Gospel of Glory by Richard Bauckham

Author:Richard Bauckham [Bauckham, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006710, REL006100, Bible. John—Theology
ISBN: 9781441227089
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Discipleship: Levels of Meaning in 1:35–46

It is widely recognized that among literary devices characteristic of the Gospel of John is double entendre—words (or larger semantic units) that have two different levels of meaning. But this general phenomenon varies considerably in character and use, and we should be cautious of generalizations about it.[30] One well-recognized category is that of misunderstanding. Typically, a character misunderstands what Jesus says, taking in a literal or material sense what Jesus means in a metaphorical or spiritual sense.[31] There are also many examples of irony.[32] Typically, a character says something that the reader sees or should see is untrue in the most obvious sense, the sense that the character intends, but is really true at another level. In irony, the meaning at the higher level, the true meaning, is “contradictory, incongruous, or incompatible with” the meaning at the lower level, the apparent meaning.[33] We shall later observe examples of irony in 1:37–46. Both misunderstanding and irony involve two levels of meaning, one of which the reader (following what the implied author explicitly or implicitly indicates) should reject as untrue or misleading.

The phenomenon to which I want to draw attention in this section does not involve opposition between the two levels of meaning. There is one meaning that is correct at the level of the narrative and another level of further meaning that does not contradict or cancel the literal level but adds an additional dimension of meaning for the perceptive reader. The relationship between the two levels is one not of contrast, but of analogy. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is more like irony than it is like allegory or symbol, where one thing stands for something else. In the phenomenon that we shall observe in 1:35–46 the same words have two levels of meaning, as they do in irony, but without incompatibility. I also need to distinguish this phenomenon from the “two-level” reading of the Gospel that J. Louis Martyn introduced into Johannine studies, according to which at one level the narrative tells the story of Jesus during his earthly lifetime while at another level it tells the story of the “Johannine community” at (or up to and including) the time when the Gospel was written.[34] Ostensibly at least, on this kind of reading of the Gospel as portraying the history and situation of the Johannine community, each level of the narrative has its own integrity, though interpreters tend to assume that the history of the community is really the controlling narrative that has generated this particular version of the story of Jesus as a kind of epiphenomenon. In the “Johannine community” reading of parts of the Gospel, the relationship between the two levels of the Gospel can be quite literalistic (e.g., the Samaritans who believe in Jesus in chap. 4 represent a stage of the community’s history when Samaritans were converted and the community was located in Samaria) but in an inevitably very partial way. This “community reading” has been cogently criticized.[35] I mention it only to distinguish it from the way I propose reading 1:35–46.

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