Over, under, and through John's story of Jesus are unforgettable ideas and concepts, profoundly simple and simply profound, for the author's own audience and beyond. These ideas did not originate in a vacuum. They have recurred and been repeated before and after the writing of the Fourth Gospel. For this reason we will examine the meaning of its words and themes in the context of its Jewish-Greco-Roman milieu. Much of our intertextual understanding will be derived from alleged parallels that involve comparisons of similar vocabulary and phrases, as well as parallel concepts and images from the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, and other relevant writings. Such parallels will help to determine the meaning of a word or expression, the translation of a particular language, determining any direct influences upon the Fourth Gospel, parallel traditions, or the influence of its ideas, as a creative and inspiring work of later antiquity.

In this fully revised new edition of a pioneering study of John's gospel, John Ashton explores fresh topics and takes account of the latest scholarly debates. Ashton argues first that the thought-world of the gospel is Jewish, not Greek, and secondly that the text is many-layered, not simple, and composed over an extended period as the evangelist responded to the changing situation of the community he was addressing. Ashton seeks to provide new and coherent answers to what Rudolf Bultmann called the two great riddles of the gospel: its position in the development of Christian thought and its central or governing idea. In arguing that the first of these should be concerned rather with Jewish thought Ashton offers a partial answer to the most important and fascinating of all the questions confronted by New Testament scholarship: how did Christianity emerge from Judaism? Bultmann's second riddle is exegetical, and concerns the message of the book. Ashton's answer highlights a generally neglected feature of the gospel's concept of revelation: its debt to Jewish apocalyptic.

In this exegetical study of the Gospel of John, Andreas Kostenberger strives to discover and articulate a throroughtly biblical theology of mission which would have contemporary implications for how the church responds to Christ's mandate.

In New Perspectives on Healing, Restoration and Reconciliation in John, Jacobus (Kobus) Kok investigates the depth and applicability of Jesus’ healing narratives in John’s gospel. Against the background of an ancient group-oriented worldview, it goes beyond the impasse of most Western approaches to interpreting the Biblical healing narratives to date. He argues that the concept of healing was understood in antiquity (as in some parts of Africa) in a much broader way than we tend to understand it today. He shows inter alia why the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman could be interpreted as a healing narrative, illustrating the ancient interrelationship between healing, restoration and reconciliation.

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.

A swirl of Jewish sectarian movements muddied the religious waters during the late Second Temple period. In recent decades, scholars of the Bible have struggled to understand the role these sects played in the rise and spread of the Jesus movement. Nazorean joins this wave of sectarian scholarship. In this book, Kem Luther sketches the history of a wisdom-oriented sect that gave birth to the Christian church. Weaving a series of what the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood called "webs of imaginative construction," he provides a provocative and plausible story about a wisdom sect--the Nazoreans--that shaped the career and teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus. To support his scenario, Luther offers sectarian readings of passages from the Gospels of Matthew and John, the Epistle of James, Acts, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Psalms of Solomon. He links his developing awareness of the sectarian context of these documents to his own trek through a landscape of post-1960 American religion. The candid account of Luther's own journey through a naive modernism, his immersion in evangelical subculture at a Bible school, and his postgraduate studies in mysticism and philosophy makes a fascinating complement to his textual studies.

The command to love is central to the Gospel of John. Internationally respected scholar Francis Moloney offers a thorough exploration of this theme, focusing not only on Jesus's words but also on his actions. Instead of merely telling people that they must love one another, Jesus acts to make God's love known and calls all who follow him to do the same. This capstone work on John's Gospel uses a narrative approach to delve deeply into a theme at the heart of the Fourth Gospel and the life of the Christian church. Uniting rigorous exegesis with theological and pastoral insight, it makes a substantive contribution to contemporary Johannine scholarship.