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

16: Response: Genre, Sources, and History

321 Professor Smith’s essay helpfully places the problem of history in the Gospel of John in the context of other ancient Gospels, the most natural setting for understanding John. In view of this approach, what light does the issue of “Gospel genre” shed on historical questions? Moreover, what can we say about history in John without resolving more specifically the controversial question of sources? On the question of genre, Richard Burridge’s work on the Gospels as biographies (developing the earlier work of Talbert, Shuler, Aune, and others) has had a major impact on how we approach these texts. For example , analogies with other ancient biographies have important implications for how the Gospel writers viewed their enterprise. Ancient biographers addressed real characters of history (or, for the distant past, those they believed were real) using existing traditions. Biographers selected and adapted traditions, and some took more liberties than others. But biographers such as Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, Arrian, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Diogenes Laertius did not invent events; rather, they drew upon prior biographic and historic accounts, collections of sayings, oral traditions, and legends. Of course, no one claims that all their sources are reliable. But in general, sources written closer to the events they depict depend upon more genuinely historical, as opposed to legendary, information, 16: Response GENRE, SOURCES, AND HISTORY Craig S. Keener 322 CRAIG S. KEENER as ancient writers themselves acknowledged. Although scholars often cite works such as Xenophon’s Cyropedia and Pseudo–Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, which were composed far more freely, these works differ so greatly in character from mainstream biographies (falling closer to novels about historical characters) that they belong in a different category. (As with other novels, they remain relevant for literary comparisons, but they differ substantially from the biographies of authors just mentioned.) Appeal to the biographic genre cannot resolve all historical questions , however, not least because the category (even with the caveat offered above) remains a broad one. Plutarch (and certainly Philo) took more liberties than Suetonius; John clearly took more liberties than, say, Luke. I believe that genre can predispose us to doubt that John simply invented the events that he describes, but genre does not help us evaluate his sources for such events or the degree to which he has adapted details in those sources. Moreover, although ancient historians sometimes adapted speeches in their sources, many also composed speeches freely where necessary (Josephus, for example, introduces Hellenistic speeches into the biblical narrative). Whereas John’s narratives are, as Prof. Smith points out, synopticlike, the Fourth Gospel’s speech material (with its explicit Christology ) appears more problematic. Synoptic comparison nevertheless helps. Some of Jesus’ sayings in John parallel those in the Synoptics but obviously reflect a Johannine idiom. This observation may permit us to suppose that some of Jesus’ other sayings in the Fourth Gospel that do not enjoy multiple attestation may also represent earlier tradition that has been recast in Johannine idiom. John does, after all, claim eyewitness tradition. Andrew Lincoln has recently argued that the eyewitness tradition claim is a fictitious literary device that would be so recognized by ancient readers (2005, 23–25). Were John writing an apocalypse, this would be the case, but biographers who claimed to be present at events or who cited others present there were making historical claims (Keener 2006). (One could counter with Philostratus’ Damis in Life of Apollonius, but this work is closer to Pseudo–Callisthenes than to the biographies we have noted.) Extrinsic confirmations, such as topographic accuracy long after 70 C.E, also differentiate John from ancient novelists. More sensitive to narrative cohesion than in the past, scholarship today tends to be more skeptical of source theories, which, despite their frequent brilliance, have so often produced contradictory results. The unity of John’s style invites attention to John’s story as a whole; at the same time, scholars today are often unconvinced by hypothetical reconstructions of sources no longer extant. Unlike such sources, comparison with the Syn- GENRE, SOURCES, AND HISTORY 323 optics can afford an objective basis for comparison. Yet as Prof. Smith has pointed out, though historical questions often return to the relation between John and the Synoptics, they do not stop there. If we assume that John was independent of the Synoptics, his inclusion of Synoptic events and sayings suggests that he has included prior traditional material. If this is the case with material that independently...