John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination

Notes

199 = Notes Introduction 1 I will be using the New American Standard translation throughout, copyright 1960. References to the Gospel of John will be cited by chapter and verse. Other biblical references will be by book title, chapter, and verse. 2 Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 228. 3 Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry,” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 218. 4 There are a number of texts to consult for suggestions concerning other poems one might examine. Mark Edwards’ John Through the Centuries, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), a reception history of the Gospel, includes poets, novelists, and playwrights in his verse-by-verse examination of responses to John. Anthologies, many linking poems and specific biblical texts, include Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, eds., Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, vol. 2, Gospels to Revelation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Curzon, ed., The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995); David Impastato, ed., Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Craig and Janet McCann, eds., Contemporary Poetry by People of Faith (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1994); Diana Culbertson, ed., Invisible Light: Poems about God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); James H. Trott, ed., A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2006); Kevin Hart, ed., The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Donald Davie, ed., The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford: 200 Notes to pp. 2–9 Oxford University Press, 1981). See also David Jasper and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible and Literature: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 5 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 231. 6 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 234. 7 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 236, 234. 8 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 235–36. 9 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 243. 10 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 240. 11 Robinson, The Death of Adam, 240. 12 I am drawing here on Kenneth Burke’s 1943 essay “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats,” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), in which he argues that a poem is a “mode of action,” “the symbolic act of the poet who made it,” recording the series of steps a poet takes in moving from one set of images to another. Close reading, for Burke, becomes an attempt to re-enact the dramatic arc of those steps. I am not arguing that the Gospel of John is a poem, but I am employing the way I read poems in reading the Gospel. For more on Burke and reading poetry see my entry “Close Reading,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 13 Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 121, 123. 14 Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 118. 15 Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 120. 16 Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 120. 17 Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 120, 121. 18 Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 71. See his entire chapter, “The Gospel as Literature” for a quick survey of the different questions on which literary-oriented biblical scholars have focused. His Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) is generally regarded as the major early introduction of these matters into critical discussions. 19 Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John, 70. 20 Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John, 15. For an example of how Culpepper ’s work has been built upon, see Mark W. G. Stibbe, John (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1993). Stibbe’s “narrative-critical” commentary stresses the elusiveness of Christ in John’s presentation, a variation on Culpepper’s focus on recognition/nonrecognition scenes. Craig R. Koester’s Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community, 2nd. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) is a thorough treatment of the symbolic language and action through which Jesus makes his Father known, valuably unfolding connections between scenes employing similar language or situations. Adele Reinhartz’s “The Gospel of John,” in The...