John the Baptist in Life and Death: Audience-Oriented Criticism of Matthew's Narrative

Abstract

John the Baptist in Life and Death: Audience-Oriented Criticism of Matthew's Narrative, by Gary Yamasaki. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 176. 35.00/ $57.50. In this book, Yamasaki reexamines John the Baptist and introduces audience-- oriented criticism, a revision of reader-response criticism. After an abbreviated overview of two centuries of research on John the Baptist, Yamasaki turns to the issue of methodology, examining reader-response criticism, the foundation of his own methodology. Here Yamasaki discovers that some analysts still privilege a supposed inherent meaning in the text (perhaps generated by prior interpretations) over that generated by reading. He says this is because modern and ancient peoples encounter a text differently. While readers today have constant access to a written text, ancient peoples had limited contact with a text-often only via the spoken word. Yamasaki refers to these encounters as static and respectively. Audienceoriented criticism is, he argues, a way of recovering the dynamic, first-time encounter between ancient people and their texts. This method, he says, shows how the encounter of text and listener naturally (re)generates a basic structure formed by the text's words, and how, upon this scaffold of words and their meanings, listening creates the full meaning of the story. Following a brief critique of various theories accounting for the structure of Matthew's Gospel, Yamasaki applies his method to Matthew's story of the Baptist. First, he shows how the birth narrative primed the listener for the importance of Jesus. Then, after discussing John as the listener first sees him, Yamasaki shows how the baptism scene presents the encounter between Jesus and John and introduces the narrator's ideology. Yamasaki further examines Jesus and the narrator's ideology, through John, even though John is off stage, in prison. The last chapter concludes this work, reiterating the relationship of John, Jesus, and the narrator's ideology, even though John is now dead. The nice thing Yamasaki's method does is to take exegesis back to basics, to what the words mean and how these meanings are (re)generated in the act of reading, According to Yamasaki, references to John throughout the Gospel form the kernel of a message-containing the narrator's ideology of Jesus-which is fleshed out by the audience. In this way, audience-oriented criticism could be a new tool in the scholar's kit-interdisciplinary, it could recover meanings otherwise missed by other methods and stitch them into our collective understanding of the formative era of Christianity. Unfortunately, Yamasaki has forgotten one step: although this work attempts to bypass the ideology inherent in scholarship to discover the original meaning of the text, it also fails to take that scholarship into account. This is especially glaring in the case of the relationship between Yamasaki's audience-oriented criticism and reader response, the very method from which he derived it. …