What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present and Future of Johannine Studies

6: PURSUING THE ELUSIVE

109 This morning, I ran several miles of the Longleaf Trace, a beautiful asphalt path through the woods of southern Mississippi outside Hattiesburg . The path is straight and flat, mileage is noted every half mile, rest stations at regular intervals offer restrooms and water, and various species of trees are labeled along the way. In contrast, the path of my experience in studying the Gospel of John has been marked by sharp turns, surprising new vistas, and constant uncertainty about what I was seeing. In short, studying John has been an expedition into still uncertain territory rather than a jog over a measured course. The trek started in my first semester of M.Div. studies (1967), when I took an elective course on the Gospel of John with Dr. William E. Hull and read the first volume of Raymond Brown’s Anchor Bible commentary . The cocktail of an engaging professor delivering beautifully prepared lectures; a masterful commentary surveying Johannine scholarship and astutely engaging John’s setting, literary artistry, and theology; and the intriguing challenges of this “spiritual” (Clement of Alexandria), “maverick” (Robert Kysar) Gospel proved to be irresistibly seductive. I began a lifelong love affair with the Fourth Gospel, which involved taking graduate seminars from Hull, James Price, and Moody Smith, and writing my dissertation on John. Chapter 6 PURSUING THE ELUSIVE R. Alan Culpepper 110 R. ALAN CULPEPPER The Johannine School Early on, I decided that I might never write a full–scale commentary on the Gospel of John—after Bultmann, Barrett, Brown, and Schnackenburg , another commentary hardly seemed to be needed, though many fine commentaries on John have been published over the last thirty years. I would work instead on various topics in Johannine studies. As a graduate student at Duke under Moody Smith, W. D. Davies, and James H. Charlesworth, and taking a minor in classics, the natural place to start for me was with John’s background. I was intrigued with the historical setting of the Fourth Gospel, particularly recent work by J. Louis Martyn (1968) and Wayne Meeks (1972), as well as the scattered allusions to “the Johannine school” in the literature on John, the Epistles, and Revelation. I discovered that this term had a long history in the debates over the authorship of the Gospel and that it had served as a mediating position between defenders of apostolic authorship and critics who maintained that the Gospel was written at a later date (and not by the Apostle John). Years later, I discovered that the term “Johannine school” can be traced to David Friedrich Strauss, who said that the Fourth Evangelist was “a venerator of [the Apostle] John, issuing perhaps from one of his schools” (1972, 330). The Gospel, Strauss maintained, was written not by John but by someone in his circle. The theory of a Johannine school also served to explain the similarities and differences among the five New Testament writings attributed to the Apostle John. The similarities in language, style, and thought among the Gospel, Letters, and Apocalypse can be explained by their common ties to the Johannine school, although the similarities between the Apocalypse and the other writings are not as strong as the similarities shared by the Gospel and Letters. The differences can be accounted for on the basis of the different authors and editors from within this school who contributed to the composition of the various documents. It was a useful and plausible theory, but can the internal probabilities be supported by the external evidence of comparative studies of other “schools” in antiquity? My supervisory committee gave me more than enough rope to hang myself, and I launched into a study of the Pythagorean school, the Academy (Plato), the Lyceum (Aristotle), the Garden (Epicurus), the Stoa (Zeno), Qumran (the Teacher of Righteousness), the school of Hillel, the school of Philo, and the “school” of Jesus, trying to understand the role and common characteristics of these diverse, ancient school traditions. I defined nine common features of these ancient schools: PURSUING THE ELUSIVE 111 (1) they were groups of disciples that usually emphasized fili/a (“brotherhood ”) and koinwni/a (“community/commonality”); (2) they gathered around and traced their origins to a founder whom they regarded as an exemplary, wise, or good man; (3) they valued the teachings of their founder and the traditions about him; (4) members of the schools were disciples or students of the founder; (5) teaching, learning...