Dining with John: Communal Meals and Identity Formation in the Fourth Gospel and Its Historical and Cultural Context by Esther Kobel (review)

Cultural anthropologists and other social scientists interested in collective social identity have long studied meal practices to identify a group's sense of itself within a larger cultural matrix and to infer social values and relations within the group. Take the following claim as representative: "In all societies, both simple and complex, eating is the primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships . . . Once the anthropologist finds out where, when, and with whom the food is eaten, just about everything else can be inferred about the relations among the society's members . . . To know what, where, how, when and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society" (Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980], 4). These social-scientific studies on consumptive symbolics and meals as social structuration performances offer resources for a theoretical framework both for ordering the historical data and for explaining this data in ways that illuminate the dynamic processes by which early Christian associations attempted to work out, in thought and practice, their marks of distinction in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Feeding and feasting stories, alimentary concerns, food metaphors and symbols, food preparation, and table fellowship pervade the Jesus traditions and narratives (the gospels, both biblical and extra-biblical). The epistolary literature too indicates that the dining room (place), social dining (ritual), and commensal and consumptive metaphors (myth and symbol) were core mechanisms in the self-identifying efforts of early Christian associations in the urban centres of the Roman Empire. Not surprisingly, as part of the current turn to the social in scholarship on emergent Christian groups, the density, variety, and importance of eating and food-related interests that are evident in nearly all the early Christian sources, New Testament scholars have feasted on these topics in recent decades. One need only look at Esther Kobel's impressive bibliography and review of key trends and signal works in these fields.

Kobel's book adds to this scholarship with its focus on the Gospel of John, rich and varied in its meal scenes and alimentary language. Although food issues in John have received attention before (61-5), she points out, "To date there has neither been a [systematic] study that has addressed the role of communal dining in the Fourth Gospel specifically, nor a study that has investigated how its meal scenes and discourses about food and drink function within the overall Gospel narrative and how they may have spoken to the lived experience of the original audience, the Johannine community that gathered for meals" (66). The study thus is bifocal, the function and meaning of meal scenes and food and drink imagery at the narrative level of the gospel (part 1, chapter 3), on the one hand, and meal discourses in the life of the Johannine community (part 2, chapters 4-8), on the other.

The first part consists of a comprehensive inventory and brief summaries of the meal scenes and metaphors of food and drink (more than seventy) in the gospel. Paying attention to narrative placement and motifs in the scenes allows Kobel to draw several general conclusions. She points out that the first and last meal accounts (the wedding meal at Cana in John 2 and the meal on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias in John 21) form what she calls a "meal-inclusio" (80-81) in which each meal is the occasion for an epiphany of Jesus that demonstrates not only who he is but also the promise of provision of his followers' needs. The meal scenes in between generally are occasions for elaborating issues that are at the core of the gospel's message: Jesus's identity, Jesus as a provider of both caloric food and non-material food, criteria...