Abstract
This article, and its sequel ‘Character Reconstruction in the New Testament (2): The Practice’, explore how character can be reconstructed from the New Testament text. There is no consensus about the approach to character in either literary theory or biblical studies. The dominant view is that most New Testament characters are like ancient Graeco-Roman stock characters. This article challenges such an understanding and instead offers a comprehensive, non-reductionist theory for the analysis, classification, and evaluation of characters in New Testament narrative. The subsequent article will show how the theory works in practice.
Keywords
1. Introduction
People are naturally interested in people and their stories. Every story has characters that drive the plot; otherwise, there is no story. As we read a story, we inevitably piece together characters from the text in order to follow the story. So we all engage in character reconstruction. While some readers do so intuitively, others use a particular method or approach. I am in the latter group and have two reasons for seeking to formalize the process of character reconstruction. First, since every reader engages in character reconstruction during the reading process, it is pertinent to ask how we go about it. Character in the New Testament has been the subject of literary-critical study since the 1970s, but there has never been consensus on method—neither in contemporary literary theory nor in biblical studies. Even though there has been a surge of interest in New Testament characters in recent years, it has not led to a consensus on how to approach characters. 2 We are still faced with John Darr’s challenge from 1992 that “it is important to ‘do something about’ the theoretical issues involved in characterization, rather than just ‘talking about’ characters”. 3
Second, a uniform approach to character reconstruction is beneficial because it enables the comparison of characters both within and across narratives. If we use an open-ended approach, where people choose from a plurality of methods and approaches, we would get an interesting set of character reconstructions but no common basis for comparison, debate, and evaluation. 4 I will argue that a uniform approach to character reconstruction is necessary (or at least beneficial) if we want to advance the discourse on this topic. My argument unfolds in two articles. In this article, I will explain my theory of character reconstruction (section 2) and position it in relation to competing approaches (section 3). In the next article, I will show how my theory works using a sample study of Jesus’ mother in the canonical Gospels.
2. The Theory of Character Reconstruction
Many scholars perceive character in the Hebrew bible, where characters can be complex and develop, to be radically different from that in ancient Greek literature, where characters are supposedly consistent ethical types. Most scholars also sharply distinguish between modern fiction with its psychological, individualistic approach to character, and ancient characterization where character lacks personality or individuality. When it comes to New Testament narrative, the majority of scholars regard most characters as “flat” or “types”. Even though a number of scholars have come to see greater complexity in the New Testament characters, 5 much of the stereotypical thinking remains. In particular, the influence of Aristotelian stock characters on New Testament scholars remains significant. 6
I have three objections to viewing New Testament characters through an Aristotelian lens. First, such an approach neglects the possible or probable influence of Hebraic characterization on the New Testament authors’ construction of characters. Geoff Webb, for example, notes that while Graeco-Roman characters are often uncomplicated and in a “state of being”, Old Testament characters are usually in a “process of learning”, and contends that Markan characterization (which is his focus) follows the Old Testament pattern. 7 Second, Aristotle’s view of character in Greek tragedy is not representative of ancient Greek literature as a whole since ancient Greek characters could be more complex (see below). Third, many “minor characters” (characters that occur only in a single passage) in New Testament narratives are unlike Graeco-Roman stock characters and display various degrees of “roundness”. Moreover, while the audience of a Greek drama evaluates the protagonist as a model to be emulated or avoided, readers of New Testament narratives are invited to evaluate the minor characters. To put it differently, whereas the minor characters in Greek drama exist for the sake of the protagonist (they simply aid the characterization of the protagonist), in the New Testament they exist for the sake of the reader. 8
I have questioned these prevailing views and developed a different approach to character in New Testament narrative. What follows is a synopsis of my comprehensive theory of character in New Testament narrative. 9 I began by examining concepts of character in ancient Hebrew and Greek literature as well as modern narrative, arguing that although there are differences in characterization, these are differences in emphases rather than kind. It is therefore better to speak of degrees of characterization along a continuum. 10 Both ancient and modern literature can portray flat and round, static and dynamic characters, although in modern narrative character is far more developed and “psychologized”. 11 I then articulated a comprehensive three-dimensional approach to character in New Testament narrative, consisting of (i) character in text and context; (ii) character analysis and classification; and (iii) character evaluation and significance.
2.1. Character in Text and Context
The first component of my approach to character reconstruction is to study character in text and context, using information in the text and other sources.
12
The truism “there are no characters without a text” would indicate that characters are limited to the world of the text and therefore the interpreter’s character reconstruction is based solely on the information in the text. However, I think that this is not an accurate inference. While narrative critics tend to limit themselves to the text, I suggest that sometimes we should go beyond the text for the reconstruction of character. Usually, characters do not have “lives” beyond the text and hence we reconstruct character from the information in the text. However, many scholars regard the narrative material of the New Testament as non-fictional in nature and as referring to real events and people in history. This means we can fill the gaps in the narrative from our knowledge of the socio-historical context of the first-century Mediterranean world (rather than our imagination). Petri Mehrenlahti and Raimo Hakola sum up well why non-fictional narratives must be seen in context: Because a non-fictional narrative claims to refer to events and circumstances of the “real” world, it is natural that the readers try to fill any gaps the narrative may have, making use of all available information about the events and circumstances in concern. What readers of a non-fictional narrative think of a character depends not only on what the narrator reveals but also on what else the readers may know about the person who is portrayed as a character in the narrative . . . The natural way to read a Gospel would be to make connections between character groups of the story and the “real” groups which those characters intend to portray…An “intrinsic,” text-centred approach does not seem to match properly the nature of the Gospels as non-fictional narratives.
13
This is an important new direction in narrative criticism, within which character reconstruction is a component. Too often, narrative critics restrict themselves to the text of the Gospels and the narrative world these evoke, effectively reading the Gospels as fictional narratives disconnected from reality.
At the same time, in presenting their characters, the New Testament authors may have left out, changed, or added certain details from their sources—as historians and biographers often do. For example, John the Baptist appears in the Synoptic Gospels as a rough-hewn figure preaching a baptism of repentance, whereas John’s Gospel presents him as an eloquent witness to Jesus. On the subject of the Gospels, if they belong to the genre of the ancient Greco-Roman biography, as many scholars contend today, 14 they need not be viewed as “objective, factual” accounts akin to courtroom transcripts. The Gospels would be expected to represent accurately the ipsissima vox rather than the ipsissima verba Jesu, so the speech of characters would often be paraphrases rather than the literal words. While the Gospel authors may have exercised this literary freedom, what matters is that the reader need not doubt their credibility; they would not have created fictitious characters. 15 Thus, the historicity of the characters in the Gospels does not exclude the possibility that the authors used a legitimate degree of freedom to portray them. Besides, the Gospel authors were theologians (rather than historians in a strict sense of the word). They wrote from a post-Easter perspective and interpreted the pre-Easter events with a specific agenda in mind, that is, they reflected on the Christ event and articulated its significance and implications for the early church.
It is not necessary or right to assume that the reader only has the text s/he is reading for the reconstruction of characters. If the reader also knows other texts where the same character features, the reader’s reconstruction of a character is influenced by multiple texts. Consequently, we must consider (i) the kind of reader we suppose; (ii) the sources such reader has access to; and (iii) how these sources should be used in character reconstruction. John Darr recognizes that the reader one postulates determines at least in part how characters are reconstructed. On the one hand, Darr admits that literary critics likely create readers in their own image, that is, the reader is usually a heuristic construct of the modern critic. On the other hand, he also values the reconstruction of a text-specific reader, that is, an approximation of the intended reader with a degree of knowledge of the socio-cultural conventions assumed by the original author. Darr’s reader, then, is a heuristic hybrid, a fusion of ancient and modern cultural horizons. 16 In line with Darr’s hybrid reader, I use the concept of a “plausible historically informed modern reader”, that is, a modern reader who has an adequate knowledge of the first-century world and can give a plausible explanation for the ancient sources s/he presumes. 17 For example, I suggest that it is reasonable to assume that a reader of John’s Gospel knows the Old Testament and Mark’s Gospel. 18 This does not mean that s/he can simply read the Johannine characters through a Markan lens; rather, her or his reading of the Johannine characters is informed by a prior understanding of them from a Markan perspective. We shall see in our sample study of Jesus’ mother that the Johannine narrative partly fits with what we know about her from the Markan narrative but that John also supplies information that complements and even deviates from that of Mark.
2.2. Character Analysis and Classification
The second component in character reconstruction is to analyze and classify the New Testament characters along three continua (complexity, development, inner life), and plot the resulting character on a continuum of degree of characterization (from agent to type to personality to individuality). 19 Let me briefly explain. I analyze and classify the New Testament characters, using the non-reductionist classification of Yosef Ewen, who advocates three continua or axes upon which a character may be situated:
Complexity: characters range from those displaying a single trait to those displaying a complex web of traits, with varying degrees of complexity in between.
Development: characters range from those who show no development to those who are fully developed. Development is not simply the reader’s becoming aware of an additional trait of a character later in the narrative or a character’s progress, for example, in his or her understanding of Jesus. Instead, development is revealed in the character’s ability to surprise the reader, when a newly-found trait replaces another or does not fit neatly into the existing set of traits, implying that the character has changed.
Penetration into the inner life: characters range from those who are seen only from the outside (their minds remain opaque) to those whose consciousness is presented from within. 20
I mark each continuum by degree, creating a sliding scale instead of a polar scale. 21 This will help us to decide where we can position a character on each continuum. Thus instead of having a continuum of complexity with two opposite poles “simple” and “complex”, I will use one that indicates the degree of complexity: “none”, “little”, “some”, and “much”. This refinement or precision will facilitate an evaluation of how the various characters compare to each other.
We cannot stop here, however, or we will be left with three disconnected continua. I therefore supplement Ewen’s model with an aggregate continuum that indicates the character’s total degree of characterization. In other words, [↑] after plotting a character along the three continua of complexity, development, and inner life, I classify or plot the resulting character on an aggregate continuum of degree of characterization as (i) an agent; (ii) a type, stock, or flat character; (iii) a character with personality; or (iv) an individual or person. In classifying ancient characters, I do not use the categories “personality” and “individual/person” in the modern sense of an autonomous individual, but to refer to a “collectivist identity” or “group-oriented personality” where the individual identity is embedded in a larger group or community. 22 The results of the character analysis can be presented in the following sample table.
Key: 0 = none, – = little, + = some, ++ = much
I avoid quantifying the terms “little”, “some”, and “much” but position a character on each continuum in relation to other characters. While some may question such an “intuitive” approach and prefer more precise definitions or “objective” criteria for what constitutes “little”, “some”, and “much”, I think this is neither achievable nor desirable. I place each character on a continuum proportionate to the other characters, and therefore the character’s positioning is always relative.
2.3. Character Evaluation and Significance
The third aspect of character reconstruction is (i) to evaluate characters in terms of their responses to the protagonist and their role in the plot, and (ii) to determine their significance or representative value for today. 23 Let me explain with reference to the Gospel of John. I evaluate the characters’ responses to Jesus in keeping with John’s evaluative point of view. As the Johannine characters interact with Jesus, John evaluates their responses according to his ideology and point of view, and communicates this ideological or evaluative system to the reader with the intention that the reader embraces it. John’s evaluative point of view is informed by the purpose and worldview of his Gospel. John’s strategy for achieving the soteriological purpose of writing his Gospel—that his readers may find life in Jesus (20:30–31)—is to put various characters on the stage where they interact with Jesus. John wants his readers to evaluate the characters’ responses to Jesus and, in turn, respond to Jesus themselves. John’s dualistic worldview only allows for two responses to Jesus—acceptance or rejection—and hence John’s evaluative point of view also allows for two options—adequate and inadequate belief-responses. I define an adequate belief-response to Jesus as a sufficiently true understanding of Jesus in terms of his identity, mission, and relationship with his Father, resulting in a commitment to Jesus. However, I cannot quantify such a belief-response, that is, I cannot determine how much authentic understanding is adequate. Instead, I determine whether a character’s response is adequate by discerning John’s evaluation of this response, which is determined by his evaluative point of view.
Since Jesus is the protagonist in all four Gospels, and each author seeks to persuade his readers to accept his view of Jesus, the main criterion for evaluating characters in the Gospel narratives is their responses to Jesus. In the Acts of the Apostles, however, Peter and Paul, by virtue of being spokespersons of the divine, are usually the protagonists (in some passages characters such as Stephen, Philip, Barnabas, and James are the focus). Hence, the main criterion for evaluating the characters in Acts is how they respond to the protagonists (especially Peter and Paul) regarding the divine message and how they subsequently perform as witnesses of Jesus and contribute to the growth of the church.
If the author’s point of view is the first criterion for character evaluation, a second criterion is their relation to the plot. Simply defined, “plot” is the logical and causal order of events in a narrative. For a long time, scholars perceived characters simply as plot functionaries. This is due to the influence of Aristotle’s concept of character as type and subordinate to the plot, on which structuralists have capitalized (see, e.g., Greimas’s actantial model). The result is that characters have often been unnaturally “flattened”. However, many literary critics, such as Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and Stephen Moore, have stressed that plot and character are equally important and interdependent. There is therefore value in examining the character’s role in the plot. Let me elaborate with reference to the Gospel of Mark this time. While it is by no means beyond debate, the plot of the Gospel of Mark revolves around conflict, caused by the proclamation of “the good news” of Jesus’ identity and mission, and the various responses of people. 24 The Markan plot is shaped by the author’s aim to persuade the audience to believe the good news that Jesus is the Christ and Son of God (1:1, 14–15) and commit to discipleship. The minor characters, for example, significantly advance the plot of Mark’s narrative because they function as primary examples of faith and discipleship, and the extent to which these characters respond to Jesus and reveal aspects of true discipleship is the extent to which they advance the plot. 25
We have noted in section 2.1 that the process of reconstructing characters from the text is a hermeneutical process that merges two horizons—that of the historical-narratological world of the text and that of the contemporary world of the reader. This creates the possibility for two-way communication where the characters can “influence” the reader and thus have a role or impact beyond the narrative. In short, characters have a representative value for today. As the reader evaluates the characters in the narrative according to the author’s point of view and purpose, it may lead the reader to seek to emulate some characters (those who align themselves with the author’s perspective) and avoid others (those whose behaviour is unacceptable from the author’s perspective). 26 In other words, we must reflect on how New Testament characters have [↑] representative value for readers in other contexts and times.
2.4. The Sum Total of Character Reconstruction
For each character, the results of our three-dimensional character reconstruction can be collated in the following table of character descriptors.
The top half of the table (from “narrative appearances” to “death”) contains various character descriptors that correspond to the topoi found in ancient Greco-Roman rhetorical handbooks and progymnasmata. 27 This information will be gathered in the first step, the study of character in text and context through a close reading or exegesis. The rest of the table contains aggregate information about the characters in terms of their complexity, development, inner life, degree of characterization, evaluation, and significance as I outlined above. This meta-level of characterization is essential for determining how characters relate to each other within a narrative. Although this analytical data about character is distilled from the ancient text by modern literary methods, it nevertheless arises from the text. While I do not suggest that ancient readers would have read the narrative this way, I maintain that it is legitimate and fruitful for the modern reader to place a modern grid on the ancient narrative to interpret its characters further. Thus, the two parts of the table reflect the fusion of the ancient and modern horizons in the reconstruction of character.
3. Competing Approaches to Character Reconstruction
My uniform approach to character is obviously not the only one, raising the question of which approach one should choose. Are some approaches to character reconstruction better than others? If so, what criteria should we use to distinguish between the various approaches? While a quest for a suitable approach to character implies a Darwinian process of selecting “the fittest” and hence the marginalization of other approaches, I contend that it is beneficial to consider whether some approaches are more useful than others.
I propose three basic criteria for selecting a suitable approach to character reconstruction:
An approach must be sufficiently sophisticated or comprehensive to account for the variety of characters in a New Testament narrative and thus avoid reductionism. Even a superficial reading of the Gospels, for example, will reveal that its characters are far from homogeneous. While E. M. Forster’s well-known categories of “flat” and “round” characters remain useful, they are too reductionistic because not every character neatly fits into these categories. 28 Hence, we need an approach that can sufficiently distinguish between the various characters and account for their diversity.
An approach must be sufficiently economic to be feasible or practical. An efficient approach to character should not be too complicated but just do enough to allow a meaningful character analysis. The approaches of Baruch Hochman and Sönke Finnern, for example, are too detailed to be useful. 29
An approach must be sufficiently quantifiable or evaluative to “measure” and compare characters within a narrative and across narratives. In order to justify classifying character X as an agent, character Y as a type, and character Z as an individual, we must be able to identify and quantify the relevant features that make up a character. While the approaches of Ewen, Hochman, and Finnern can “measure” certain aspects of character, they have no evaluative component. None of them indicates what we should we do with the resulting three, eight, or ten categories in their comprehensive models. The reader is simply left with a number of unrelated continua. This suggests that we need some kind of aggregation in order to assess the totality of a character and compare data. Culpepper’s evaluation is too limited because he only quantifies the characters’ belief-responses rather than their degree of characterization. 30 While Myers’s approach is sufficiently sophisticated and economical, she does not gather meta-data about a character which could facilitate comparison to other characters. 31
My approach builds on the approaches of Myers and Ewen. Where Myers stops with the analysis of a character in relation to various ancient character descriptors or topoi, I continue with Ewen’s approach to collect meta-information about that character in terms of its degree of complexity, development, and inner life. I then go beyond Ewen and (i) situate each character on a resulting continuum of degree of characterization; (ii) evaluate each character according to the narrative’s point of view and its role in the plot; and (iii) determine the representative value of each character for today. In short, my approach is essentially “bottom up” and consists of two steps. First, I collect information about a character in categories of ancient characterization through exegesis or a close reading of the text. Second, I collect meta-information about the character in terms of its complexity, development, inner life, degree of characterization, evaluation, and significance. I contend that my uniform approach meets the criteria stated above. I must stress that the “uniform” aspect of my approach applies mainly to the second step where I collect meta-data about a character. In the first step, a close reading of the text to analyze a character in relation to ancient topoi, a plurality of approaches is possible.
4. Conclusion
This article has outlined a comprehensive, non-reductionist approach to character reconstruction in the New Testament. The approach consists of three components: (i) character in text and context; (ii) character analysis and classification; (iii) character evaluation and significance. One could still ask why a method or model of character reconstruction is relevant and why we cannot simply stick with exegesis. First, exegesis will always be the necessary first step in character reconstruction, but I have suggested that we need a “guided” exegesis that is focused on identifying particular aspects of character. Second, based on such exegesis, we can collect aggregate data about a character in order to facilitate a comparison of characters within and beyond narratives. In laying out my approach in relation to competing approaches, I suggested that a suitable approach to character must fulfil the criteria of being sufficiently sophisticated, economic, and quantifiable. While I do not claim that my approach is the only one that can fulfil these criteria, I maintain that a uniform method is beneficial to compare and evaluate characters within and across New Testament narratives. I should mention that my approach is also versatile in that it can be adapted to analyze and “measure” other aspects of character such as the degree of virtue. 32 What remains is to put my approach to character reconstruction to the test, which I will do in the subsequent article.
Footnotes
1
Cornelis Bennema is Senior Lecturer in New Testament at Union School of Theology, UK and Extraordinary Associate Professor, Unit for Reformed Theology and the Development of the South African Society, Faculty of Theology, North-West University, South Africa.
2
See, for example, Sönke Finnern, Narratologie und biblische Exegese: Eine integrative Methode der Erzählanalyse und ihr Ertrag am Beispiel von Matthäus 28, WUNT II/285 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Alicia D. Myers, Characterizing Jesus: A Rhetorical Analysis on the Fourth Gospel’s Use of Scripture in Its Presentation of Jesus, LNTS 458 (New York: T&T Clark, 2012); Christopher W. Skinner (ed.), Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John, LNTS 461 (New York: T&T Clark, 2013); Steven A. Hunt, D. Francois Tolmie, and Ruben Zimmermann (eds), Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Approaches to Seventy Figures in John, WUNT 314 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Brian C. Small, The Characterization of Jesus in the Book of Hebrews, BIS 128 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Christopher W. Skinner and Matthew Ryan Hauge (eds), Character Studies and the Gospel of Mark, LNTS 483 (New York: T&T Clark, 2014); Cornelis Bennema, A Theory of Character in New Testament Narrative (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014); Cornelis Bennema, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John, 2nd edn (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014); Fredrik Wagener, Figuren als Handlungsmodelle, WUNT II/408 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015); Frank Dicken and Julia Snyder (eds), Character and Characterization in Luke–Acts, LNTS (New York: T&T Clark, forthcoming 2016).
3
John A. Darr, On Character Building: The Reader and the Rhetoric of Characterization in Luke-Acts (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 37.
4
This becomes evident in the volume on Johannine characters by Hunt, Tolmie, and Zimmermann, mentioned in n. 2, which intentionally advocates an open-ended approach, where each of the forty-four contributors choose their own approach.
5
See, for example, the observations by R. Alan Culpepper, Judith Redman, and Susan Hylen regarding John’s Gospel in Skinner (ed.), Characters, 22–3, 61–3, 96.
6
See, most recently, Myers, Characterizing Jesus, 55–61. Cf. the more nuanced approach of Michael Whitenton, ‘The Dissembler of John 3: A Cognitive and Rhetorical Approach to the Characterization of Nicodemus’, JBL (forthcoming 2016). While Whitenton argues that Nicodemus in John 3 would have been perceived by ancient audiences as initially resembling one of Theophrastus’s stock characters—the “dissembler”—he also asserts that Nicodemus breaks out of this mould in John 7 and 19, and hence is a complex character. While I am uncertain about his analysis of John 3, I appreciate his observation that Nicodemus over the entire text continuum is not a flat character.
7
Geoff R. Webb, Mark at the Threshold: Applying Bakhtinian Categories to Markan Characterisation, BIS 95 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 11–13. See further Bennema, Theory of Character, 107–8.
8
In a recent review of my work, Christopher W. Skinner (dis)misses all this and maintains that New Testament characters, like other ancient characters, are nearly always agents subordinated to the plot, thus rehearsing the Aristotelian approach to New Testament characters (‘Review of Cornelis Bennema, A Theory of Character in New Testament Narrative’, JETS 58 (2015): 390–2, on 391).
9
Bennema, Theory of Character. For my work on New Testament characters between 2009 and 2014, see Bennema, Theory of Character, xi n. 1, xii n. 3.
10
I was especially indebted to Fred W. Burnett, who has excellently argued this case (‘Characterization and Reader Construction of Characters in the Gospels’, Semeia 63 (1993): 3–28).
11
For a more detailed discussion, see Bennema, Theory of Character, ch. 2.
12
Bennema, Theory of Character, 62–72.
13
Petri Merenlahti and Raimo Hakola, ‘Reconceiving Narrative Criticism’, in D. Rhoads and K. Syreeni (eds), Characterization in the Gospels: Reconceiving Narrative Criticism, JSNTS 184 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 13–48, on 40–3.
14
The compelling case for this has been made by Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 213–32.
15
Cf. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 12–34; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 384–411; C. Stephen Evans, ‘The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: From What Perspective Should It Be Assessed?’, in R. Pennington (ed.), The Gospel of John and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 91–119 on 97–100; Jonathan T. Pennington, Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 31–3, 94–107; Myers, Characterizing Jesus, 26, 29, 36; Judith Christine Single Redman, ‘Eyewitness Testimony and the Characters in the Fourth Gospel’, in Skinner (ed.), Characters, 59–78 on 68.
16
John A. Darr, ‘Narrator as Character: Mapping a Reader-Oriented Approach to Narration in Luke–Acts’, Semeia 65 (1993): 43–60, on 47–8.
17
Since we can no longer know how a first-century reader would have read a first-century New Testament narrative, reading an ancient narrative today necessarily implies a fusion of ancient and modern horizons. Thus, while the modern reader must be sensitive to the socio-historical realities of the ancient narrative, she remains a modern reader nonetheless.
18
For the case that John knew Mark’s Gospel and assumed that his audience was familiar with the Markan narrative, see Richard Bauckham, ‘John for Readers of Mark’, in R. Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 147–71; Paul N. Anderson, The Riddles of the Fourth Gospel: An Introduction to John (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011), 126–9.
19
Bennema, Theory of Character, 72–90.
20
Ewen’s works are only available in Hebrew, but his theory is summarized in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Methuen, 1983), 41–2. For a discussion whether Ewen’s model can be extended with additional continua, see Bennema, Theory of Character, 82–5.
21
I am indebted to Mieke Bal for this refinement (Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. C. van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 86–8).
22
Cf. Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd edn (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 60–7.
23
Bennema, Theory of Character, 90–106.
24
For more informed discussions, see Jack Dean Kingsbury, Conflict in Mark: Jesus, Authorities, Disciples (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989), 27–9; David M. Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, 3rd edn (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2012), 73–97.
25
Cf. Cornelis Bennema, ‘Character Analysis and Miracle Stories in the Gospel of Mark’, in Bernd Kollmann and Ruben Zimmermann (eds), Hermeneutik der frühchristlichen Wundererzählungen: Historische, literarische und rezeptionsästhetische Aspekte, WUNT 339 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 413–26; ‘Gentile Characters and the Motif of Proclamation in the Gospel of Mark’, in Matthew Ryan Hauge and Christopher W. Skinner (eds), Character Studies and the Gospel of Mark, LNTS 483 (New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 215–31.
26
Cf. Rhoads, Dewey, and Michie, Mark as Story, 103–4.
27
After engaging with Alicia Myers’s work (see n. 1), I decided to adapt the table of character descriptors that I used in my 2009 study on Johannine characters in order to achieve a greater degree of correspondence with ancient lists of topoi. For various ancient lists of rhetorical topoi, see George A. Kennedy, trans. Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Jerome H. Neyrey, ‘Encomium versus Vituperation: Contrasting Portraits of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel’, JBL 126 (2007): 529–52; Michael W. Martin, ‘Progymnastic Topic Lists: A Compositional Template for Luke and Other Bioi?’, NTS 54 (2008): 18–41; Myers, Characterizing Jesus, 43–6.
28
R. Alan Culpepper uses, inter alia, Forster’s classification for his analysis of the Johannine characters, concluding that most are flat (Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1983), 102–4). However, Culpepper’s analysis is too reductionistic, and I have shown that most Johannine characters have various degrees of roundness (Encountering Jesus, 350).
29
Baruch Hochman uses eight continua of polar opposites upon which a character may be located (Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 86–140). Sönke Finnern proposes no less than ten Gegensatzpaare (“opposite/contrasting pairs”) to analyze characters (Narratologie, 157–61). David B. Gowler, for example, utilizes Hochman’s model in his character study of the Pharisees in Luke–Acts but admits that this model is not entirely adequate to evaluate character in ancient narrative (Host, Guest, Enemy and Friend: Portraits of the Pharisees in Luke and Acts, ESEC 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 53–4, 306–17, 321, 327). Ruben Zimmermann employs Finnern’s model to analyze “the Jews” in John’s Gospel but concludes that “[t]he binary-coded pairs pointed out by Finnern fall short in a determination of the character conception of ‘the Jews’” (‘“The Jews”: Unreliable Figures or Unreliable Narration?’, in Hunt, Tolmie, and Zimmermann (eds), Character Studies, 71–109, on 107).
30
Culpepper, Anatomy, 145–8.
31
Since Myers does not aim to evaluate the characters, this is an observation rather than a critique.
32
See, for example, Cornelis Bennema, ‘Virtue Ethics in the Gospel of John: The Johannine Characters as Moral Agents’, in L. Daniel Chrupcała (ed.), Rediscovering John: Essays on the Fourth Gospel in Honour of Frédéric Manns, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum 80 (Milan: Edizioni Terra Santa, 2013), 167–81.