3 - The social function of John's narrative

Summary

Narrative and social identity

In chapter 2, we looked at the importance of the genre approach for narrative criticism, and in doing so mentioned on several occasions how genres function as social conventions for both the writer and the reader. Narrative criticism as it has been practised so far has, however, shown little concern for the culture and social communication implicit within NT narratives (the province of redaction criticism). Indeed, Culpepper's Anatomy begins with a critique of redaction criticism which one often finds in introductions to NT narrative criticism. He criticizes redaction-critical approaches to John because they use the gospel as ‘a “window” through which the critic can catch “glimpses” of the history of the Johannine community’ (1983, p. 3). They assert that ‘the meaning of the gospel derives from the way it was related to that history’ (p. 3). Culpepper is following Norman Petersen here. In his Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (1978), Petersen had criticized redaction critics for construing texts ‘as windows opening on the preliterary history of their parts rather than as mirrors on whose surfaces we find a self-contained world’ (p. 24). Both scholars offer an alternative method in which the text is seen as a mirror, and in which meaning evolves out of the interaction between mirror and observer, text and reader. In this paradigm, the narrative world of each gospel is seen neither as a window on to the history of a community, nor as a window on to the ministry of Jesus.