DESCRIPTION
Given all that has been written about the Gospel of John over the past twenty centuries, can anything more possibly be said about it?
Yes, says Jerome Neyrey -- by reading this "maverick Gospel" in terms of ancient rhetoric and by viewing it in terms of cultural anthropology.
By interpreting the text in these two fresh ways, Neyrey distinctively illuminates the Gospel of John, casting new light on its theological message and on such topics as Jesus the revealer practicing secrecy, foot-washing as transformation ritual, and the Jewish background of Jesus' equality with God, of Jesus being "greater than" Abraham. Neyrey's scholarly study will certainly educate -- and at times provoke -- attentive readers.
"The essays here are gathered together in the hope of providing a different and coherent type of reading of the Fourth Gospel. Commentaries on this Gospel are always severely constrained as to space and can only make succinct remarks about the story and its characters. These essays, however, are article-length studies of most of the chapters in the Gospel, interpreting it in terms of classical rhetoric or through the lenses of cultural anthropology. The aim of these studies is not novelty for its own sake but a fresh interpretation by means of materials that belong in any interpreter's toolbox, both rhetorical and cultural." -- from the preface