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Immortal Longings in Sermone Humili: A Study of John 4.5–26

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Laurence Cantwell
Affiliation:
South Glamorgan Inst. of Higher Education, CyncoedCardiff CF2 6XD

Extract

From those high fountains where now she drinks her fill of the waters of life the woman of Samaria may permit herself a wry smile at the curiously contorted ways in which some of her modern commentators re-tell her story. It is not that they take the incident at Jacob's well too seriously. In a way they do not take it seriously enough. Those few minutes of conversation by the well-side were for her the beginning of the new and abundant life which she now lives to all eternity — and nothing could be more serious and important than that. No, it is rather that the conversation is given the wrong sort of seriousness. It is invested with an earnest solemnity of which the event itself was entirely free. I fear she hardly recognises herself in the pasteboard caricature which is held up to our inspection by over-earnest, perhaps overlearned, exegetes.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1983

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References

page 74 note 1 Mimesis (Berne, 1946)Google Scholar, Epilogue. The substantial point is made in C.2, but every one of the twenty chapters corroborates and documents it.

page 74 note 2 Wilder, Amos N. makes a passing reference to it in his Early Christian Rhetoric (S.C.M., 1964), p. 56Google Scholar, but the point is never really developed in the rest of the book.

page 75 note 3 In Joannem (Tr. 15).

page 75 note 4 Gesammelte Aufsatze, II, 235f. Quoted by Barrett, C. K., The Gospel according to St John (2nded., S.P.C.K, 1978).Google Scholar

page 75 note 5 St John (Penguin, 1968) in loc.

page 76 note 6 C. K. Barrett, op. cit., in loc.

page 76 note 7 cf. Macdonald, John, The Theology of the Samaritans (S.C.M., 1964), pp. 3137.Google Scholar

page 77 note 8 C. K. Barrett, op. cit., p. 197.

page 79 note 9 Samaritan law on monogamy was even stricter than Jewish. Divorce was virtually unknown (cf. Encyclopaedia Judaica, ‘Samaritanism’).

page 79 note 10 Dodd, C. H., The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge, 1963), p. 313.Google Scholar

page 79 note 11 This is sufficient reason, even if there were no other, for the implausibility of John Bligh's suggestion that the woman's words in v. 17 could be read in a seductive sense (cf. Heythrop Journal 3.335–6).

page 81 note 12 Kirk, G. S., Heracleitus, the Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge, 1954), Fr. 2.Google Scholar

page 82 note 13 Commentary on St John's Gospel in loc. (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis ix, Turnhout, 1969).

page 84 note 14 De Cwitale Dei 19.13.