The Shining Garment of the Text: Gendered Readings of John's Prologue, by Alison Jasper. JSNTSup 165; Gender, Culture, Theory 6. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 266. $14.95. Alison Jasper has chosen the prologue of John's Gospel as a case study in feminist biblical criticism. Her aim is to challenge what she names the approach that has determined the process of biblical interpretation. According to jasper, this approach insists on a singular definitive understanding of the text that is linked with a transcendent, typically masculine, notion of truth. Mieke Bal and Julia Kristeva provide Jasper a theoretical base for her challenge to phallogocentric readings. In Bal, jasper finds an interpretive model that acknowledges exclusionary reading practices but also discovers textual traces of disruptive female presence. Kristeva's theory of intertextuality-with its suggestion of multiple levels of the reading subject intersecting with the text and producing fragmented, heterogeneous results-offers Jasper an alternative to univocal reading. Thus, in the first part of the book, the author aims to clarify the patterns of interpretation in a pre-feminist, patriarchal context through close analysis of five historical readings of the prologue. In the second part, she attempts to resist the notion of a monolithic interpretation by means of her own multiple readings. Jasper begins her investigation into past readings of the prologue with Augustine (ch. 1), then moves to Hildegard of Bingen (ch. 2), Luther (ch. 3), Bultmann (ch. 4), and concludes with Adrienne von Speyr, a Swiss mystic who published reflections on the prologue in 1953 (ch. 5). Jasper searches each of these readings for the presence and/or absence of feminine images and symbolism especially in Wisdom imagery and the mother of Jesus. However, her primary concern is the way these commentators deal with the uncomfortably polyvalent implications of the Word becoming flesh. Flesh is the keyword here, given its history of negative associations with carnality, sin, death, and especially the feminine. In Augustine, for example, Jasper notes a metaphorical spiritualizing of the flesh that dissociates the Word from the disturbing and contaminating symbols of the feminine. With Hildegard, Jasper finds that despite a strong affirmation of the human form as a model of the incarnation, she still reads within the Augustinian framework in which flesh is viewed as a subjection to uncontrolled desires. Indeed, in each case, the author shows how the notion of the flesh is ultimately devalued or eliminated. All prove to be uncomfortable with a positive reading of the body and desire and thus collapse all traces of woman or the feminine within the Prologue into either descriptions of emptiness and absence, or evil and moral failure (p. 162). In the second part of the book, Jasper introduces three of her own readings of the prologue. She identifies the first two as deconstructive readings designed to resist predetermined hierarchies such as masculine/feminine or divine/human. Thus, in her first reading, Jasper shifts the focus from the Word, or Jesus, as the subject of interpretation to the figure of John the Baptist. She offers an interpretation in which John presents an ironic challenge to divine self-sufficiency evident in the totalitarian system of John 1:1-5. …