Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The audience and origin of the Gospels: introduction and method
- 2 Early Christian community: a study of the community construct and its functional potential in early Christianity
- 3 Early Christian Gospel: Gospel genre and a critique of the two-level reading of the Gospel of John
- 4 Early Christian reader: an explication of the audience of the fourth Gospel by inquiring for the implied reader
- 5 Reading the fourth Gospel: the function of the Gospel of John in light of the Gospel community debate
- 6 The sheep of the fold: summary and conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Reading the fourth Gospel: the function of the Gospel of John in light of the Gospel community debate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The audience and origin of the Gospels: introduction and method
- 2 Early Christian community: a study of the community construct and its functional potential in early Christianity
- 3 Early Christian Gospel: Gospel genre and a critique of the two-level reading of the Gospel of John
- 4 Early Christian reader: an explication of the audience of the fourth Gospel by inquiring for the implied reader
- 5 Reading the fourth Gospel: the function of the Gospel of John in light of the Gospel community debate
- 6 The sheep of the fold: summary and conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
After spending four chapters setting the context of the Gospel community debate and challenging the current community readings of the Gospels, it is time to apply our proposal to the FG. It was Gail O'Day who pointed out that one of the weaknesses in Martyn's reconstruction of the JComm was that his reading strategy
blocked out for a while all other ways both of reading the Gospel and of reading the historical data. Martyn's reading became totalizing, not because his claims or even his intentions and methods were totalizing, but because he read so well and so easily that we forgot it was a construction of the data. We … read Martyn instead of rereading the data …
The question of reading the Gospels is the key issue in the Gospel community debate. But until now the debate has been entirely theoretical. The various conferences and article interchanges have only dealt with the exegetical principles and not exegetical practice. The newness of the debate has required more in-depth discussion and clarification, as this book has attempted to do in the first four chapters. But now we must turn to exegetical practice. Before we enter into exegesis, a brief summary of our proposed reading strategy is in order.
Our proposed reading strategy assumes, at the broadest level, that the Gospels were written for an indefinite audience, not an individual “church” or network of churches disconnected from the rest of the early Christian movement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sheep of the FoldThe Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John, pp. 185 - 246Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007