What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present and Future of Johannine Studies

14: Response: Ideologies Past and Present

277 It was with much pleasure and interest that I read Sandra Schneiders’s reflections upon her journey as a scholar of the Fourth Gospel. There is much about which we concur, even if I began my own journey in a much different place and now find myself heading in new directions. Whereas Schneiders’s path has taken her from strictly historical questions to more literary and ideological interests, I took a literary approach in my dissertation , but since then I have become ever more interested in the historical dimension of texts. However, my interest in history is ideologically flavored. That is, like Schneiders, I also have been influenced by ideological approaches, and like Schneiders, I am interested in contemporary uses of the biblical text. Thus, the question that arises in the intersection between Schneiders’s reflections and my thoughts on future directions in Johannine Studies concerns history, ideology, and contemporary interpretations of the text. In what ways do the ideological forces that helped shape the Fourth Gospel in the past have lasting effects on its interpretation and use in the present? Clearly, the historical element in this question has little to do with a historical–critical method that might tell us “what really happened.” It does not concern the historicity of the Gospel accounts, or of John’s Gospel versus the Synoptic Gospels. To be sure, I assume that the Gos14 : Response IDEOLOGIES PAST AND PRESENT Colleen Conway 278 COLLEEN CONWAY pels are historical documents and I am interested in them as such. But I am not interested in their historical factuality, nor do I think it critically important for the interpretation of these texts. Instead, I consider that insofar as the Gospel of John was generated in a particular time and place, it is a product of a cultural moment. My historical interests are in the cultural forces or ideologies that produced that moment and led to the particularly Johannine way of shaping a story about Jesus. Moreover, my interest in the historical dimension of a text such as the Fourth Gospel is not only in how it was produced, but also how it contributed to the production of a particular worldview. Rather than assuming that the text simply reflects its context, I assume a degree of reciprocity between the two. By now, those familiar with “the new historicism ” will no doubt see it rearing its paradoxical head in this discussion . Admittedly, this perspective has had a major influence on the way I conceive of history and textuality. And while the “new historicism” is not so new anymore in secular literary studies (it is likely quite passé by now), I still believe we have much to learn by considering the Gospel of John in light of the questions raised by this perspective. Such questions concern the production and circulation of texts, the systems of power represented in this textual production, and how the text participates in the symbolic world of a particular culture. I can provide one example from my own work. Currently, I am focused on the imperial context of the Gospel writers, in particular the gender ideology that was at the heart of the Roman imperial project. In considering the forces that contributed to the shaping of the Johannine Jesus, I examine the masculine ideology of the empire. Because the ideology of masculinity is so prominent in the rhetoric of the Roman Empire, I cannot imagine a presentation of a divine man—in this case, John’s presentation of Jesus—that would not engage this ideology in some way. But I do not assume that the Gospel of John merely reflects this ideology . Instead, its presentation of Jesus suggests a complex relationship of accommodation, adaptation, and resistance to imperial masculinity. In many respects, the Johannine Jesus takes on the characteristics of a truly masculine ideal (self–control, courage, self–sacrifice for a noble cause). But the Johannine Jesus’ ultimate stance against the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31) suggests a resistance to imperial authority. Most likely, the author intends this phrase as a reference to the devil, but this does not exclude a reference to the emperor as well—indeed, most people hearing “the ruler of this world” in the first–century Mediterranean context would think first of the emperor. In this way, the Fourth Gospel IDEOLOGIES PAST AND PRESENT 279 participates in the broader gender ideology of its culture, but at the...