ταῦτα εἰπὼν ἔπτυσεν χαμαὶ καὶ ἐποίησεν πηλὸν ἐκ τοῦ πτύσματος, καὶ ἐπέχρισεν αὐτοῦ τὸν πηλὸν ἐπὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς
tauta eipon eptusen kamai kai epoiesen peylon ek tou ptusmatos, kai epekrisen auto ton peylon epi tous ophthalmous
Saying these things, he spit on the ground, made mud out of the spit, and with the mud, anointed the man’s eyes.
Later manuscripts use the word epetheken from the verb epitithemi (ἐπιτίθημι), which means “to put or lay upon,” instead of epekrisen, which means “to anoint” in reference to how Jesus placed the mud on the man’s eyes. Also, some later manuscripts add the words tou tuphlou at the end of the verse, apparently in an attempt to clarify that Jesus was putting the mud on the eyes of the blind man, as opposed to putting the mud on his own eyes (?!).
The Greek word for “spit” is wonderfully onomatopoetic: eptusen (he spit) and ptusmatos (spit).
Brown explains that by using spit, Jesus left himself vulnerable to accusations of sorcery. According to the Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin 10:1, Rabbi Akiva curses those who speak charms over an infirmity and, according to the Tosephta, spitting is considered a charm.[1] The potential for such accusations may explain why Matthew and Mark omit Jesus’s charming “spit” miracles.
Regarding the mud, Brown references Irenaeus who interprets the mud as “a symbol of man’s being created from the earth,” and then adds, “see the use of ‘clay’ or ‘mud’ in Job 4:19 and 10:9,”[2] but Brown offers no comment on Irenaeus’s interpretation or the clay references in Job. Considering our interest with the question of suffering, the references to Job should certainly be considered.
The first Job reference comes from the speech of Eliphaz regarding the guilt of humanity and the justice of God. He first asks, “Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?” (4:7). Because humanity does indeed suffer from perishing and destruction, the explanation must be that humanity is not innocent. Eliphaz then asks, “Can a mortal be righteous before God? If God places no trust in his servants, if he charges his angels with error, how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust!” (4:17-19). Those who live in houses of clay and whose foundations are in the dust are not trustworthy; therefore, Eliphaz concludes his speech saying humanity “is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (5:7) just like our friend Celidonius, who is born blind. Likewise, he must have deserved the trouble…or not.
The second Job reference is from Job himself in a speech in which he begins, “I loathe my very life; therefore I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul” (10:1). Job demands that Yahweh explain his charge against him, the reason for his suffering, the offense he committed, which apparently deserves such suffering. In his interrogation of Yahweh, he asks, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” (10:4), questions that resonate with unique relevance in light of the context of Celidonius. Job wonders if Yahweh is indeed like humanity in humanity’s compulsion to blame: “Are your days like those of a mortal, or your years like those of a strong man, that you must search out my faults and probe after my sin?” (10:5 – 6). He then says, “Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me? Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again?” (10:8-9). In effect, Job says, “God, how can you be so petty? I don’t believe that you’re like us in our need to scapegoat and blame. That’s not you. You made me. You molded me carefully and tenderly and creatively. You love me. How could you destroy me?” By responding to the question of suffering with a creative act involving clay, perhaps the Johannine Jesus is pointing to the God that Job desired when describing clay in his prayer: a God that has no interest in destroying what he so carefully made…
Regarding the mud as a symbol of creating, Irenaeus writes, “Now the work of God is the fashioning of man. For, as the Scripture says, He made [man] by a kind of process: ‘And the Lord took clay from the earth, and formed man.’ Wherefore also the Lord spat on the ground and made clay, and smeared it upon the eyes, pointing out the original fashioning [of man], how it was effected, and manifesting the hand of God to those who can understand by what [hand] man was formed out of the dust” (Adversus Haeresus. 5.15.2).[3] Although many commentators have rejected this interpretation of the clay, Daniel Frayer-Griggs has shown how Irenaeus’s interpretation is supported by sources in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as in other ancient Near Eastern texts.[4]
Jesus uses a creative, muddy method in order to bring about healing and transformation. Just as the Light of the World invited us to see how the insights of Mimetic Theory shed light on the Light himself, Jesus’s method invites us to explain the muddy method of narrative criticism, which I will utilize throughout this project.
Narrative Criticism in Fourth Gospel
Although scholars such as Herbert Leroy, David Weade and Marinus de Jonge previously examined literary dynamics in the Fourth Gospel (riddles, irony, and a synchronic reading respectively), R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel proved to be the first major study that applied insights of narrative criticism to John.
Culpepper applied the theoretical framework of narratologist Seymour Chatman to the Fourth Gospel, introducing terms such as “implied author,” “narrator,” and “implied reader” to biblical interpretation.
The Real Author
The real author refers to the actual flesh-and-blood author or authors of the text. In terms of the Fourth Gospel, the real author is the one (or ones) who actually wrote the Gospel text by putting pen to paper or reed to parchment. The candidates for this role are many. Traditionally, the leading candidate has been John son of Zebedee, a tradition that many have traced back to Irenaeus’s testimony[5] and Clement of Alexandria who, according to Eusebius, wrote, “John, perceiving that the external facts had been made plain in the other Gospels, being urged by his friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.”[6] However, modern scholarship has interrogated this tradition to the extent that most Johannine scholars today reject it while also questioning if St. Clement’s “John” is even referring to “John son of Zebedee” at all or perhaps another John of the early church.[7] As a result of this questioning, three lines of thought have emerged regarding the historical writer of the Fourth Gospel: 1) John the Elder 2) the Johannine school and 3) John the son of Zebedee. Martin Hengel suggests that the historical writer was an influential and educated theologian named John the Elder (not the apostle) who was upheld by his pupils in Ephesus as the ideal disciple of Christ.[8] C. K. Barrett argues that John the Apostle founded the Johannine School, whose members wrote the Johannine literature, including a particularly gifted and educated member who wrote the Fourth Gospel. Raymond Brown tackles the question of the historical writer by offering three stages of composition. At the first stage of composition, an eyewitness experiences the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth firsthand. Brown explains that this eyewitness came to be known as the “Beloved Disciple” in the text, but he does not associate the eyewitness with the apostle John or with any of the disciples mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels. At the second stage, the eyewitness shares his experiences of Jesus of Nazareth with a community of his own disciples but does so in light of the resurrection. Within this second stage, the eyewitness accounts of the “Beloved Disciple” take on a life of their own within the listening community, speaking to their particular context and struggles.[9] It is not until the third stage that the eyewitness accounts of the “Beloved Disciple,” which have grown and developed within the community, finally get written down by the historical author of the Gospel whom Brown calls the “evangelist.” Brown includes in this third stage the work of the “redactor,” who added the Epilogue (Ch. 21) and the Prologue (Ch. 1:1-18) as well as other disputed additions, but explains that “in this theory, the contribution of the evangelist is far more notable and influential; and if one wants to use the language of author, he is truly the author of the Fourth Gospel.”[10] Brown’s three-stage theory of composition remains one of the more widely accepted approaches to the historical writing of the Fourth Gospel among Johannine scholars, including Francis J. Moloney and Sandra Schneiders.
Finally, Leon Morris and John A. T. Robinson are among the few Johannine scholars who still uphold the tradition of John the Apostle as the author of the Fourth Gospel. Morris agrees with William Temple that the Gospel account “has the ‘feel’ of exact memory”[11] and reiterates the fivefold argument of B. F. Westcott, which concludes, based on textual evidence, that the author of John was 1) a Jew 2) a Palestinian Jew 3) an eyewitness 4) an apostle and therefore most likely 5) the apostle John.[12] John A. T. Robinson also dismisses John the Elder as “a mere construct of modern scholarship”[13] and sees enough connections between the Beloved Disciple and John the Apostle to offer the following conclusion: “Of course all these connections are highly tentative and nothing hangs on them. But at least a good deal begins to come together and make sense if the hypothesis is accepted, on its own merits, that the man behind John’s Gospel, the beloved disciple, is indeed the son of Zebedee, as tradition has unanimously asserted.”[14]
Although I (who might be biased towards this predominantly Anglican assertion) am persuaded by the final line of thought that upholds John the Apostle as the author of John the Gospel, there is certainly no unanimity among scholars regarding the identity of the Gospel’s real author.
The Implied Author
In Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth coined the term “implied author,” which is essentially a version of the author’s self or the author’s “second self” that is created by the real author through the writing of the text and constructed by the reader through the reading of the text. Booth explains,
As he writes [sic], [the real author] creates not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in general’ but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men’s texts….Whether we call this implied author an ‘official scribe,’ or adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tilloston—the author’s ‘second self’—it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe.[15]
The reader of a text, according to Booth, inevitably constructs a picture of the author through his or her textually informed imagination. This picture of the author created by the reader is not the real, flesh-and-blood author, but is rather the “implied author.” The implied author cannot exist outside of the reader’s engagement with the text while at the same time the implied author would not exist at all if it were not for the real author’s writing of the text in the first place. Jewish Johannine scholar Adele Reinhartz explains,
The implied author does not have an existence separate from the reading experience. Her or his voice may or may not be distinguishable from that of the narrator; he or she may not be a direct or indirect mouthpiece for the views of the writer. He or she is always, however, a construct of the reader, as an expression of the reader’s creative activity in making sense of and responding to the story. The raw material that the reader uses to construct the implied author is often present within the text itself but it must be infused with the reader’s imagination in order to come alive.[16]
Culpepper explains that the implied author is “the sum of the choices made by the real author in writing the narrative, but the implied author is neither the real author (who wrote) nor the narrator (who tells).” Furthermore, the implied author, who “must be inferred from the narrative,” “has no voice and never communicates directly with the reader.”[17] Instead, the implied author creates a narrator who has the voice, which communicates directly with the reader. Culpepper explains that the narrator “dramatically pulls the curtain on the implied author in the closing verses of the gospel,”[18] revealing the implied author as the Beloved Disciple. Culpepper sees the editor of the Fourth Gospel essentially agreeing with him that the Beloved Disciple is the implied author in John 21:24 (“This is the disciple who is testifying to these things, and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true”).
However, Staley takes issue with Culpepper’s assertion that the implied author is the Beloved Disciple by reminding Culpepper that the narrator is a creation of the implied author, quoting Chatman who says that the implied author “is the principle that invented the narrator.”[19] Therefore, the implied author must be the one who pulls the curtain on the narrator, not vice versa. Moreover, Staley thinks Culpepper misuses the concept of “implied author” in separating the editor from the implied author. Culpepper himself writes, “A single work touched by several writing hands presents a single implied author.”[20] If so, then the editor of John 21:24 should be one of the “writing hands” that constitutes the implied author and therefore cannot be understood as a separate entity.
The Narrator
Staley suggests that the Beloved Disciple is best understood as the narrator,[21] which Culpepper appears to reject when he writes, “Staley proceeds to identify the Beloved Disciple as the narrator, but he has just indicated that the narrator can be ‘omnipresent.’”[22] However, Staley explains that the Beloved Disciple is a both an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator and can therefore be simultaneously a character within the story and an omnipresent voice. He writes,
The narrator of the Fourth Gospel can be none other than “the beloved disciple,” and since he is also omniscient and omnipresent, this makes him, in Genette’s terms, “extradiegetic,” or above the story. However, as a… “writer-narrator,” he is also heterodiegetic, for although he is finally retrospectively revealed to have been a character in the story he has just finished telling/writing, he never intrudes as an “I” narrator-character in that story.[23]
I agree with Staley’s argument that the Beloved Disciple is the narrator throughout the entire Fourth Gospel. Even when it appears that a new narrator has taken the stage (as in John 21:24), Staley sees this as an example of what Meir Sternberg calls “the trick of double reference,”[24] a narrator who can move freely within his roles as witness to strictly narrator to an editorial “we.”[25]
So in conclusion, the real author or authors of the Fourth Gospel have given the reader the opportunity to construct from the text an implied author, who speaks to the reader through the voice of the narrator who identifies himself as the Beloved Disciple.
The Real Reader
Just as the real author is the flesh-and-blood author of the text so too is the real reader the flesh-and-blood reader of the text. Most Johannine scholars have been concerned with the first readers of the Gospel, for which much ink has been spilt. Culpepper summarizes and simplifies their quest for the Fourth Gospel’s first readers when he writes, “Put most simply, the question [regarding the first readers] is whether John was written as a missionary document for non-believers, a community document for believers, or a theological document for the church at large.”[26] Culpepper concludes his Anatomy, explaining, “Real meaning can be found…between text and reader, in the experience of reading the text, and belief in the gospel can mean openness to the ways it calls readers to interact with it, with life, and with their own world.”[27]
In this project, the real reader is the contemporary reader who seeks to use the Fourth Gospel as a resource for praying the question of suffering. As a resource for praying the question of suffering, the Fourth Gospel can lead the reader to experience a divine response to the question of suffering. I will refer to this experience of a divine response to the question of suffering through the medium of the Gospel narrative, as the theodical spirituality of the Fourth Gospel.
In Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Fourth Gospel, Adele Reinhartz explores four different readings of the Fourth Gospel by adopting four different identities and postures as the reader. She first adopts the identity and posture of a compliant reader who constructs the implied author (whom she refers to as the Beloved Disciple) as a mentor, offering the reader the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. As a compliant reader, Reinhartz understands the transformative value of the Fourth Gospel, but finds the implied author’s negative assessment of those who reject the gift (ie. “the Jews”) “highly problematic.”[28] She then adopts the identity and posture of a resistant reader who experiences the Beloved Disciple as an opponent and reads the Gospel “through the eyes of the Johannine Jews.”[29] From this perspective, she sees that it is not Jesus but the Jews who are the real victims, demonized and threatened by the Beloved Disciple’s harsh rhetoric. Realizing that a resistant reading only reverses the dangerous binary opposition she sees employed by the Beloved Disciple, Reinhartz then adopts the posture of a sympathetic reader. As a sympathetic reader, she experiences the Beloved Disciple as a colleague, but one with whom she keeps at a comfortable distance in order to avoid full engagement and confrontation with divisive issues. Finally, she adopts the posture of an engaged reader, willing to name and address the divisive issues that stand between her and the Beloved Disciple, namely his assertions regarding Christology and exclusivity. From this final perspective, Reinhartz experiences the implied author as “someone who feels himself to be profoundly Other, both to [Reinhartz] and to most of the world around him” and thus dangerously alienating.[30] In her conclusion, she writes about her attempt at friendship with the Beloved Disciple, saying,
Although I have been able to visit with him in and through his Gospel, to address the questions I have to him, to vent my anger at aspects of his narrative, and to strive for some understanding, he remains fixed within his text without the means to respond, react, or engage with me in words other than those that represent the unchanged content of the Fourth Gospel.[31]
As a result, Reinhartz remains unconvinced that a friendship between the Beloved Disciple and herself is possible, but looks forward with some hope “to future meetings with the Beloved Disciple, and to ongoing conversation.”[32]
I summarize Reinhartz’s project in order to show the similarities and differences between her four readings and the readings upon which we will embark in this project. Instead of reading the entire Fourth Gospel from the perspective of four different readers, we will be reading one pericope of the Fourth Gospel from the perspective of a reader who seeks to use the Gospel as a resource for praying the question of human suffering.
Unlike Reinhartz, we will not be concerned with trying to befriend the implied author (the Beloved Disciple). Instead we will be concerned with encountering the one about whom the implied author wrote the Gospel: the Johannine Jesus.
Sandra Schneiders argues that the Fourth Gospel functions for the reader as Jesus’s signs functioned for his contemporaries. Just as the signs in John function in order to lead those who witness them to belief and new life so too does the Gospel itself function in order to bring the reader to belief and new life. In this way, the Jesus whom the real reader encounters in John challenges, teaches and invites the reader to believe just as he challenged, taught and urged his original followers. Disciples and other literary characters invite the reader into the story in order to be transformed by the encounter with the Johannine Jesus.
Schneiders insists that “only those things that ‘are written’ in the Gospel, and as they are written in the Gospel, are necessary and sufficient for later disciples, who will come to believe through their reading (or hearing) of the text and thus become and remain disciples of Jesus just as truly as his first disciples.”[33] Therefore, the vast spatial and temporal distance between the earthly Jesus and today’s reader does not prove to be a disadvantage to the reader. Instead, the reader is invited, by and through the text, to have a genuine and authentic encounter with the Johannine Jesus, who prays for the reader (17:20) and even seems to understand the spatial and temporal distance as an advantage to the reader and an opportunity for deeper faith: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29).
According to Schneiders, the immediacy of the Johannine Jesus to the reader “is very important because it locates the revelatory encounter with God in Jesus, not in one’s experience of the words and actions of the earthly Jesus (which was available only to a few followers in first-century Palestine) but in the engagement with the Gospel text (which is open to all people of all time).”[34] A transformative encounter with the Johannine Jesus is available to all who are willing to faithfully engage the Gospel text. In this project, we will faithfully and critically engage the Gospel text in order to highlight the potential for transformative encounter, specifically a transformative encounter that leads the reader out of a blame-bound existence and into the victim-free abundant life. Locating the revelatory encounter with the Johannine Jesus within the text does not however, dismiss the importance of the life of the earthly Jesus, which inspired the text in the first place. “Revelation,” Schneiders explains, “is rooted in the life of Jesus in Palestine in the first century. But it occurs in the faith life of believers in the community shaped by the text of scripture.”[35] In this dissertation, we will see how the text of the Fourth Gospel can shape, inform and transform the reader.
In this way, the Johannine Jesus can do for the reader what the Beloved Disciple could not do Reinhartz, who wrote, “Although I have been able to visit with him in and through his Gospel, to address the questions I have to him, to vent my anger at aspects of his narrative, and to strive for some understanding, he remains fixed within his text without the means to respond, react, or engage with me in words other than those that represent the unchanged content of the Fourth Gospel.”[36] Though the words of the Johannine Jesus are indeed still “fixed” within the text, the multi-layered meaning of his symbolic words and actions remain broad enough to “respond, react, or engage” with the reader who addresses questions, vents anger and strives for understanding.
In this project, we will apply a reader-response criticism to the text but a “conservative” reader-response criticism which means that we “believe there is something in the text prior to the act of reading—gaps, indeterminacies, instructions, flags, and signals, for example—that calls for and governs their response. The reader follows invitations; like a polite guest being shown the narrative sights, the reader obliges the author by catching the cues and looking in the right direction.”[37]
The literary term for the ideal polite guest who follows all of the author’s cues and invitations is “the implied reader.”
The Implied Reader
If the implied author is the author whom the reader constructs with his or her textually-informed imagination in the act of reading then the implied reader is the reader whom the author constructs with his or her imagination in the act of writing. As Culpepper writes, “The implied reader is defined by the text as the one who performs all the mental moves required to enter into the narrative world and respond to it as the implied author intends.”[38] Developed as a literary concept by Wolfgang Iser, [39] the implied reader remains intratextual, just like the implied author, as the diagram shows above.
In other words, the implied author and the implied reader can be ascertained and constructed by the text alone. Staley explains that both the implied author and the implied reader are “stable entities” which “do not change with each new reading—only with changes in medium and linguistic signification.”[40] However, Staley also acknowledges that both implied authors and implied readers “can rarely if ever be completely reconstructed by any reader, even upon multiple readings.”[41]
As readers, we can only get into the imagination of the real author (who constructs an implied reader in writing) insofar as the text itself allows. We might consider which of Reinhartz’s four reader roles (compliant, resistant, sympathetic, engaged) correlates best with the implied reader we can construct from the text. Although it is likely that Reinhartz’s compliant and sympathetic readings resonate more with the posture of the implied reader than do the resistant and engaged readings, we ultimately cannot draw any final conclusions. The implied reader, like the implied author, “can rarely if ever be completely reconstructed by any reader.” What we can describe with more accuracy is the contemporary reader today along with his or her interests, issues and questions. We can also see how the text’s invitations and cues can engage the contemporary reader with his or her issues and questions.
In this project, the contemporary reader will take the seat of the implied reader (insofar as the implied reader can be constructed) and ride through chapters 9 and 10 of the Fourth Gospel, following textual cues and directions, in order to see how the Gospel (and specifically the Johannine Jesus) responds to the contemporary reader’s question, specifically the question of suffering. In order to take the seat of the implied reader, we will need to engage at least four literary dynamics within the text, dynamics that are most often investigated by narrative critics: characters and characterization, intertextuality, intratextuality and symbolism.
The Narratee
If we identify the narrator as the Beloved Disciple as Staley proposes, then the narratee is the one to whom the Beloved Disciple speaks or narrates. The difference between the implied author is subtle and complex as we examined above while the difference between the implied reader and the narratee can be so subtle that Culpepper admits that in John, the two are “scarcely distinguishable.”[42]
The real author or authors create a text with an implied author who speaks to the reader through the voice of the narrator while the real reader attempts to take the seat of the implied reader by following textual cues, which includes stepping into the role of the narratee, the one to whom the narrator speaks.
The voice of the narrator becomes apparent when the narratee is addressed in explanatory asides that appear to interrupt the flow of the narrative. For instance, in 9:7, the narrator explains to the narratee that “Siloam” means “Sent.” The narrator offers another similar explanatory aside in 20:16. Also, in verses 19:35 and 20:31, the narrator explicitly addresses the narratee in the second person plural. The reader is invited to take on the role of the implied reader by taking on the role of the narratee, which may require a suspension of disbelief. Culpepper writes,
For the contemporary reader, reading the gospel may become an exercise in pretense, pretending to know and think what the evangelist assumed his first-century readers knew and thought and pretending to believe that water could be changed into wine and a man born blind could be given sight by obeying the command to wash clay and spittle from his eyes. Obviously there are different kinds of pretense or willing suspension of disbelief that are required of the gospel’s actual, contemporary readers.[43]
Although the real contemporary reader approaches the text with his or her own question of suffering, in order to be faithful to the text, the reader needs to takes on the role of the implied reader as best as he or she can, which means taking on the role of the narratee as best as he or she can. We will attempt to do this by paying attention to the following literary dynamics: characters, intertextuality, intratextuality and symbolism.
[1] Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 1:372.
[2] Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 1:372.
[3] Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:543.
[4] Daniel Frayer-Griggs, “Spittle, Clay, and Creation in John 9:6 and Some Dead Sea Scrolls” Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 3 (2013): 659 – 670
[5] According to Eusebius, Irenaeus recalls learning from Polycarp as young boy, writing, “The blessed Polycarp sat and disputed…how he reported his intercourse with John and with others who had seen the Lord, how he remembered their words, and what were the things concerning the Lord which he had heard from them.” Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.20.5-7
[6] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.5-7
[7] See R. Alan Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee: The Life of a Legend (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2000) for a more thorough discussion.
[8] Martin Hengel, The Johannine Question (University of Michigan: SCM Press, 1989)
[9] See J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1979) and Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
[10] Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John, edited by Francis J. Moloney (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 78.
[11] Leon Morris, Studies in the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1969), 142.
[12] See B.F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (Grand Rapids MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1971), v – xxv.
[13] John A. T. Robinson, The Priority of John, ed. J. F. Coakley (London: SCM Press, 1985), 103.
[14] Robinson, The Priority of John, 122.
[15] Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 70-71
[16] Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John (New York: Continuum, 2001), 21.
[17] Culpepper, Anatomy, 16.
[18] Culpepper, Anatomy, 47.
[19] Chatman, Story and Discourse, 148. Cf. also Genette, Narrative Discourse, 228; and Bal, “The Narrating and the Focalizing,” 237. As cited by Staley, The Print’s First Kiss, 13.
[20] Culpepper, Anatomy, 16.
[21] Staley, Print’s First Kiss, 39.
[22] Culpepper, Anatomy Preface to Paperback, x.
[23] Staley, Kiss, 39.
[24] Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, 279. As cited by Staley, Kiss, 40.
[25] Sternberg uses Xenophon as an example one using the “trick of double reference” as he “speaks of himself as ‘he’ in the capacity as agent and ‘I’ in the capacity as restricted narrator.’” Sternberg, Expositional Modes, 279.
[26] Culpepper, Anatomy 212. Culpepper briefly surveys the hypotheses of Johannine scholars concerning the first readers on p. 211.
[27] Culpepper, Anatomy, 237.
[28] Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple, 79.
[29] Reinhartz, 82.
[30] Reinhartz, 158.
[31] Reinhartz, 162.
[32] Reinhartz, 167.
[33] Sandra Schneiders, Written, 10
[34] Sandra Schneiders, Written, 10
[35] Sandra Schneiders, Written, 10
[36] Reinhartz, 162.
[37] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Reader in New Testament Interpretation” in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 318.
[38] Culpepper, Anatomy, 7.
[39] Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, 34
[40] Staley, Print’s First Kiss, 37.
[41] Staley, Print’s First Kiss, 37.
[42] Culpepper, Anatomy, 8.
[43] Culpepper, Anatomy, 207.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 