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

17: Response: The Leuven Hypothesis in C/catholic Perspective

339 As Professor Van Belle indicates in his essay, the Catholic University at Leuven is home to a rich tradition of biblical interpretation, one that is fully self–conscious of hearing, reading, and understanding the Scriptures in the midst of a community of faith. As Van Belle points out in his summation of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, this community is Catholic in an obvious and official sense in that it responds to the guidance of the teaching office that speaks for and in the name of the whole church. In a related but perhaps less juridical sense, this is a catholic community in that it reads the Bible together and knows that the meaning of the Bible emerges from this dynamic reading as church, as People of God, whose collective wisdom is always more than the sum of the parts. This tradition of reading and interpretation is also catholic in that it reaches back and rests upon the wisdom, both scholarly and spiritual, of those whose voices are now silent and whose pens are long still, but who remain eloquent in a new way. Of course, this approach is certainly not unique to Roman Catholic Bible readers, nor are all Catholic readers aware of or in agreement with such an outlook. But this description does, I believe, encapsulate the spirit that generally pervades the Catholic scholarly approach to reading and interpreting sacred Scripture, whether in the historical–critical 17: Response THE LEUVEN HYPOTHESIS IN C/cATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE Peter J. Judge 340 PETER J. JUDGE tradition for which K.U.Leuven is well known or through newer, postmodern methodologies. When it comes specifically to the interpretation of the Gospel of John, the approach of those who are groomed in the Leuven tradition could also be said to be rather Catholic. This emphasis is epitomized in the first “guideline” in the framework of the Leuven Hypothesis that Van Belle elicits from Selong and Konings: “the Fourth Gospel is a theological work and not a history”; it “is not simply a narrated account of Jesus’ career; rather it is an interpreted account of the significance of his person and teachings.” At first blush, hardly anyone would take issue with such statements, yet they make a simple point that becomes a kind of ethos. One could fairly say that modern Catholic scholarship has not been characterized by a focus on the historical Jesus, nor by efforts to isolate a core of so–called authentic words of Jesus or biographical material. Such concerns are not absent, but in general it seems to me that Catholic exegetes are more oriented to the study of the Gospels as vehicles for discovering the proclaimed Jesus, the Christ. Somewhat paradoxically, the Christian proclamation of good news in a saving encounter with God is without doubt “embodied in a historical person”—“the Word became flesh” (John 1:14)—yet the real value of reading and studying the Gospel of John comes not from mining the text for historical data but rather from engaging the Christology and soteriology—that is to say, the faith—of the Johannine community. Van Belle notes that “authentic historical tradition in the Fourth Gospel can be neither denied nor proven”; in fact, it is not even the point of the scholarly endeavor. What is important is not how much or how well the Gospel of John preserves the historical Jesus, but rather how the Fourth Evangelist has (re–)interpreted the meaning of the “real” Jesus Christ for faith. Reading John as a Gospel brings us to another sense in which the Leuven approach is catholic in the more general sense. I was first inclined to call this an extended meaning of the term in view of what has been mentioned earlier, but in fact it is listed as the very first definition of the word “catholic” in my Webster’s Dictionary: “comprehensive.” Leuven scholars have endeavored to read John among the Gospels in a comprehensive way, as a relatively late first–century Christian proclamation in the form of a rather unique literary genre shared with the Synoptics. In points 3 through 6 in his framework of the Leuven Hypothesis, Van Belle stresses the necessity of understanding the Johannine Gospel, its language, style, and presentation of events, first and foremost in comparison and contrast to the Synoptic Gospels, with a full openness to the evangelist...