Abstract
Fifty years after the publication of C. H. Dodd’s Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, sixty after his The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, this book offers a rich engagement with Dodd’s work and influence. Although overshadowed somewhat by the German giant who was his contemporary, namely Rudolf Bultmann, this Oxford-educated Englishman has been one of the most significant scholars of the Fourth Gospel in the twentieth century. Unlike Bultmann, he never published a commentary on the Fourth Gospel, but his two great monographs on it have earned their place among the ‘classics’ of Johannine scholarship. His legacy is felt in every major area of the field. Historically, he challenged the academy to reconsider John’s relationship to the Synoptics and to value his gospel as a separate source of plausibly historical tradition. In literary analysis, he drew attention to John’s symbolic and parabolic discourse, although focusing on its historical ‘background’ for interpreting it. Here as elsewhere his selection of ‘background’ material is vulnerable to criticism: critics justly claim that it is skewed toward questionably relevant comparanda, such as Greek philosophy and rabbinic Judaism, while remaining too little touched by the newly emerging material from Qumran. Theologically, he coined the term ‘realised eschatology’, which has become one of the major terms for analysing the eschatology of the New Testament in general, and above all that of the gospel of John.
The fourteen essays collected in the present volume engage with Dodd’s work at many levels. Firstly, they challenge us to a better understanding of his method and approach. Thus, Tom Thatcher’s introductory essay seeks to do what Dodd never did: namely to set out explicitly the method by which Dodd arrived at his conclusions about the historical tradition in the Fourth Gospel. He articulates this as a series of criteria or ‘tests’ that Dodd applies to evaluate whether John has drawn material from an independent oral tradition. Other contributions seek to locate Dodd more fully in the debates of his own day. Craig Koester compares his approach with Bultmann’s, recognising Dodd’s interpretation of Christianity as ‘progressive’ and historical, Bultmann’s as ‘paradoxical’ and historically elusive. John Painter’s wide-ranging and personal retrospective emphasises the dialogue between Dodd and other great Johannine scholars of his generation: not only Bultmann, but also Edwyn Hoskyns, Noel Davey, and Painter’s own supervisor, C. K. Barrett. Painter’s dissertation in 1967 contrasted Bultmann and Dodd; today his reflection on Dodd finds him more deeply resonant with other scholars than ever. Not only does he recognise far more similarity between Dodd and Bultmann than he once did, but also a more profound influence of Dodd on Barrett, while J. D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered (2003) is described as ‘in many ways a massive expansion of Dodd’s approach to the historical Jesus’.
Several essays in the volume seek to clarify how Dodd’s work contributes to and compares with movements in scholarship that have come after, such as narrative criticism (Oscar Cullmann); literary approaches to symbolism (Jan van der Watt) or the use of rabbinic sources in studying the New Testament (Catrin H. Williams). Many others focus on offering new insights into the Fourth Gospel itself, stimulated by questions that arise through rereading Dodd’s work. Thus Jaime Clark-Soles draws on recent discussion of ‘viewpoint’ in characterisation to argue against Dodd that Nicodemus is a major character and indeed personality in the Fourth Gospel. Michael Theobald takes up and expands upon questions Dodd raised concerning the Passion and Easter Narrative (PEN), in order to assert, more confidently than Dodd ever did, that the pre-Johannine PEN did not contain a cult aetiology, and indeed that there was only ever one ancient cult aetiology, namely that passed on by Paul, which was secondarily combined with the PEN. This interpretation is only possible when one takes seriously, as Dodd did, the Fourth Gospel as a distinct source for the history of the early church.
There is no synopsis of Dodd’s legacy, which might help newer (or busier) students, and there are aspects of his influence that are understated in comparison with others (for example, his emphasis on Hellenistic Greek philosophical religion appears rarely and only as a subordinate theme). Those are small omissions, however, and the book as a whole is precisely the kind of essay collection that constitutes a vital and worthy ‘engagement’ with a respected scholar. Great Johannine scholars of our own day reassess his work closely, evaluate his influence, and above all continue to engage in lively conversation with him. In doing so, they open up a debate with historiographical depth and contemporary edge. The collection of essays that results is valuable for the study both of the Fourth Gospel and of its historiography.