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19 In part three of Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous hero voyages to Glubbdubdrib where he is granted his wish to see the ghosts of Homer and Aristotle together with those of their numerous commentators. Contrary to expectations, he soon discovers that Homer, far from being blind, has exceptional sight, while Aristotle, the celebrated “peripatetic” teacher, is virtually immobile. Gulliver also discovers that these learned “antients” are completely unacquainted with those later ghosts who make up the rest of the company (Swift 1975, x). Swift’s satirical wit was, of course, directed at the received wisdom of his age, which he took as complacency and sought to deflate by completely reversing its norms and assumptions. In many ways, however, Swift’s masterpiece remains as fresh today and as vexatious to the world as he predicted it would be on its publication in 1726 (Swift 1975, v). For those of us who inhabit the lesser world of Johannine Studies, the vexation surely lies in raising acutely the whole issue of meaning, and therefore of historicity, in the process of interpreting for today an ancient text such as the Fourth Gospel. Bearing this in mind, and bearing in mind also John Ashton’s declared position as “an unrepentant advocate of historical criticism,” my response to his admirable and wide–ranging contribution will briefly explore this topic. 1: Response WHY SHOULD HISTORICAL CRITICISM CONTINUE TO HAVE A PLACE IN JOHANNINE STUDIES? Wendy E. S. North 20 WENDY E. S. NORTH To begin with, I am not persuaded by Robert Kysar’s claim that the rise of postmodernism could signal the demise of historical–critical methods of biblical interpretation (Kysar 2005b). In the first place, it is unclear to me why the empirical fact that all human endeavor is subjectively flawed should be seen to have burst upon our collective consciousness only just now in the history of ideas. Did we never know this before? After all, the argument itself is scarcely new. Swift, for example, was an incisive proponent of it and wrote Gulliver’s Travels with the express intention of ridiculing the naïveté of the Enlightenment view of the human being as “animal rationale” (Swift 1975, x). Second, I do not see that it follows from this fact of human frailty that we should abandon the whole historical enterprise. Objectivity may be humanly impossible, but it matters that we try. Not to do so, as Ashton puts it, “would be like saying that if you have a squint there is no point trying to see straight” (1994, 188). What, then, can historically oriented approaches bring to the task of interpreting John’s Gospel in today’s climate of hermeneutical alternatives ? From a historical standpoint, the Fourth Gospel as we now have it belongs (probably) to the end of the first century C.E. and was written by a real individual who was addressing a real target audience. It follows from this that the text itself, as a vehicle of communication, can be supposed to have “meaning,” inasmuch as this will be the burden of what its author wished to convey. The difficulty here arises when we ask what meaning was perceived in the text by its first recipients, which is where reader response theory begins to come into view. However, there are two observations we can make about the Gospel of John which suggest that these original readers’ perception of its meaning may not have strayed far from what the author intended. The first, which I have argued elsewhere (North 2003, 466), is the likelihood that John’s first readers were a specific group who were already in receipt of his teaching. This circumstance would surely have predisposed them to be open to further instruction. The second observation concerns John’s style of communication. With more than 400 asides to the reader distributed throughout his text (Van Belle 1985, 63–104), John was at pains to the point of pedantry to inform his readers how his Gospel was to be understood. This means that his readers would find meaning in his text by attending to what he does say rather than to what he does not say. These considerations surely place a serious question mark against the unrelenting application of the view that readers of John’s text would have contributed to its meaning by filling in its “gaps.” One of the effects of historical–critical study is an emphasis on the extent to which John and his text are estranged...

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