Befriending The Beloved Disciple

A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John

Adele Reinhartz

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780826413192
• eBook ISBN: 9781441125224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Adele Reinhartz has been studying and teaching the Gospel of John for many years. Earlier, she chose to ignore the love/hate relationship that the book provokes in her, a Jew, and took refuge in an "objective" historical-critical approach. At this stage her relationship to the Gospel was not so much a friendship as a business relationship. No longer willing to ignore the negative portrayal of Jews and Judaism in the text, nor the insight that her own Jewish identity inevitably does play a role in her work as an exegete, Reinhartz here explores the Fourth Gospel through the approach known as "ethical criticism, " which is based on the metaphorical notion of the book as "friend"--not "an easy, unquestioning companionship, " but the kind of honest relationship in which ethical considerations are addressed, not avoided. In a book as multilayered as the Gospel itself, Reinhartz engages in 4 different "readings" of the Fourth Gospel: compliant, resistant, sympathetic, and engaged. Each approach views the Beloved Disciple differently: as mentor, opponent, colleague, and as "other." In the course of each of these readings, she elucidates the three narrative levels that interpenetrate the Gospel: the historical, the cosmological, and the ecclesiological. In the latter, Reinhartz deals at length with the so-called expulsion theory, the dominant scholarly notion that the Johannine community, which included believers of Jewish, Gentile, and Samaritan origins, engaged in a prolonged and violent controversy with the local Jewish community, culminating in a "traumatic expulsion from the synagogue."

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1. Prologue
• CHAPTER 2. Reading as Relationship
• CHAPTER 3. The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple
• CHAPTER 4. The Beloved Disciple as Mentor: A Compliant Reading of the Fourth Gospel
• CHAPTER 5. The Beloved Disciple as Opponent: A Resistant Reading of the Fourth Gospel
• CHAPTER 6. The Beloved Disciple as Colleague: A Sympathetic Reading of the Fourth Gospel
• CHAPTER 7. The Beloved Disciple as Other: An Engaged Reading of the Fourth Gospel
• CHAPTER 8. Conclusion: Befriending the Beloved Disciple
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF ANCIENT LITERATURE
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS
• INDEX OF NAMES