Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 65:1 (Mar 2022)
Article: Synchronic With Caveats: A Fourth Wave Of Interpretation For The Fourth Gospel
Author: Cory M. Marsh

JETS 65:1 (March 2022) p. 93

Synchronic With Caveats: A Fourth Wave Of Interpretation For The Fourth Gospel

Cory M. Marsh*

^* Cory M. Marsh is Professor of New Testament at Southern California Seminary, 2075 E. Madison Ave, El Cajon, CA 92019. He may be contacted at [email protected]

Abstract: Against the historical backdrop of two prominent approaches to the Gospel of John, this article argues for an interpretive methodology consistent with evangelical convictions such as divine inspiration and inerrancy. Building on Thomas Brodie’s “three waves” classification of Johannine interpretive history and incorporating Andreas Köstenberger’s hermeneutical triad, this study offers a methodology for reading the Fourth Gospel that falls within synchronic approaches to John but includes caveats that give due weight to the Gospel’s historical and theological veracity.

Key words: Gospel of John, Fourth Gospel, hermeneutics, synchronic, diachronic, evangelical, presuppositions

In his 1993 critical study of the Fourth Gospel (FG), Thomas Brodie succinctly describes three “ages of interpretation” that had characterized Johannine studies up to his time. Though he acknowledges that theology, history, and literature were all involved in each era’s methodological approaches, he finds that interpretation of the FG emphasized the theological up through the eighteenth century, the historical in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the literary as the twentieth century progressed.1 His accurate and well-outlined historical study of the interpretation of the FG provides a helpful taxonomy to initiate the present article.

Brodie’s taxonomy, however, involves at least two shortcomings. The first is that, given the date of writing, his survey stops short of twenty-first-century Johannine scholarship. Second, Brodie largely ignores evangelical contributions, focusing on movements within wider Johannine scholarship. The resulting imbalance gives undue authority to critical Johannine scholarship over more confessional scholarly models.

JETS 65:1 (March 2022) p. 94

This article champions a more robust way of reading the FG than that allowed by any single one of the emphases in Brodie’s three ages. It argues for an interpretive approach that maintains the self-attesting history, literary beauty, and theological message of the Gospel of John as an inspired, inerrant, and authoritative document.

I. A “Fourth-Wave” Synchronic Approach

Over against the synchronic literary-critical approaches that have recently dominated Johannine scholarship and earlier diachronic his...