Genre Bending in the Fourth Gospel‪.‬

Contemporary Johannine scholarship displays remarkable methodological diversity. There remain historical critics, interested in the ways in which texts such as John are embedded within, reflect the values of, and interact with the context of the ancient world. Some attend to the structural features of ancient society that provide the framework within which the Gospel might have meaning. (1) Others wrestle with the text's diachronic development. (2) Some scholars, such as our colleagues who are inaugurating a consultation on "Jesus, John, and History," pursue the historical-critical quest to what other colleagues would judge to be a Quixotic end. Still others worry not so much about the historical Jesus lying behind the text as about a sectarian community, defining itself through the text, against a dominant group. (3) Some of our colleagues thus do business as usual, or as it has usually been done for the last two hundred years, with, of course, ever greater methodological sophistication. Others say that there may be a different and perhaps better way to analyze the genius of the text. Some are interested in how the Gospel in its final form works in various liberating or oppressive ways, negatively, to ground Christian anti-Judaism, (4) to valorize and yet marginalize women, (5) or positively, to ground an egalitarian community striving for the liberation of its members. (6) At least since the work of Alan Culpepper, (7) Johannine scholars, like their counterparts working on other early Christian narratives, have focused their attention on the literary dynamics of the Gospel, asking how its symbolism functions, (8) how it develops its characters, (9) works its ironic ways, (10) uses narrative rhetorically, (11) and spins out its complex, often dramatic, (12) plot. (13) Some colleagues have moved beyond formal analysis to a more playful, yet often insightful, engagement with the text and with the lives of its interpreters, offering a reading of John among the missions of the Southwest (14) or in the places where bodies are dissected and built, from the butcher shops of Limerick to the treadmills of God's gym. (15) The Fourth Gospel, in other words, is a microcosm of the discipline of NT studies, itself but a segment of the larger world of humanistic scholarship.