Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, and John's Prologue (original) (raw)
In this article, the problems revolving around the Prologue and its relationship with the rest of the Gospel are investigated from a theological perspective. The research has tended to focus on such issues as the views of revelation and salvation found in the Prologue and the subsequent narrative and on their respective use of symbolism.
The Beginning of the Gospel of St. John: Philosophical Perspectives, New York: Peter Lang Publishers
1992
The question of how to read the Bible is a perennial one. How do we interpret the God who claims to transcend our human categories? The difficulty is particularly acute in John's Gospel with its account of a man, Jesus, who claims to be God. Based on the principle that a text can present the radically transcendent only by disrupting itself, this book considers not just the sense of the Gospel, but also the breakdown of this sense. Focusing on its failure to humanly locate its central character and on the many misunderstandings which surround him, it presents a new approach to the Gospel's paradoxes. The result is a new definition of this sacred text based on a new hermeneutics.
Honest to John! A Response to the Reviews of The Fourth Gospel and the Quest for Jesus
2008
Jesus of history. As they all acknowledge, the disjunction of these two subjects has been the prevalent modern paradigm for conducting both Johannine and Jesus studies in recent decades, but such a move has its own sets of new critical problems. While this book calls attention to those new problems, it also seeks to find solutions to the original issues that modern critical theories have tried to address. In doing so, it seeks to build on the most plausible of literary and tradition-development theories, even if new approaches and syntheses are required. In taking seriously the character and claims of the Johannine tradition, however, this approach attempts to be honest to John. On that score, critical and traditional approaches alike have too often fallen dismally short. Jeff Staley has done an excellent job of describing the overall thrust of the book. He rightly notes the importance of the literary theories the book advances, including their implications for a plausible view of the development of the Johannine tradition. His introduction also points helpfully to the connections between the historical subject of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus and the unfolding history of the Johannine situation. As one who has appreciated Staley's literary-rhetorical analyses of John over the last two decades or more, I hope to benefit from the best of reader-response and new literary-critical approaches to John while not assuming that fictive literary function implies a fictional character and origin of the narrative. In that sense, historical narrative functions in many ways similar to fictive narrative. And, one literary characteristic claimed by the Johannine narrator is that at least some of the origin of John's tradition is rooted in first-hand encounter with the ministry of Jesus. While it is impossible to prove that any or all of John's material goes back to an independent Jesus tradition, just as it is impossible to prove that none of it does, the overlooked reference to the apostle John's making a statement with an undeniably Johannine ring to it in Acts 4.20 (cf. 1 Jn 1.3) makes this a critically plausible consideration. 'We cannot help but testify to what we have seen and heard!' could not have been crafted as a more characteristically Johannine utterance, and while it may be misguided or wrong, it was written by Luke a full century before Irenaeus. Since the writing of the book, I have found another three dozen ways in which Luke departs from Mark and sides with John, doubling the evidence for Luke's dependence on the Johannine tradition in its oral stages, as argued in Part III. The point is that the 16. This chapter was first presented in 2003 at the John, Jesus, and History Consultation under the title, 'Why this Study is Needed, and Why it is Needed Now', and it is now published in Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just and Tom Thatcher (eds.), John, Jesus, and History. I. Critical Assessments of Critical Views (Symposium Series, 44; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007), pp. 13-70. The John, Jesus, and History Project is scheduled to go from 2002-2010 at the national SBL meetings, involving three triennia covering (1) literature reviews and introductory matters, (2) aspects of historicity in John and (3) Johannine contributions to Jesus research.