Cast out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John by Adele Reinhartz (review)

The secondary literature on the vexed issue of the presentation of “the Jews” in the Fourth Gospel is vast, as too are the multiple perspectives applied, whether to refine the question or to ameliorate the outcome: historical context, social structures, literary analysis, narrative dynamics, theological framework, reception history. . . . Indeed, among the persistent obstacles to significant progress have been the frequent failure to identify and critically interrogate the perspective adopted and the tendency to slide without comment from one level of reading or standpoint to another. In Cast out of the Covenant, Adele Reinhartz combines the insights of long engagement in the debate with a clear-sighted analysis of locating these various perspectives in presenting a sustained account of the problem and of what is at stake. Her guiding principle is the rhetorical intention and execution of the Gospel’s core message, and is grounded by the introduction, alongside the implied author, of an implied reader, Alexandra. Without denying R.’s own authorial situatedness, the inevitable appeal to the imagination prompts the reader to stand in Alexandra’s place: the network of the Gospel’s ideas and language is not part of an abstract and contingent intellectual system but generates the question, “What conclusions would Alexandra draw?”

The starting point is, rightly, the text as an intentional act of persuasion; its goal is for readers to recognize their own longing for life and freedom, which is met through the person and work of Jesus and through the appropriation of the offer of life and the transformation of self that follows. Most importantly, this transformation entails joining with others who share that experience and journey. In the first part of the argument, R. explores the Gospel’s use of narrative art, evocative language, invitations to identify with characters, and the language of transformation, birth, and family to achieve this goal through “the rhetoric of affiliation.” The second part explores the reverse side, which, in the contextual framework of Jesus and of the thoroughly Jewish worldview of the Gospel, produces a “rhetoric of disaffiliation.” The affirmation of all that is given to those who respond carries with it the denial of any others who claimed the same gifts and privileges; the familiar themes of covenant (not named in John), Torah, and temple are subsumed under “the rhetoric of expropriation,” while the role played by “the Ioudaioi” becomes a “rhetoric of repudiation.” Here Reinhartz addresses the various attempts to determine who “the Ioudaioi” really are, inside and outside the Gospel, including questions of translation and of “Judeans versus Jews,” making a good case for the latter. She holds together both that although “they have some affinities to ‘real Jews’ their main importance lies in their role in the Gospel’s rhetoric and theology,” and that in a first-century context the Gospel creates a “distance between its ideal or intended audience and any Jews, or forms of Jewishness known to its real audiences” (pp. 103–4). Only in the third part does R. discuss, and demonstrate the weaknesses of, the familiar theory of a Johannine community and its expulsion from “the synagogue” most associated with J. L. Martyn. Going further, she questions that the intended audience was Jewish-Christian, and suggests that, while certainty is unachievable, an audience of gentiles, perhaps including some with sympathies with Judaism, is as likely. In this context, the Gospel is promoting a separate identity, and hence a separation from any Jewish community as well as from a gentile past.

Reinhartz acknowledges her own situatedness, as one not persuaded by the Gospel’s rhetorical intention, but also recognizing the imperative of wrestling with inherited Scriptures. Briefly acknowledging the dilemma of Christian anti-Judaism, her concern is to “tell it like it is . . . or like I see it,” and to urge others not to be uncritically persuaded by that element of John’s rhetoric that once “enfleshed” can lead...