Ecclesial imagery in the Johannine passion account

Having exposed the Johannine passion account to practical and genre criticism (the two aspects of the synchronic approach to NT narratives), we now come to the first diachronic approach to John's story. When we approach a text such as John 18–19, narrative criticism is concerned not only with literary qualities and deep generic structures, but also with the function of John's narrative Christology in its original, proposed social milieu. I recognize that the task of identifying the social function of narrative has sometimes been a rather arbitrary and subjective exercise. One of the problems with Johannine redaction criticism is that it tends to allegorize details of the gospel into incidents from the community's reconstructed history. In chapter 3, I indicated the circularity of this thinking, and the disrespect for Jesus-history which such approaches entail. Instead of treating John's story as an allegory of community history, I suggested a more cautious method in which rigorous literary analysis and sociological explanation work together in harmony. For example, instead of regarding John 9 as an allegory of an incident in the life of John's community (in which a Christian minister runs foul of the Jamnia edict by healing a Jew and leading him to Christ), I would want to begin with a close analysis of the language in the narrative and then infer its plausible sociological function in the Johannine Sitz im Leben.