Abstract
For most of the late 20th century, scholars looking for ethics-relevant material in the New Testament focused disproportionately on the moral injunctions in Paul and the Synoptics. More recently, thanks in large part to Jan van der Watt, Reuben Zimmerman, and others, the case for finding an ethical program in the Fourth Gospel, albeit in subtler guise than had once been sought, has been renewed. Most of the 13 contributors to the present volume accept that there are Johannine ethics and attempt to move beyond the question of “whether” there is a Johannine ethical program to exegetically- and narratively-grounded discussions of “what” Johannine ethics look like in the narrative and social contexts of the Fourth Gospel.
The book is organized into three parts. After a general introduction, Part I, “The Johannine Imperatives,” has essays on believing, loving, and following. With seven essays, Part II, “Implied Ethics in the Johannine Literature,” is the longest and most eclectic part of the book, wide-ranging in methodology and findings. Part III, “Moving Forward,” contains three essays and the editors’ concluding chapter. A Bibliography and an Author Index round out the book.
Skinner's introduction, “(How) Can We Talk About Johannine Ethics? Looking Back and Moving Forward,” succinctly surveys the state of the question and its history, emphasizing the recent shift towards an affirmative and broader-ranging approach to Johannine ethics. Yes, he argues, we can talk about the “what” and “how” of Johannine ethics, although we must approach such a project sensitively and with realistic expectations.
Chapter 1, “Believing in the Gospel of John: The Ethical Imperative to Becoming Children of God” (Sherri Brown), treats the Fourth Gospel's summons to believe as an ethical imperative, announced in the Prologue and elaborated in the following narrative. Those who receive the command and act on it are given the power to become children of God, which is the ultimate goal of the Gospel.
Chapter 2, “Love One Another: The Johannine Love Command in the Farewell Discourse” (Christopher W. Skinner), looks at the command, “Love one another,” in the context of a narrative Christology developed by the Evangelist, arguing that its scope is universal, not restricted to a sectarian Johannine community.
Chapter 3, “‘Follow Me': A Life-Giving Ethical Imperative” (Raymond F. Collins), develops the author's position that Jesus's “follow me” invitations to Philip (John 1:43) and later to Peter (John 21:19) should be understood as programmatic for the entire Gospel and for Christian discipleship.
Moving into Part II, Chapter 4, “The Creation Ethics of the Gospel of John” (R. Alan Culpepper) roots Johannine ethics in a Jewish tradition that used “covenant” and “creation” as ethical bases. The springboard for this essay is the first lines of the Fourth Gospel's Prologue, which speak of the Logos’ role in creation. The Prologue also introduces the theme of “life” that is so important to the subsequent narrative. Culpepper argues that the Fourth Gospel, then, both participates in an ethical tradition that values all life and presents its protagonist as modeling God's love for all.
Chapter 5, “Love Embodied in Action: Ethics and Incarnation in the Gospel of John” (Jaime Clark-Soles), offers a primer on disability studies and a truly stimulating reading of the man born blind in John 9.
Chapter 6, “The Lyin’ King? Deception and Christology in the Gospel of John” (Adele Reinhartz), challenges the common assumption that the Fourth Gospel presents Jesus as an ethical model for positive interpersonal relationships, focusing on the scene in John 7 where Jesus deceives his brothers.
Chapter 7, “John's Implicit Ethic of Enemy-Love” (Michael J. Gorman), argues that Johannine love is not only not restricted to the community of believers, but extends to enemies, and that this enemy-love is visible both in God's sending of Jesus and Jesus’ sending of the disciples into a hostile world.
Chapter 8, “Just Opponents? Ambiguity, Empathy, and the Jews in the Gospel of John” (Alicia D. Myers), engages ancient rhetorical and characterization strategies to discuss the characterization of the Johannine Jews in ethical perspective, concluding that they are a more ambiguous and therefore more complex character than recent readings have sometimes assumed.
Chapter 9, “The Johannine Request to ‘Come and See’ and an Ethic of Love” (Toan Do) connects the four repetitions of the “come and see” imperative (John 1:39, 46; 4:29; 11:34) to the Johannine ethic of love.
Chapter 10, “God, Eschatology, and ‘This World': Ethics in the Gospel of John” (Francis J. Moloney) illuminatingly draws eschatology into the discussion of Johannine ethics as they are narratively represented in relationships between characters.
Part III begins with Chapter 11, “Genre, Rhetoric, and Moral Efficacy: Approaching Johannine Ethics in Light of Plutarch's Lives and the Progymnasmata” (Lindsey Trozzo), which makes the important point that genre conditions audience expectations for what to find in any given text. She points out that John's participation in the bios genre would lead readers to expect ethical content.
Chapter 12, “Creation, Ethics, and the Gospel of John” (Dorothy A. Lee), asks if the Fourth Gospel can be used as an ethical resource in connection to the modern ecological crisis.
Chapter 13, “Virtue Ethics and the Johannine Writings” (Cornelis Bennema), argues against the heuristic backdrop of Greco-Roman virtue ethics that the Johannine vision of the “good life” entails Spirit-guided allegiance to Jesus.
The editors’ brief, co-authored conclusion points the way to four additional avenues promising for future research on Johannine ethics, including in connection to the rhetoric of characterization in Greco-Roman bioi, in reception history, social memory, and, finally, in comparison with other ancient ethical systems.
Space constraints prevent a detailed engagement with the substance of the individual essays in this collection; so I will conclude with a few remarks about the collection as a whole.
The contributions are all first-rate pieces of scholarship, which is a testament both to the industry of the contributors and the shepherding of the editors. For better or worse, this is not a volume of conference papers. While the essays shine when taken individually, the authors engage only minimally with each other's work and sometimes take for granted what their co-contributors explicitly set out to dismantle. The decision to include a variety of perspectives, not all of which are symbiotic, was a deliberate and wise move on the part of the editors.
Readers will be pleased to see that the volume employs footnotes rather than endnotes, but may be disappointed to find no indices of subjects or ancient sources. I should also note that despite the book's subtitle and conceptual framing, the volume overwhelmingly focuses on the Fourth Gospel and ignores the Epistles. All students and scholars of the New Testament, however, will find much of value in this accessible book. It would make an excellent addition to the bibliography for a graduate-level course on the Fourth Gospel or early Christian ethics.