This literary and exegetical study of psalm quotations, allusions and echoes in the Fourth Gospel demonstrates the Evangelist's understanding of David, the presumed "author" of the psalms, as a paradigm for his portrayal of Jesus.

This volume deals with the reception of the psalms in the New Testament, taking as an example the Fourth Gospel, a work profoundly shaped by early Christian liturgy. It explores the contemporary Jewish attribution of the Psalms to David, an idealized figure envisaged as Temple founder and man of prayer. It then shows how this image of David has affected the way the Fourth Evangelist draws on the psalms through quotation, allusion and echo. It frequently demonstrates that the Fourth Gospel attests to Jewish psalm interpretations found in rabbinic sources. Challenging the prevailing view that the Fourth Evangelist intentionally dissociates Jesus from David, this book argues that David as psalmist plays a highly significant role in the Johannine portrayal of Jesus.

Jesus: The Celestial Man is a book about the Fourth Gospel of the New Testament, the Gospel of John. The subtitle describes its two-fold purpose. "Time" refers to the historical context and the meaning of words for those who wrote them and originally heard them. "Space" is the unique cosmology the author of the Fourth Gospel captured from the teaching and ministry of Jesus, a new perspective on creation with its higher dimensions that provide a scientific basis for understanding God, the world, and our place in it.Since Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, the author goes behind the Greek words preserved in the ancient Gospel to discover the original sayings of Jesus and their impact for Christians today. Although the book contains many footnotes and an extensive index, the author's style is easy to read. Stories come alive with a unique writing style that allows the reader to experience what it was like to be with Jesus in first-century Israel. You'll see Jesus as you've never seen him before: laughing, arguing with religious authorities, dying on the Roman stake, and exploding from the tomb on Easter morning.The author's viewpoint is orthodox, but non-traditional. He asks questions of the text few others have and finds answers that shed new meaning on familiar verses. The book includes the author's translation of the Gospel of John, clarifying words too often left unexplored. For example, what "world" did God so love He sent his only Son? And what did agape love mean in the context of people who spoke Aramaic, and not primarily Greek? Jesus: The Cosmic Man is a verse-by-verse tour de force of the only eyewitness Gospel to the life and ministry of Jesus.

Using various narrative approaches and methodologies, an international team of forty-four Johannine scholars here offers probing essays related to individual characters and group characters in the Gospel of John. These essays present fresh perspectives on characters who play a major role in the Gospel (Peter, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Thomas, and many others), but they also examine characters who have never before been the focus of narrative analysis (the men of the Samaritan woman, the boy with the loaves and fishes, Barabbas, and more). Taken together, the essays shed new light on how complex and nuanced many of these characters are, even as they stand in the shadow of Jesus. Readers of this volume will be challenged to consider the Gospel of John anew.

Werner Kelber's The Oral and the Written Gospel substantially challenged predominant paradigms for understanding early Jesus traditions and the formation of written Gospels. Since that publication, a more precise and complex picture of first-century media culture has emerged. Yet while issues of orality, aurality, performance, and mnemonics are now well voiced in Synoptic Studies, Johannine scholars remain largely unaware of such issues and their implications. The highly respected contributors to this book seek to fill this lacuna by exploring various applications of orality, literacy, memory, and performance theories to the Johannine Literature in hopes of opening new avenues for future discussion. Part 1 surveys the scope of the field by introducing the major themes of ancient media studies and noting their applicability to the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles. Part 2 analyzes major themes in the Johannine Literature from a media perspective, while Part 3 features case studies of specific texts. Two responses by Gail O'Day and Barry Schwartz complete the volume.

Building on recent developments in biblical studies, David Rensberger explores new avenues of interpretation of the Fourth Gospel made possible by the rediscovery of its social and historical settings. He looks to the first generation of readers and considers the range of meanings the Gospel might have held for them. He sees that behind the "spiritual" there is the possibility of social and even political interpretations. He discusses the relation of John's Gospel to liberation theology and to contemporary questions on the role of the church in the world.

A more nuanced view of the Fourth Gospel’s media nature suggests a new and promising paradigm for assessing expansive and embedded uses of scripture in this work. The majority of studies exploring the Fourth Evangelist’s use of scripture to date have approached the Fourth Gospel as the product of a highly gifted writer, who carefully interweaves various elements and figures from scripture into the canvas of his completed document. The present study attempts to calibrate a literary approach to the Fourth Gospel’s use of scripture with an appreciation for oral poetic influences, whereby an orally-situated composer’s use of traditional references and compositional strategy could be of one and the same piece. Most importantly, pre-formed story-patterns—thick with referential meaning—were used in the construction of new works. The present study makes the case that the Fourth Evangelist has patterned his story of Jesus after a retelling of the story of Adam & Israel in two interrelated ways: first in the prologue, and then in the body of the Gospel as a whole.

The story of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple is a beautiful and intriguing love story, well worth being treated as serious literature and appearing between covers of its own. For this version of the story, editor Tobias Skinner has chosen to believe, for reasons set forth in the preface, that it was Lazarus who first wrote this version of the gospel. Who would be more inclined to write of Jesus as God in the flesh, as the incarnation of Logos, as infallible, as a worker of miracles-something the author of this gospel does far more often than the authors of the other three-than a man who believes Jesus saved him from death and who is so comfortable in his love relationship with Jesus that he can confidently and repeatedly refer to himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and at the end as "the disciple whom Jesus sincerely loved"? Skinner here presents a readable alternative text for this ancient story of love.

This book investigates the narrative function of the Old Testament characters in the Gospel of John. The fascinating thesis is that the Hebrew characters in John's narrative uniformly function as a witness for the messianic identity of Jesus. The Jewish scriptural traditions (Hebrew and intertestamental ones) are compared to shed light on John's indebtedness for its formation of his Christology. A compelling argument ensues, which informs our understanding, not only of the Gospel itself, but also of Jesus Christ revealed in the Gospel. COMMENDATION "Dr Ahn's thorough and careful study represents a solid contribution, from which many will benefit. All serious interpreters of the Johannine witness will want to refer to this work." - Mark A. Seifrid, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, USA

Spiritual but broken, theological but flawed—these are the words critics use to describe the Gospel of John. Compared to the Synoptics, John’s version of the life of Jesus seems scrambled, especially in the area of time and chronology. But what if John’s textual and temporal flaws have more to do with our implicit assumptions about time than a text that is truly flawed? This book responds to that question by reinventing narrative temporality in light of modern physics and applying this alternative temporal lens to the Fourth Gospel. From the singularity in the epic prologue to the narrative warping of event-like objects, this work explodes the elemental temporalities simmering below the surface of a spiritual yet superior Gospel text.