Genre Bending in the Fourth Gospel

(ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.) Contemporary Johannine scholarship displays remarkable methodological diversity. There remain historical critics, interested in the ways in which texts such as John are embedded within, reflect the values of, and interact with the context of the ancient world. Some attend to the structural features of ancient society that provide the framework within which the Gospel might have meaning.1 Others wrestle with the text's diachronic development.2 Some scholars, such as our colleagues who are inaugurating a consultation on "Jesus, John, and History," pursue the historical-critical quest to what other colleagues would judge to be a Quixotic end. Still others worry not so much about the historical Jesus lying behind the text as about a sectarian community, defining itself through the text, against a dominant group.3 Some of our colleagues thus do business as usual, or as it has usually been done for the last two hundred years, with, of course, ever greater methodological sophistication. Others say that there may be a different and perhaps better way to analyze the genius of the text. Some are interested in how the Gospel in its final form works in various liberating or oppressive ways, negatively, to ground Christian anti-Judaism,4 to valorize and yet marginalize women,5 or positively, to ground an egalitarian community striving for the liberation of its members.6 At least since the work of Alan Culpepper,7 Johannine scholars, like their counterparts working on other early Christian narratives, have focused their attention on the literary dynamics of the Gospel, asking how its symbolism functions,8 how it develops its characters,9 works its ironic ways,10 uses narrative rhetorically,11 and spins out its complex, often dramatic,12 plot.13 Some colleagues have moved beyond formal analysis to a more playful, yet often insightful, engagement with the text and with the lives of its interpreters, offering a reading of John among the missions of the Southwest14 or in the places where bodies are dissected and built, from the butcher shops of Limerick to the treadmills of God's gym.15 The Fourth Gospel, in other words, is a microcosm of the discipline of NT studies, itself but a segment of the larger world of humanistic scholarship. It would be difficult to diminish the cacophony of competing voices, even if it were desirable. Yet there might be some interesting ways of encouraging new avenues of fruitful dialogue among them. Let me try, ever so briefly, to do so, taking a clue from one of the oldest interpretive strategies of modern NT study a version of form criticism. The attempt to analyze the formal features and generic affinities of the Fourth Gospel in general and its various discourse materials in particular has always encountered a certain degree of frustration.16 The enterprise is not quite what it is in the Synoptic Gospels. The forms seem to be more fluid; the generic markers less clear-cut. Nonetheless, some formal and generic judgments are not particularly controversial. Formally, the Fourth Gospel as a whole combines narratives and dialogue or discourse, perhaps juxtaposed in an odd sort of way, when compared with the Synoptics. The narratives offer a selection of deeds of Jesus, perhaps prepackaged in a miracle catena or protoGospel,17 perhaps derived directly from the Synoptics18 or at least in part from oral tradition.19 However attenuated or refined, the ghost of Bultmann's Signs Source lives on as one major way of thinking about the Gospel. Particular narratives do show distinctive Johannine touches,20 but a healing remains a healing, a fish story remains a fish story, at least on the surface. It would be of interest to explore how narrative forms are bent in the Gospel, but this essay focuses primarily on the more intractable discourse material. The other half of Bultmann's famous division of the Fourth Gospel never fared quite as well as did his hypothesis of a Signs Source. …