Befriending The Beloved Disciple A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John [Paperback]

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.

AcknowledgmentsChapter1. Prologue2. Reading as Relationship3. The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple4. The Beloved Disciple as Mentor: A Compliant Reading of the Fourth Gospel5. The Beloved Disciple as Opponent: A Resistant Reading of the Fourth Gospel6. The Beloved Disciple as Colleague: A Sympathetic Reading of the Fourth Gospe7. The Beloved Disciple as Other: An Engaged Reading of thel3,