"Do You Love Me?" A Narrative-Critical Reappraisal of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in John 21:15-17 (Essay‪)‬

Over the centuries, a great number of readers have grappled with the question of whether the alternation of verbs ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) that appear in the mouths of Jesus and Peter in their last conversation in the Gospel of John (21:15-23) is narratively significant. In recent times, the conclusion that this alternation represents John's stylistic preference for using different but synonymous words (rather than repeating the same word) has emerged as something like a settled consensus. (1) The mortar of this consensus is the insistence that any attempts to draw a dependable semantic distinction between [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] are doomed to failure whether in Greek literature generally, (2) the Septuagint, (3) the NT, (4) or John's Gospel itself. (5) While the dissenting opinion--that the alternation of verbal forms in John 21:15-17 is not merely one of style but of substance--was championed by British scholarship of the nineteenth century, support for this position has continued to dwindle in the face of the apparently irrefutable evidence that the Gospel of John regularly deploys synonyms for the purpose of stylistic variation. (6)