Gossip in John's Gospel and the Social Processing of Jesus' Identity

Abstract

ABSTRACTReaders of the NT's gospels are normally attuned to the words and deeds of Jesus and relatively less concerned with talk about him. Yet the amount of talk about Jesus in the gospels is striking, and when considered from the perspective of gossip, even more so. The aim of this article is to illustrate how gossip is operative with a number of other social-cultural processes in constituting Jesus' identity in the Fourth Gospel. After constructing a viable framework for identifying gossip in John, a selection of gossip events is evaluated in terms of its function vis-a-vis other social values and processes and in terms of its content. The cross-cultural social type of a shaman is then utilised to make sense of gossip's role in the social construction of Jesus. This project springs from inquiry into the sort of man who was the generative cause of the emergence of oral and eventually written stories about Jesus that come to us in John, and thus involves linking literary features about oral phenomena in the text to a social personage thoroughly embedded in his first- century Mediterranean world, and so underscoring gossip's role in the construction of a culturally plausible historical figure.