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77 O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2 Earlier in this study, we pointed out at some length that the environment in which the New Testament was written was both oral and rhetorical in character.1 We stressed the fact that texts, especially religious texts, functioned differently in a culture that was 90 percent illiterate and in which even the texts that exist are oral texts, meant to be read aloud. These important insights, when coupled with the realization that orally delivered and rhetorically adept discourse and storytelling was at the heart of first-century culture, should have long ago led us to a new way of reading the Gospels themselves. The telling of the story of Jesus was from the beginning crucial for the new Christian movement, and surely it was important well before the whole story was written down in any one fashion. M. Mitchell in a seminal essay has shown that in various places in the Pauline corpus, “Paul grounds his arguments solidly upon an underlying gospel narrative , which he accesses through various forms of rhetorical shorthand —brevity of speech, synecdoche, and metaphor. Though Paul is thoroughly consistent in his frame of reference—the gospel narrative— his references to it are fluid and flexible.”2 A good example of this sort of short rhetorical citing of the gospel can be found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, in which Paul mentions the climax of the gospel narrative, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and its immediate sequels, the appearances of Jesus. The gospel apparently first appeared in any written form in these summaries in Paul’s highly rhetorical discourses, framed as letters. What this means is that there was permission to tell the story in rhetorically effective and persuasive ways, even when, and perhaps 6 What’s in a Name? Rethinking the Historical Figure of the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel 78 What’s in the Word especially when, the story involved the memoirs of someone who actually heard Jesus in person—an eye- and earwitness of some part of Jesus’ life and teachings. I submit that there is no more rhetorically effective (and affective) telling of the gospel story in long form, but nonetheless edited down on the basis of rhetorical and other considerations (cf. John 20:30 and 21:25) than the Gospel of John. What we have in this Gospel is not the boiling up of a story on the basis of shards of information , but rather the boiling down of copious notes, memoranda, and eyewitness accounts from the Beloved Disciple and their organization into a rhetorically effective order and shape by some final editor (on which more is said at the end of this chapter). I also submit that when one looks at the Gospel of John as an oral document that was meant to be heard rather than read privately or individually, and heard in the order in which it is now presented, certain things come to light, including fresh insights into the identity of the Beloved Disciple.3 The Problem with the Traditional Ascription to John Zebedee M. Hengel and G. Stanton, among other scholars, have reminded us in recent discussions of the Fourth Gospel that the superscripts to all four of the canonical Gospels were in all likelihood added after the fact to the documents; indeed, they may originally have been added as document tags to the papyrus rolls. Even more tellingly, they were likely added only after there were several familiar gospels, for the phrase “according to” is used to distinguish this particular Gospel from other well-known ones.4 This means that all four Gospels are formally anonymous, and the question then becomes, how much weight one should place on internal evidence of authorship (the so-called inscribed author) and how much on external evidence? In my view, the internal evidence should certainly take precedence in the case of the Gospel of John, not least because the external evidence is hardly unequivocal. This does not alleviate the necessity of explaining how the Gospel came to be ascribed to someone named John, but we will leave that question to the end of our discussion. As far as the external evidence goes, it is true enough that various church fathers in the second century thought John, son of Zebedee, was the author...

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