When studying irony in the Gospel of John, scholars have largely relied on modern literary theories and anachronistic interpretive tools. In this book, Dr. Tat Yan Lee pushes beyond contemporary interpretations to examine the literary context of the Gospel’s original audience. Utilizing Aristotle’s Poetics and drawing parallels between John’s Gospel and ancient Greek tragedy, Dr. Lee offers a fresh perspective on the role of dramatic irony within the text. His exploration of Aristotelian theory highlights the significance of emotion as an intended by-product of ancient drama and provides a critical method for establishing plausible early readings of the Gospel and its dramatic devices. Offering present-day readers a chance to encounter John’s Gospel through ancient eyes, this book holds valuable insight for Johannine scholars, classicists, students of literary theory, and all those desiring greater insight into the gospel and its impact.

The application of theological and literary approaches to the study of the New Testament in recent years has enabled a seismic shift in our understanding of the identity of Jesus as the New Testament presents him. In terms of the Gospel of John, these theological and literary explorations have resulted in a richer understanding of what it means to identify Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, the one who bears unique witness to the God of Israel, and the one whose life fulfills and embodies numerous symbols that were significant within biblical texts and the traditions of Second Temple Judaism. This volume gathers many of today's most significant interpreters of the Bible as they examine John's Gospel and its distinctive theology, in relation to the wider canon of Scripture. Pastors, theologians, and biblical scholars will find studies of individual texts as well as broader biblical themes. Readers will come to appreciate anew the emphases that make John stand out among the New Testament writings. Readers will also develop a richer understanding of the deep theological connections that unite John with the Old Testament's vision of God and other New Testament portrayals of Jesus and his enduring significance.

In contrast to the common opinion that the Johannine Farewell Discourses represent solely the Jewish genre of the Testament, George Parsenios argues that features of the discourses are misread or missed completely apart from Greco-Roman literature. Evidence from classical drama, for instance, assists in reading Jesus' return to the Father as a dramatic exit and, further, accounts for the puzzling delay of Jesus at 14:31 without recourse to redaction theories. Consolation literature and the literary symposium emphasize Jesus' continuing and consoling presence, with particular attention to the Paraclete's role as doppelgänger. The thread that binds the various chapters into a coherent whole, therefore, is the utility of classical literature in clarifying Jesus' consoling presence even after his departure to the Father.

The Fourth Gospel is a political document. Although it has often been interpreted primarily as a "spiritual gospel," it has much to offer readers engaged in the difficult task of negotiating life lived under the dominion of empire, whether in the first or twenty-first century. This book gives careful attention to the political dimensions of the Gospel's Passion Narrative, including the arrest scene (18:1-12), the Roman show trial (18:28--19:16), and the crucifixion and burial of Jesus (19:16-40). It employs James C. Scott's model of hidden transcripts and examines the Fourth Gospel's use of irony as it seeks to understand the political dimensions of the Fourth Gospel and its relationship to the Roman Empire. In this book, Wright argues that the Passion Narrative displays part of a Johannine hidden transcript that resists, contests, and at times mimics elements of Roman imperial power. The Gospel mocks the representatives of Rome, including Pilate, the Roman soldiers, and the Jewish authorities, eroding confidence in the empire and its agents. It also subverts Roman imperial claims of dominance, authority, and power. As such, the Fourth Gospel fosters an alternative worldview and community, one centered on faith in the sovereignty of Jesus and Israel's God.

This monograph on John 9 makes extensive use of premodern Christian exegesis as a resource for New Testament studies. The study reframes the existing critique of the two-level reading of John 9 as allegory in terms of premodern exegetical practices. It offers a hermeneutical critique of the two-level reading strategy as a kind of figural exegesis, rather than historical reconstruction, through an extensive comparison with Augustine's interpretation of John 9. A review of several premodern Christian readings of John 9 suggests an alternative way of understanding this account in terms of Greco-Roman rhetoric. John 9 resembles the rhetorical argumentation associated with chreia elaboration and the complete argument to display Jesus' identity as the Light of the World. This analysis illustrates the inseparability of form and content, rhetoric and theology, in the Fourth Gospel.

The Fourth Gospel and the Manufacture of Minds in Ancient Historiography, Biography, Romance, and Drama is the first book-length study of genre and character cognition in the Gospel of John. Informed by traditions of ancient literary criticism and the emerging discipline of cognitive narratology, Tyler Smith argues that narrative genres have generalizable patterns for representing cognitive material and that this has profound implications for how readers make sense of cognitive content woven into the narratives they encounter. After investigating conventions for representing cognition in ancient historiography, biography, romance, and drama, Smith offers an original account of how these conventions illuminate the Johannine narrative’s enigmatic cognitive dimension, a rich tapestry of love and hate, belief and disbelief, recognition and misrecognition, understanding and misunderstanding, knowledge, ignorance, desire, and motivation.

Keener's commentary explores the Jewish and Greco-Roman settings of John more deeply than previous works, paying special attention to social-historical and rhetorical features of the Gospel. It cites about 4,000 different secondary sources and uses over 20,000 references from ancient literature. - Publisher.

"The Fourth Evangelist understood the elements of Greek drama and employed them to construct the Gospel's plot. Scholars of literary criticism in the Bible and students of drama alike will find in this text a detailed, compelling, and interdisciplinary study that will answer questions left open by prevailing theories and launch avenues of research that have yet to be explored."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.

As the first volume in the Johannine Monograph Series, The Gospel of John: A Commentary by Rudolf Bultmann well deserves this place of pride. Indeed, this provocative commentary is arguably the most important New Testament monograph in the twentieth century, perhaps second only to The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. In contrasting Bultmann's and Schweitzer's paradigms, however, we find that Bultmann's is far more technically argued and original, commanding hegemony among other early-Christianity paradigms. Ernst Haenchen has described Bultmann's commentary as a giant oak tree in whose shade nothing could grow, and indeed, this reference accurately describes its dominance among Continental Protestant scholarship over the course of several decades.