The Glory of the Crucified One: Christology and Theology in the Gospel of John

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Jörg Frey, Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Zurich, has become one of the world’s foremost Johannine scholars. Still, in the process of writing the commentary on John in the prestigious EKKNT series, he has published at least 48 scholarly books or articles on the Fourth Gospel (the number he includes in his bibliography plus this book) out of at least 84 publications that in some way impinge on his study of John (again from this book’s bibliography). This volume translates into English seven of his essays published in 2013 as part of a German collection of 18 studies (identically entitled Die Herrlichkeit des Gekreuzigten) and four that appeared in other sources, all carefully chosen to give a representative sampling of his conclusions about John’s views of God and Christ in particular.The first essay discusses five main approaches to John today, what Frey calls theological, historicizing, contemporary-historical, source- and redaction-critical, and literary or narratological. He wants a combination of the literary, historical and theological that does not take authorship, source criticism, history-of-religions parallels, or purely synchronic analysis as points of departure. The second study tackles what Frey takes to be the genuine anti-Semitism of the Fourth Gospel. While rejecting J. L. Martyn’s specific two-level reconstruction of the historical Jesus and the Johannine community, Frey still opts for a fusion of those two horizons such that genuine intra-Jewish hostility has been expanded beyond what occurred in Jesus’s life in light of the situation in the church at the end of the first century.Third, we read of Frey on John and time. With the emphasis on Jesus’s “hour,” Frey looks at the uses of various tenses and argues that past and future can both be present for God and therefore for John’s narrative. This for him helps to explain the fusion of horizons just discussed. In the book’s longest essay by far (67 pages), he next studies Johannine dualism. Specific examples should be treated individually and function differently, are not explained by either Gnosticism or Qumran, and do not outweigh the Gospel’s “salvation-universal” or eschatological perspective. The fifth chapter explores the death of Jesus as exaltation and glorification but shows that these views beyond the cross itself do not cancel out John’s focus on Jesus’s death as noble, effective, vicarious and, ultimately, salvific or atoning/expiatory.Despite church history’s emphasis on John as the spiritual Gospel, ch. six reminds us of the importance of Jesus’s humanity and a bodily resurrection for John. Chapter seven brings us to John’s theological heart—the glory of the crucified one, retrojected throughout the narrative of Jesus’s life based on the church’s post-Easter experience guided by the Spirit’s interpretation. Chapter eight then argues that this glory is best interpreted in light of the OT shekinah, beginning already in John 1:14 where that glory first appears immediately after the Word became flesh and dwelt (eskēnosen) among us (with its play on words with the Hebrew shākan).Ninth, we read, “Jesus as the Image of God in the Gospel of John,” which is actually a survey of all the main categories, titles, and predicates of Jesus in this Gospel (of which “image” actually is not one). The tenth study focuses on God himself and the various ways he is portrayed, including in what must be called at least a “proto-trinitarian form of thought.” The final essay is entitled “Johannine Theology as the Climax of New Testament Theology.” This presupposes a form of development in thought, even if it was not as tidy and linear as some have imagined. The high Christology, proto-trinitarianism, and emphasis on love all help to qualify John’s thinking as climactic.An anthology of this kind, however unified in some respects, requires each essay to be evaluated separately. The studies that most directly tie in with the title of the work form the book’s strongest contribution. When Frey is analyzing John’s theology, he is at his best. He gives excellent surveys of history of interpretation and succinct evaluations of strengths and weaknesses of major approaches and consistently advances the conversation with his own proposals. He recognizes and even highlights that John does have a theologia crucis, that he emphasizes Jesus’s humanity as much as his deity, that the sources of Trinitarian thought all appear here, and that history-of-religions parallels are not nearly as significant as OT and earlier Christian backgrounds for John’s emphases. He rightly retains a redemptive-historical approach to John’s eschatology that has not been swamped by cosmological dualism.On the other hand, Frey never defines what the Easter experience actually was that so changed perspectives on things. He never distinguishes post-Easter, Spirit-inspired theological interpretation of historical events from pure invention of episodes in the Fourth Gospel. He dismisses advocates of historicizing as too one-sided and extreme without ever interacting with their arguments. His appeal to verbal aspect to support his view of time in John does not take into account basic observations such as the aspectually vague nature of eimi. Switches from the imperfect of eimi to the aorist of other verbs cannot bear the weight of what he claims for them for the simple reason that eimi has no aorist forms.Despite these drawbacks, having these essays in English is a special gift from Baylor, especially given the thorough footnotes to recent German research more broadly. One can only hope that Frey will not spend so much time writing preparatory studies that he never actually completes the commentary to which they are all building.