The Origins of John’s Gospel ed. by Stanley E. Porter and Hughson T. Ong

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Origins of John’s Gospel ed. by Stanley E. Porter and Hughson T. Ong Mary L. Coloe PBVM stanley e. porter and hughson t. ong (eds.), The Origins of John’s Gospel (Johannine Studies 2; Leiden: Brill, 2015). Pp. xi + 319. $142. This volume brings together a number of essays on the topic of “origins,” grouped under four headings. First, “Dating, Sources, and Traditions of John’s Gospel.” The contributors here are Porter, “The Date of John’s Gospel and Its Origins”; Ilaria Ramelli, “John the Evangelist’s Work: An Overlooked Redaktionsgeschichtliche Theory from the Patristic Age”; Michael Labahn, “‘Secondary Orality’ in the Gospel of John: A ‘Post-Gutenberg’ Paradigm for Understanding the Relationship between Written Gospel Texts”; Craig L. Blomberg, “The Sayings of Jesus in Mark: Does Mark Ever Rely on a Pre-Johannine Tradition?” The second section is “The Johannine Community,” which contains Ong, “The Gospel from a Specific Community for All Christians: Understanding the Johan-nine Community as a ‘Community of Practice’”; Marc-André Argentino and Guy Bonneau, “The Function of Social Conflict in the Gospel of John”; Ruth Sheridan, “Johannine Sectarianism: A Category Now Defunct?” The third section is “Structure, Composition, and Authorship of John’s Gospel”: Paul N. Anderson, “On ‘Seamless Robes’ and ‘Leftover Fragments’—A Theory of Johannine Composition”; David I. Yoon, “The Question of Aporiai or Cohesion in the Fourth Gospel: A Response to Urban C. von Wahlde”; Lorn [End Page 740] Zelyck, “Irenaeus and the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel.” The final section is “Johannine Anti-Judaism and the ‘Son of Man’ Sayings,” containing Jonathan Numada, “The Repetition of History? A Select Survey of Scholarly Understandings of Johannine Anti-Judaism from Baur until the End of the Weimar Republic”; and Panayotis Coutsoumpos, “The Origin of the Johannine ‘Son of Man’ Sayings.” Indexes of ancient sources and modern authors follow. Porter provides an overview for the dating of John and the implications of this for theories of the origins of this Gospel and the reconstruction of the history of NT development. Ramelli makes use of patristic studies that present John having access to the Synoptic Gospels and as the redactor of earlier material, written or oral. The issue of sources behind John continues in the essays of Labahn, who proposes an oral milieu and material available in a collective social memory, and Blomberg, who identifies many links with Mark’s Gospel, suggesting early Johannine traditions prior to Mark. The section on the Johannine community begins with the distinction made by Ong between the community/ies from which the narrative developed and the community for which it was written. The community of origins, Ong asserts, shared much with the larger Christian community even as it had its own distinctive practices as witnessed to by the unique literary characteristics of this gospel. Argentino and Bonneau draw upon the work of Lewis Coser (The Functions of Social Conflict [New York: Free Press, 1964]) which “serves as a means of constructing one’s personal identity” (p. 139). In Coser’s terminology, Jesus is a “heretic” who remains within the group (Judaism) but breaks down its values and becomes a source of division. The disciple characters in the narrative could be described as “renegades” in that they have broken with the group. The essay then looks at three characters on the fringe of the group: Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and the man born blind. Sheridan offers a helpful overview of sociological and linguistic approaches to the text as a means of gaining insight into the community behind the text. She cautions against simplistic categorizations such as “sect” or “cult” and moves toward the genre theory of Carolyn Miller (“Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 [1984] 151–76), where the genre enacts a particular social situation (p. 164). The third group of essays addresses the complexity of the text and the question of author/editors. Anderson attempts to deal with too many issues—composition, authorship, and an overview of scholarly approaches. In my opinion, the overview would have been sufficient for this volume. Yoon addresses the question of whether the Gospel is a composite document resulting from many stages of development (von Wahlde...