Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 45:1 (NA 1994)
Article: The Fourth Gospel—An Appeal To Jews
Author: Stephen Motyer

TynBul 45:1 (1994) p. 201

The Fourth Gospel—An Appeal To Jews1

Stephen Motyer

The central concern of the thesis is with the so-called anti-Judaism of the fourth Gospel, particularly with ‘You are of your father the Devil’ in 8:44. Its starting-point is the observation that, if the currently dominant hypothesis of the Gospel’s origin is correct, then it can hardly be rescued from the charge of a fundamental hostility towards Jews. The hypothesis associated with J. Louis Martyn has dominated scholarship for 25 years, and pictures a small Jewish-Christian group producing the Gospel (in its final form) as a response to exclusion from its parent synagogue. In this reconstruction, inward-looking self-assertion and hostility are the fundamental motives in the johannine community’s appropriation of the Scriptures and institutions of Judaism. The thesis therefore sets its treatment of johannine anti-Judaism into a broad consideration of the ‘Martyn hypothesis’ and of the situation and purpose of the Gospel.

Reviewing contemporary methodology in johannine studies, the thesis is sharply critical of the allegorical method employed by the ‘Martyn hypothesis’, whereby the history of Jesus is re-read as the history of the johannine community. In addition Martyn is criticised for the partial use of the evidence of contemporary Judaism in his reconstruction of the historical circumstances behind the Gospel. Martyn is not alone in this: in particular the evidence of the contemporary (late first-century) apocalypses has not been sufficiently exploited by johannine scholarship.

TynBul 45:1 (1994) p. 202

The thesis proposes a method developed from J.D.G. Dunn’s significant essay ‘Let John Be John’: this involves first exploring the text for its ‘points of sensitivity’, that is, those features of it which seem to relate to or address contemporary movements or needs. Then a survey of the situation of Judaism in the late first century, drawing particularly on the apocalypses, gives depth to these ‘points of sensitivity’; and finally a return to the text from the background situation enables the authentic, first-century voice of the text to be heard. The exegesis of John 8:31-59 is thus conducted (a) against the background of the political and religious situation of Judaism in the late first century, and (b) in the light of a wider sense of the function of the whole Gospel in that setting.

Vital to the method is a movement away from a focus on authorial intention to a focus on reception: what would this text have been ‘heard’ to say, in the situation faced by late first-century Juda...