The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate
Ebook
Few scholarly constructs have proven as influential or as durable as the Johannine community. A product of the era in New Testament studies dominated by redaction criticism, the Johannine community construct as articulated first by J. Louis Martyn and later by Raymond E. Brown emerged with an explanatory power that proved persuasive to scholars deliberating on the provenance and emergence of the Johannine literature for the next 50 years. Recent years, however, have seen this once dominant paradigm questioned by many of those working with the Gospel and Letters of John. The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate is dedicated to exploring the current state of the question while shining a light on new and constructive proposals for understanding the emergence of the Johannine literature. Some contributions accept the idea of a Johannine Community but suggest different ways we might know about the nature of that community. Others reject the existence of a Johannine Community, suggesting alternate models for understanding the emergence of these texts. These proposals are themselves set in perspective by responses from senior scholars.
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Christopher W. Skinner and Christopher Seglenieks
Chapter 1: The Rise, Demise, and Afterlives of the Johannine Community
Christopher W. Skinner
Part I: New Approaches to the Johannine Community
Chapter 2: Reading the Johannine Community in the Letters: A Method
Christopher Seglenieks
Chapter 3: The Language of John: Idiolect, Sociolect, Antilanguage, and Textual Community
David A. Lamb
Chapter 4: Disentangling “Mom’s Spaghetti”: A Socio-Cognitive Approach to the Complexity of the Johannine Community
Christopher Porter
Chapter 5: Triangulating a Johannine Community from John 18:28—19:22
Laura J. Hunt
Chapter 6: The Johannine Community and the Johannine Community Vision: Historical Reflection, Rhetorical Construction, and Narrative Ecclesiology
Andrew J. Byers
Chapter 7: Renewing Johannine Historical Criticism: A Proposal
Hugo Méndez
Chapter 8: The Legacy of the Beloved Disciple: The Johannine Letters as Epistolary Fiction
Elizabeth J. B. Corsar
Part II: The Way Forward? Responses to the Proposals
Chapter 9: Who Are the Children of God? Rhetoric, Memory, and Creating Communities with the Johannine Writings
Alicia D. Myers
Chapter 10: The Johannine Situation—An Advance over Imagined Communities
Paul N. Anderson
Chapter 11: Seeing with the Eyes and Hearing with the Ears: Community Hypotheses in Johannine Scholarship
Adele Reinhartz
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Most narratives are written by someone for someone. Was that the case for the Fourth Gospel? This illuminating collection enables a number of newer perspectives in the search for the Gospel's presumed origins. Gifted authors challenge long-accepted historical paradigms, raising questions that shine fresh light upon why this Jesus-story was written, how it was written, and for whom it was written. The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate should become an important point of reference for all future discussions of these major interpretative issues.
This is a fascinating and timely volume of essays on the Johannine community theory. It explores the question of whether the theory has run its course or whether anything can be retrieved or revisioned from a previous generation of Johannine scholarship. It does so from several different angles: literary, sociological, historical and theological. The strength of this collection lies in its diversity of opinions and approaches, stimulating the reader to new ways of envisaging the origins, context and futuristic vision of the Johannine writings.
- Title: The Johannine Community in Contemporary Debate
- Authors: Christopher Seglenieks, Christopher W. Skinner, Paul Anderson, A. L. Byers, Elizabeth J. B. Corsar, Laura Hunt, David A. Lamb, Hugo Méndez, Alicia D. Myers, Christopher A. Porter, Adele Reinhartz
- Publisher: Fortress Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781978717329, 9781978717312, 1978717318, 1978717326
- Resource ID: LLS:9781978717329
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-12-11T06:45:54Z
Christopher Seglenieks works at the Bible College of South Australia, an affiliated college of the Australian College of Theology.
Christopher W. Skinner is professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Graduate Program Director in the Theology Department at Loyola University Chicago.