British New Testament Society

This paper proposes that observing how the Fourth Evangelist composed his narrative provides a useful entry-point into the issue of whether his work was directly dependent on Synoptic material. References in the Gospel strongly suggest that John is re-telling a story that was already known to his readership. Since we do not know whether that bank of knowledge included the Synoptics, I propose to tackle the issue by examining how John composes on the basis of material known to his audience that we can identify: (a) within the gospel and (b) outside the gospel. From the evidence of how he handles this material, I will attempt to construct an argument that John could have composed in direct dependence on Synoptic material in the following test-cases: (a) Jn 20:3-10; and (b) Jn 12:1-8.

Ancient Mediterranean peoples coped with death and other forms of absence by a variety of means. Most of these come under the rubrics of mourning and consolation, and have been studied in detail. A popular strategy that is seldom discussed, however, was the use of a substitute or surrogate to replace a dead or otherwise absent loved one. This frequently took the form of another person, ideally the absent person's child, but as often as not the substitute was a realistic portrait, which under the proper conditions might not only replace a dead loved one but actually mediate his or her post-mortem presence. In this paper I explore this popular practice and then apply its two-fold logic of replacing and mediating to the functioning of the Paraclete in John 14.

John 14:1-4 is customarily given a futurist eschatological hermeneutic within 'popular' Christian circles: Jesus is returning to 'heaven' to prepare a 'mansion' for the disciples, and one day will return to take them back there to be with him. There are two problems with this interpretation. First, futurist parousial expectations receive at best a cursory mention elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel. Second, the language of this passage and its immediate context suggests that a realised eschatological hermeneutic is intended. In short, John 14:1-4 is intended by the writer as an introduction to the promise of the New Paraclete. The disciples need not worry, because they will be where Jesus is; not in some future life but in this life, by the Spirit, the Paraclete, whom Jesus is about to promise and they are soon to receive.

This thoroughly realised eschatological framework does not often seem so patently obvious to contemporary Western readers of the Fourth Gospel. Among some Johannine scholars, however, it has been staple fodder within the history of interpretation. One reason for this 'gap' has been the insistence on a canonical reading of the Fourth Gospel among contemporary Western readers, which is often influenced significantly by a perceived Lukan schema. This in turn affects interpretations of the narrative 'climax' of the Fourth Gospel - John 20:19-23. (Pentecostals in particular tend to adopt the suggestion that we have here some form of 'prophetic symbolism' - there is no reception of the Holy Spirit.)

A non-canonical, narrative-critical reading of the resurrection narrative in the Fourth Gospel (20:1-18), however, in particular the last two verses, offers a dramatic interpretation that was clearly intended by the writer for the target audience. The risen Jesus delays the completion of his mission - his ascent to the Father - in order to pass a 'message' on to his disciples via Mary Magdalene that this is what he is about to do. His ascent implicitly occurs at the end of 20:17. And so we are ready for the reception of the Holy Spirit by the disciples in 20:19-23. The baton is passed to the 'other Paraclete'. John 14:1-4 is fulfilled, just as the main author of the Fourth Gospel draws his writing to a close.

This paper has a number of purposes. By concentrating on one major uncial manuscript, I claim a narrative integrity for a text that incorporates the pericope of the Woman taken in Adultery without any notation or comment. This enables a narrative reading, drawing on aspects of conversation analysis, which locate this passage in the context of other conversations which the Bezan Jesus engages in with women in private. For the purposes of this paper, the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4) and Jesus and Martha (John 11) are used as conversation partners with the conversation of Jesus and the woman who has been brought to him to test his loyalty to Jewish law. The result is a reading that illuminates both a particular ancient text, some text critical elements, and the place within the gospel of conversations between particular women and the character of Jesus.