New Light On The Fourth Gospel -- By: Stephen S. Smalley
Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 17:1 (NA 1966)
Article: New Light On The Fourth Gospel
Author: Stephen S. Smalley
TynBul 17:1 (1966) p. 35
New Light On The Fourth Gospel
The Tyndale New Testament Lecture For 1965*
*Delivered At Cambridge On July 13th, 1965.
The following special abbreviations are employed:
HE Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica.
HTFG C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge (1963).
IFG C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge (1954).
‘New Light on the Fourth Gospel’ is on any showing a bold title to choose for a lecture such as this, since the phrase has about it a character that may at worst be described as presumptuous, and at best as ambiguous. One likely result of this choice is that my readers will have been lured under false pretences, eager to receive completely fresh illumination in this complex region of biblical discussion. Let me then confess at the outset that almost certainly they will be disappointed. New light on the Fourth Gospel there may be; but I make no claims to be shedding it.
None the less, I hope to persuade you in due course that my title is not wholly inappropriate. For the paramount task before us is the reconsideration of the light that has already been shed, and mostly within the last decade, on the Gospel of John.1 However, the intention is not so much to survey in scrupulous detail the speculations of every scholarly pen, and the relevant secrets of every Qumran jar; it is rather to assess the present drift of the Johannine debate and some of its implications, by looking afresh at the principal areas in which the scholarly lions have been roaring after their prey. Inevitably we shall then be driven back once more to the place and
TynBul 17:1 (1966) p. 36
meaning of history in John, and to the relation in the Gospel between history and the apostolic kerygma.
The Current Debate
What, then, is the present state of the evangelic parties? What are the live issues in this particular field of New Testament study, and where are they leading us? We are by now very familiar with the chief conclusions of what has been termed the ‘new look’ on the Fourth Gospel. 2The most significant is, of course, the suggested existence of a distinctive Johannine tradition, which has been deduced from the possibility (to my mind, the certainty) that the Fourth Evangelist wrote independently of the Synoptists; and the latest volume of D. Guthrie’s New Testament Introduction, The Gospels and Acts (Tyndale Press, London (1965) 262-275 and 278-284), has provided u...
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