Understanding Judaism and the Jews in the Gospel of John: Polemic, Tradition, and Johannine Self-Identity
reopens the perennial question of the Fourth Gospel’s perplexing characterization of “the Jews.” According to the reigning paradigm, the Gospel of John witnesses to a community’s burgeoning sense of religious distinctiveness. Ethnically Jewish believers in Jesus had begun to forge a new identity in
contrast
to the Jews. Nathan Thiel assesses the weaknesses of the prevailing model
,
arguing that the fourth evangelist still saw himself as living and working within the Jewish tradition. Yet if the Gospel of John is the literary product of a self-consciously Jewish author, why would he speak so often and so critically of “the Jews”? Thiel considers the factors which have conditioned the evangelist’s choice of terminology: the Gospel’s setting, its intended audience, and, above all, John’s indebtedness to Scripture. As a first-century Jew well-versed in Israel’s sacred texts, the evangelist has modeled his story of Jesus after patterns familiar to him from the Scriptures—Scriptures in which Israelite authors consistently portray their ancestors as faithless despite God’s powerful work on their behalf. John is a relentless critic, but such cutting theological assessment had long been part of Israel’s counterintuitive way of telling its history.