José Manuel Hernández Carracedo. La caracterización de Jesús en las notas del narrador del evangelio de Juan: Una guía de lectura para el relato

Abstract

This is a slightly revised version of Hernández Carracedo’s doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Santiago Guijarro Oporto and defended at Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain. It focuses on the characterization of Jesus in the narrator’s notes in the Gospel of John. Using insights from modern linguistics, especially teoría de la polifonía del discurso (speech polyphony theory) and teoría de la enunciación (theory of written statements), Hernández Carracedo explores how Jesus’s being, relationships, and actions contribute to his identidad narrativa (narrative identity). After a brief history of research, the author selects the texts that will be the object of his study and explores the presentation of Jesus in the five main sections of the Gospel.His findings are noteworthy. First, the parentheses were intended to clarify the identity of Jesus, because in the first century this issue was the object of contradictory interpretations. Second, the narrator’s notes do not function independently of each other; they are all literarily related. Third, the parentheses have structural value: they signal major divisions in the text. Fourth, the evangelist has used notes to advance his larger purpose of presenting Jesus as the New Temple and as the one who reveals God’s glory to the world.The book is a clear contribution to scholarship about the Gospel of John, a model of close engagement with the text, and a fruitful basis for further studies interested in the theological, literary, and historical dimensions of this Gospel. Furthermore, the book includes interaction with a number of secondary sources originally written in Spanish that are virtually absent in traditional scholarship.Due to space constraints, Hernández Carracedo did not include a defense of some of the critical options that he has adopted. For example, he seems to share the view that the Gospel of John was subjected to different redactions by different authors and the narrator’s notes are evidence of a specific (and perhaps late) hermeneutical engagement with previous editions of the text. He also indicates that some specific sections in the Gospel are later interpolations (e.g., p. 316). The clear grammatical and theological links he has found between the parenthesis and larger themes in the Gospel might well point to a different conclusion, that the author behind the notes might not be different from the hand responsible for larger sections of the text.Similarly, it is not always clear how Hernández Carracedo moves from literary observations to conclusions about the putative early Johannine community. For example, he explains that the Johannine community engaged in controversy with other Jewish and Christian circles in the first century. Since the idea that a discrete group of Christians in the first century is behind the Gospel of John has been recently questioned by several scholars, the reader expects further defense of the traditional perspective and a clear explanation of how his literary and theological observations can help us answer historical questions.One of the ideas that Hernández Carracedo could have developed further has to do with the role of the narrator’s notes in highlighting Jesus’s move and engagement with marginalized areas in Israel. Given that this is a novel idea that is hardly ever found in so-called standard Johannine scholarship, the reader would benefit from a full explanation of how and why John uses the parenthesis to advance this theme.One of the findings of the book has to do with the use of the narrator’s notes to advance the portrayal of Jesus as the New Temple. Hernández Carracedo concludes: “This Christology implies a critique . . . of the traditional formal worship [in Jerusalem]. Now, the presence of God is found independently from a specific place” (p. 281). However, if the Gospel of John was written approximately two decades after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, it is safe to conclude that he was not criticizing a practice that was no longer taking place during his time. If his temple Christology had specific contextual relevance, one can imagine that he was responding to the traumatic experience of living under Roman occupation at the end of the first century. The references to the Romans and Caesar in 11:48 and 19:15 might point to this larger imperial context.My hope is that this book will become further motivation for scholars working in the so-called developed world to engage Spanish-speaking scholarship. Traditionally, scholarship has been a one-way dialogue, where scholars who publish in Spanish engage German, French, and English scholarship. However, Hernández Carracedo’s book further demonstrates the need of more global and multilingual scholarly discourses.