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

7: The Gospel and the Epistles of John Read against the Background of the History of the Johnnanine Communities

127 Invited to indicate what I judge to be the critical issues for Johannine Studies, the best I can do is to retrace my own steps in Johannine research and to indicate what proved to be important at various stages.1 The first section of my essay will give a short review of my book Jesus: Stranger from Heaven and Son of God, consisting of a number of essays written between 1970 and 1975 (M. de Jonge 1977a). This volume appeared in the year that also saw the publication of L’Évangile de Jean. Sources, rédaction, théologie, reflecting the proceedings of the Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense 1975, in which many prominent Johannine scholars participated and of which I had the honor of being president (M. de Jonge 1977b). Because a comparison between the two books helps to illustrate how my views interacted with the scholarship of that time, a characterization of what happened at the Leuven conference precedes the review of my own book below. Although Johannine subjects figured regularly in my academic teaching until my retirement at the end of 1990, and though I wrote a few articles as I went along, it was not until 1996 that I published a short commentary on John in Dutch, in which I summarized my insights as they had Chapter 7 THE GOSPEL AND THE EPISTLES OF JOHN READ AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE HISTORY OF THE JOHANNINE COMMUNITIES Marinus de Jonge 1 I wish to thank my colleagues Martin C. de Boer (for helpful discussions about a number of central issues) and Gilbert Van Belle (for good advice). 128 MARINUS DE JONGE developed over the years (M. de Jonge 1996). I also wrote a number of further essays in the period 1990–2000 (M. de Jonge 1990; 1992a; 1992b; 1993; 1995; 2000). These later publications will form the background of the second section of this article, in which I will attempt to assess some more recent trends in Johannine scholarship. How much has happened in the past thirty years in research on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles becomes particularly evident when one compares the volume on the 1975 Leuven conference with John and the Synoptics, which contains the papers of the colloquium at Leuven in 1990 under the leadership of Adelbert Denaux (Denaux 1992), and with the lectures at the recent 2005 Leuven colloquium on “The Death of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,” with Gilbert Van Belle as president (Van Belle 2005). However, in particular the comparison between the colloquia of 1975 and 2005, which were completely different in scope and approach, has brought home the fact that, for me at least, one problem has remained central over the years: the relationship between a literary and a historical approach to the Johannine writings. Commenting on a number of issues that were and are important to me, I shall concentrate on this question. Looking Back to 1975 In my introduction to the volume from the Leuven conference in 1975 I wrote: There is widespread agreement on the fact that the Fourth Gospel shows a unity of vocabulary, style and theology; Johannine exegesis will have to give a prominent place to redaction–criticism. But there is variety in this unity, there are sudden transitions in language and content, and (seeming) inconsistencies. The problem is how to explain them. Here the question of sources comes up, and the problem of various stages in the redaction of the Gospel. Both questions were hotly debated at the conference, and different answers are given in the papers in this volume. (M. de Jonge 1977b, 13) I added that I expected that the readers of the volume would find the rich variety of approaches and the great diversity of results in Johannine Studies at the same time stimulating and perplexing. Let me single out just a few of these approaches for our present purpose. At the 1975 conference, Rudolf Schnackenburg, who had just completed the third volume of his commentary on the Fourth Gospel, gave THE GOSPEL AND THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 129 a survey of Johannine research in the period 1955–1975 (Schnackenburg 1977). Of the many points reviewed by him, I note his assessment of the various linguistic–semiotic approaches then coming into fashion, which were represented at the conference by Pierre Geoltrain, who gave a paper titled “Analyse structurale du chapitre 9 de l’Évangile de Jean” (unfortunately not included...