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191 It is an honor to respond to J. Louis Martyn’s reflections upon his own intellectual formation and upon an issue that has preoccupied both of us for many years—the Johannine community. Of course, as Martyn well knows, this is by no means my first response to his work; much of my thinking and writing on the Fourth Gospel has been inspired by his research, in particular his History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. In this I am not alone. Indeed, for those of us who became interested in the Gospel of John in the 1970s and 1980s, Martyn’s work served a role that was very similar to the role he ascribes to Bultmann’s commentary in stimulating his own work on the Gospel of John. That my own position differs from his by no means diminishes my deep appreciation of and indebtedness to his work. In his comments, Martyn quotes a paragraph from History and Theology that I memorized long ago and will never forget. In this passage, he enjoins us to hear the Fourth Evangelist speak in his own terms rather than ours, and to “see with the eyes and hear with the ears” of the Johannine community (Martyn 2003, 29). For a young graduate student entranced by the highly volatile era that laid the foundations of what we now refer to as “Judaism” and “Christianity,” these words were the Pied Piper’s melody, leading me on to an engagement with the Gospel of John and its 10: Response READING HISTORY IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL Adele Reinhartz 192 ADELE REINHARTZ earliest audiences. Martyn’s work held out the hope that if I could only listen carefully enough and set aside my own Tendenzen, background, and baggage, I would indeed hear the Fourth Evangelist speak in his own words, in his own terms; I would become an honorary member of the Johannine community and see and hear this Gospel as they did.1 Furthermore, Martyn’s imaginative retelling of John 9 (in which Jesus heals a man born blind) as a two–level drama brought the Johannine community to life for me in a compelling and elegant way. His theory that Johannine Christians were expelled from the synagogue for believing Jesus to be the Messiah provided a coherent and relatively simple answer for much that had puzzled me about the Gospel of John. Martyn’s historical –critical approach to the Gospel as a document produced by and for a particular community embroiled in conflict with its local Jewish community helped to explain, but not to excuse, some of John’s negative comments about Jews and Judaism and to assign to the Gospel a prominent role in the processes that eventually led to the so–called “parting of the ways.” Finally, his approach provided a vehicle for an ongoing engagement with Jewish–Christian relations, by inviting us to listen with empathy to the distress of Johannine Christians bound by family and affection to those who remained within the synagogue—that is, to those who did not follow their faith and join in their fate. I do not recall exactly when I began to question the expulsion theory (cf. Reinhartz 1998a; 1998b; 2001). In looking back, however, it is clear that one important factor was my increasing sense that historical criticism of the New Testament had to be supplemented—or, more precisely, informed by—attention to its literary and rhetorical nature. In this venture , I was educated and emboldened by Alan Culpepper, whose book Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (1983) showed how useful literary criticism and theory could be for our understanding of the Gospel of John. My conviction that the Gospel of John must be viewed first and foremost as a literary work did not cause me to abandon the quest for its historical context. But it continues to shape my approach to the text as a communication between an (implied) author and an (implied) audience and to suggest that meaning does not reside within the text or in its historical context but rather in the interaction between text and reader. From this perspective, then, I have addressed a number of questions to Martyn’s compelling theory. First, should we not keep in mind that the “Johannine community,” plausible as it is, is nevertheless a construct, a creation of our scholarly approach rather than an incontrovertible histor1 My use of the masculine for the Fourth Evangelist reflects my own sense of the narrator and implied author...

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