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343 In 1973, when I began work on my doctoral dissertation, Prof. Noel Lazure, my director, suggested that I adopt some position regarding the literary origin of the Gospel of John and move on in my study of the symbolism of the “crowd” (o)/xloj) in the Gospel. Three years before that, Robert Fortna had published The Gospel of Signs (1970). I was impressed with the care with which he did his work and the way he set out criteria for determining what belonged to the signs source and what did not. As I worked on the instances of o)/2xloj in John 7, my attention was also called to a dissertation by M. C. White on “the Jews” in the Fourth Gospel (1972). White pointed out that John uses two sets of terms for “authorities” and that these alternate in the text. The one set comprises of “Pharisees,” “chief priests,” and “rulers,” and the other is represented only by the term “the Jews.” White referred to Wellhausen’s earlier work on chapter 7, which had argued the same position. I was struck by that observation and began to notice other features that were consistent with the material associated with these two sets of terms. As a result of my work on this subject, Professor Lazure suggested I petition for a change of topic—because I had already written three hundred pages on the literary analysis of the Gospel! And so, my dissertation came to set forth the beginning of a theory regarding the origin of the Fourth Gospel. Chapter 18 THE ROAD AHEAD THREE ASPECTS OF JOHANNINE SCHOLARSHIP Urban C. von Wahlde 344 URBAN C. VON WAHLDE With the demands of teaching, two institutional moves and a growing family, my research proceeded slowly. In 1982, Raymond Brown published his commentary on the Johannine epistles and I was asked to write a review of it. The thoroughness of the reading necessary for the review led me to understand in a whole new way both the First Letter of John and its relationship to the Fourth Gospel. I began to notice that much of the material that I could not account for in my study of the composition of the Gospel had considerable similarities to the views of the author of 1 John. At the same time, much of the material in the second of the literary strata I had already identified in the Gospel of John seemed similar to the beliefs of the opponents that were being confronted by the author of 1–2–3 John. The more I studied, the more this seemed to be borne out in the text. In 1982, I published a study of all the texts in the Gospel of John that contain the term oi9 0Ioudai=oi (“the Jews”) as a way of distinguishing the various uses of this word (von Wahlde 1982). This eventually led to my becoming concerned with the very important question of possible anti–Semitism in the Gospel. In the meantime, I had moved again (to my current position at Loyola University in Chicago) and in 1987 was asked to chair the department at a time when we were developing a doctoral program. Again, research on a large scale slowed down, although two preliminary explorations of the Fourth Gospel appeared in book form. In 1989, I was asked by Michael Glazier to do a commentary for a series he envisioned. A sequence of unfortunate incidents resulted in his company being taken over by Liturgical Press, and as it became clear that the type of commentary I had proposed would not be a good fit with the vision of the new editors, I was released from my contract but decided to finish the commentary before seeking another publisher. When I was almost finished with the first draft, I approached Professor David Noel Freedman , editor of the Anchor Bible series. Unbeknownst to me, Professor Freedman had just been appointed editor of the new Eerdmans Critical Commentary series. An agreement was reached for a multivolume commentary in that series, which is now in the final stages of completion. Beginning about 1998, yet another aspect of the Gospel of John began to engage my attention. While doing work on my commentary, I became impressed with the specificity and detail of the Gospel’s references to places where narrated events occurred. About this time, Prof. James Charlesworth of Princeton invited me to give a paper in Jerusalem in 2000 at a conference on “Jesus and...

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