The Footnotes of John’s Gospel -- By: Merrill C. Tenney

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 117:468 (Oct 1960)
Article: The Footnotes of John’s Gospel
Author: Merrill C. Tenney


The Footnotes of John’s Gospel

Merrill C. Tenney

Any casual reader of the Fourth Gospel soon becomes aware that its pages contain a great deal of explanatory material which is not directly involved in the progress of the narrative. This material is by no means irrelevant to the main thrust of the Gospel, but is parenthetical. If it were omitted, the main theme of thought would remain largely unaltered, although the parenthetical material has a definite value for understanding the meaning of the Gospel. It is more extensive and varied than the notes that one finds occasionally in the Synoptics, and is worth special consideration in the interpretation of the meaning of John.

This explanatory material may be called footnotes.1 The word does not have that meaning in the sense of the numbered references that one finds in the text of a modern book of research, with its neatly marshalled excursuses and bibliographical references. Most of the footnotes in John are more nearly “glosses” or “asides” which the writer introduced to make his story more lucid, or to explain the cause or motive for some act.

To the best knowledge of this writer there is no separate treatment of this phenomenon to be found in the vast literature on the Fourth Gospel. Occasional notes in the major commentaries deal with some of the passages included in this study, but no single correlation of them has ever been attempted. Since the use of these footnotes is a characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, and since some of them are quite important to its structure and interpretation, one wonders why more has not been done with them. They offer a valuable insight into the design of the author, and provide some hints concerning the occasion for which the Gospel was written.

The criteria for selecting these passages have already been indicated. They are sentences or paragraphs of explanatory comment, interjected into the running narrative of the story, and obviously intended to illumine some casual reference, or

to explain how some important statement should be understood. Fifty-nine of these passages are listed here, though there can always be a margin of debate whether some should be omitted because they are part of the main narrative, or whether others should have been included. Not all of these are indisputably clear; for in a few cases there is doubt whether the author is interjecting an observation, or whether the narrative itself is diffuse. If the Fourth Gospel represents the oral style of its author, the latter alternative is possible; but if the dubious passages be excluded, there are still enough remaining to constitute a re...

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