John In Recent Study
JOHN IN RECENT STUDY
The overwhelming majority of scholarly energy on John during the last twenty or thirty years has been devoted to some theme in the fourth gospel as a means of access to the ostensible Johannine community. 95 Enough has been said on this approach.
A second focus has been a perennial one: the examination, from fresh standpoints, of particular themes in John’s gospel. For instance, the role of the Paraclete, the Holy
Spirit, in the fourth gospel continues to call forth books and articles. 96 There are similar treatments of many Johannine themes.
A third emphasis has been the study of a variety of historical matters—the trial of Jesus, the relation between John and the synoptics, or this or that topographical detail.
But by far the most important development in recent studies on John is the application of various forms of literary criticism to the fourth gospel. This may be a structuralist approach to certain chapters, 98 an examination of the asides in John, 99 or a consideration of some such literary device as irony. 100 The tendency in all of these approaches is to treat the text synchronically, that is, to treat the text as a finished product and to ask virtually no questions about its historical development or its referents. Nowhere is this better seen than in the magisterial and provocative work of Culpepper, 101 which analyzes the gospel of John in the categories reserved for modern novels.
There have been both a gain and a loss in these studies. Some of them have said not much more than the obvious, with the heavy weight of the formal categories of structuralism or the new literary criticism to drag them down. The most creative have in their favor that they treat the gospel of John as a single text, a unified piece of work.
This is both refreshing and something of a relief from older approaches whose primary goal was to detach sources or traditions from the text as we have it.
But there is a loss as well. These studies often ignore the rootedness of the gospels, including this Gospel, in history—their passionate concern to bear witness, not simply to pass on abstract ideas. The genuine insights of these studies are sometimes offset by an air of unreality, of merely esoteric textual formality.