vulnerable to victimization by traditional hermeneutics through their negative portrayals within a dualistic framework. The travels of Jesus, the main character in the Gospel narrative, involve encounters with minor characters, who are often marginalized with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.13 A dualistic framework of interpretation justifies such asymmetry in the relationship between Jesus and minor characters: on the one hand, Jesus is seen as superior, omniscient, and omnipotent; on the other hand, the minor characters are depicted as inferior, incomprehensive, and powerless. A radical re-envisioning of otherness beyond the confines of binary opposition would offer an antidote to such an interpretation of the minor characters in the text.
The point to be acknowledged is that minor characters in the Gospel of John function to define the Johannine community as its conflicting image. Indeed, the most salient discursive tendency observed in the understanding of minor characters in Johannine Studies is that they are often imagined as the others in relation to the Johannine community. That is to say, the Johannine community can define itself by othering minor characters. Operative in the process of othering is a representational dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. By means of such a dialectical framework, the Johannine community constructs a clear-cut boundary to differentiate itself from the others represented by minor characters in such a way as to attribute negative features to them and further exploit them for the formation of a communal identity. At the same time, the representational dialectic entails an asymmetrical relation of power between Jesus and the minor characters by placing the former at the center and the latter in the periphery. As suggested above, the dualistic Weltanschauung provides a rationale for justifying the marginalization of Johnâs minor characters on a fundamental level.
Nonetheless, it is my contention that minor characters in the Gospel of John can be reconstructed as challenging and destabilizing the dualistic Weltanschauung rather than becoming its victims. I further argue that the minor characters undermine the hierarchical structure based on binary oppositions embedded in the Gospel. A both/and framework concentrates on the ambiguity of the minor characters, which undermines Johannine dualism by enabling them to cross the boundaries drawn within an either/or framework. I go on to claim that ...