Introduction

It has long been recognized that any study of the Gospels must incorporate to some degree a detailed understanding of the origins and traditions of early Christianity, whether explicitly or implicitly. The modern commentary almost always begins by discussing the introductory material before discussing the text proper. This approach is simply assumed. The end result is certainly affected in principle by the starting point. This is not to say that any understanding of the text is predetermined a priori and that the text itself is left helpless to the scholar's dissecting and analyzing tools; on the contrary, the text is often used as the very tool itself by which one draws theories by which it need be analyzed. Thus, any attempt to understand the Gospels and their meaning must consider thoroughly the means by which an understanding of what they are and how they came to be directly affects how one discovers what they mean.

The danger with the above is obvious: where one starts can undoubtedly determine where one will end. Too often a particular understanding of Christian origins can malign a text so that it no longer reveals the meaning most appropriate to early Christian belief and the text within which it dwells. In order to prevent such a mishap, it seems appropriate to step back from the detailed aspects of current research to see if the picture being painted by modern scholars is appropriately describing the texts as we now have them.

Introduction

After spending four chapters setting the context of the Gospel community debate and challenging the current community readings of the Gospels, it is time to apply our proposal to the FG. It was Gail O'Day who pointed out that one of the weaknesses in Martyn's reconstruction of the JComm was that his reading strategy

The question of reading the Gospels is the key issue in the Gospel community debate. But until now the debate has been entirely theoretical. The various conferences and article interchanges have only dealt with the exegetical principles and not exegetical practice. The newness of the debate has required more in-depth discussion and clarification, as this book has attempted to do in the first four chapters. But now we must turn to exegetical practice. Before we enter into exegesis, a brief summary of our proposed reading strategy is in order.

Our proposed reading strategy assumes, at the broadest level, that the Gospels were written for an indefinite audience, not an individual “church” or network of churches disconnected from the rest of the early Christian movement.

No discussion of the interpretation of the Gospels can avoid discussing the Gospels as text. But the text does not exist in isolation; the Gospels were created in a social and religious milieu. For the form critic, the social environment controlled the literary creation and influenced the meaning of the text. Form criticism was sociological in its very nature and literary genre was considered a social category of communication. But as we have seen thus far, it is difficult to derive the socio-historical background of the Gospels. Not only can the sociological background only be determined in vague ways, but the text itself must be considered as its own living entity. This is stated most clearly by the social historian Abraham Malherbe:

Nearsly thirty years ago Robert Kysar did a complete survey of scholarship on the Gospel of John. When summarizing the results of the investigation Kysar noted that one of Johannine scholarship's recent accomplishments was that “Contemporary Johannine criticism has confirmed that the gospel is a community's document.” Kysar claimed that the inclinations long found in scholarly literature have confirmed in a substantial manner that the FG must be interpreted as the document of a community:

Such a statement describes well the paradigm that this study has attempted to correct. It is notable that nearly thirty years later Kysar has moved in the opposite direction. Concerning the importance of knowing “as much about the [historical] occasion as possible,” Kysar now concludes:

The quest for the early Christian “community”

The quest for the historical Jesus that occupied much of the nineteenth century largely gave way to the quest for the early church in the twentieth century. As we saw in chapter 1, the focus on the communities of the early church, though undefined, was considered by the initial form critics to be the only historical remnant left to be sought. The historical results determined by the form critics were in many ways sociological in nature. The basic methodology used by Bultmann and the other early form critics was an idea taken from the sociology of literature, namely that certain types of literature or genres (Gattungen) are bound to and shaped by specific types of social life-settings (Sitze im Leben). Literary genre is a social category of communication; the questions being asked of the text were sociological. The communities in which the Gospel texts were created had various functions which determined the forms and overall use of the Jesus tradition and its eventual Gospel text form.

Although the initial sociological emphasis in form criticism looked promising, the sociological potential was never developed. Thomas Best argues that, “it cannot be denied that even form criticism, with all its talk of the Sitz-im-Leben (life-setting) of the text, was a literary and theological discipline which produced hardly any concrete historical, social, or economic information about the traditions which it studied”.

After looking at the Gospel as a text, we now turn to its reader. We argued in chapter 2 that the language of the FG is not “insider” or antilanguage and that the Gospel “community” should be pictured as much broader than the sectarian-like groups normally supposed. We argued in chapter 3 that the very nature of an early Christian “Gospel” and its relation to the bios genre cannot define the audience of the text, but certainly make a local “community” reading rare or specialized. We also critiqued Martyn's two-level reading of John and presented a case for a “literal” reading of the Gospel text appropriate to the first century. But what type of audience does the narrative expect?

Narrative criticism has often been used by historical critics to define more clearly the audience a text would have expected. Of course, the recovery of the audience of a text is immediately faced with a dilemma: it is easier to determine if a text was written for a local, homogeneous group rather than a general audience, than it is to distinguish between a general (non-localized) audience and a local group that is heterogeneous. Our focus, then, will be specifically on noting possible distinctions in the text between a local, heterogeneous audience and a general audience. Thus, since even “community” interpreters assume the JComm was heterogeneous, we will also begin with that assumption; for a heterogeneous audience is congenial to our proposed audience.