6 - A genre criticism of John 18–19

Summary

The genre of the passion story

In chapter 5 I set about the task of examining the formal qualities of the story in John 18–19. The task we have before us now is to summarize the essential story of John's passion narrative and then to assess their family resemblances, story-types or mythoi. The main thrust of chapter 2 was that the structuralist understanding of narrative introduced by Vladimir Propp can be helpful in the establishing of gospel genres. Propp worked on over 100 Russian folk-tales, broke them down into invariable plot functions, and then produced a taxonomy of essential characters and functions within the genre. In gospel studies I showed how Nickelsburg uses a similar approach on the Marcan passion narrative. He too starts with the Marcan text, breaks it down into its essential plot functions, then relates the basic framework of Mark 15–16 with stories of persecution and vindication in Jewish literature which have the same basic storypattern. All this implies the existence of deep plot-structures which transcend their actualizations in stories. One main thrust of structuralist narratology is that there is a distinction between narrative as a specific historical performance and narrative as an achronic system. With this in mind it is helpful to see John 18–19 as a particular manifestation in space and time of a supra-historical structure of possibilities.