Free The Jewish Annotated New Testament by Amy-Jill Levine Page B

believe in Jesus as the Christ and Son of God thereby relinquish their covenantal relationship with God (8.47). It must be emphasized that the Gospel is not anti-Semitic in a racial sense, as it is not one’s origins that are decisive but one’s beliefs. Nevertheless, it has been used to promote anti-Semitism. Most damaging has been Jn 8.44, in which Jesus declares that the Jews have the devil as their father. The association of the Jews with Satan or the devil is pervasive in anti-Semitic discourse and imagery, from woodcuts (such as the image of [T]he Jew calling the Devil from a Vessel of Blood , a 1560 woodcut found in the Histoires Prodigieuses by the important French humanist, Pierre Boaistuau, ca. 1517–66) to plays such Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , in which the Jewish merchant Shylock is referred to as “a kind of devil,” “the devil himself,” and “the very devil incarnate” (act 2, scene 2), and on present-day white supremacist websites, to name but a few examples.
    While John’s difficult rhetoric should not be facilely dismissed, it can be understood as part of the author’s process of self-definition, of distinguishing the followers of Jesus from the synagogue and so from Jews and Judaism. This distancing may have been particularly important if the ethnic composition of the Johannine community included Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles. This approach does not excuse the Gospel’s rhetoric, but it may make it possible for readers to understand the narrative’s place in the process by which Christianity became a separate religion, to appreciate the beauty of its language, and to recognize the spiritual power that it continues to have in the lives of many of its Christian readers.
    STRUCTURE AND LITERARY FEATURES
    The Gospel of John falls into two main sections, traditionally called the Book of Signs (chs 1–12) and the Book of Glory (chs 13–21). For details on the subsections under each main section, see the headings in the annotations.
    The Johannine narrative
    As a “life” of Jesus, the Gospel of John tells what we might term a “historical tale,” in that it situates Jesus’ story in its historical context of Galilee and Judea, during the decades leading up to the first Jewish Revolt against Rome. The Gospel also tells a cosmological story of the preexistent Word of God who enters the world, conquers Satan, and returns to the Father. This cosmological tale exists within and behind the account of Jesus’ words and deeds. The historical tale, which describes his interactions with his followers and his opponents, is evident primarily through the plot, which traces Jesus’ life from the moment of his identification by John the Baptist (1.19–36) through to his crucifixion (ch 19) and his resurrection appearances to the disciples (chs 20–21). The cosmological tale is told both by the narrator and by Jesus, in their comments and reflections upon Jesus’ life and death.
    The Gospel of John employs a number of literary devices, which direct the reader’s attention to its main themes and help to bridge the historical and cosmological tales. These include repetition (e.g., “The hour is coming, and is now here”; 4.21,23; 5.25,28; 16.2,25,32), double entendre (e.g., “be lifted up” in 3.14–15 as meaning both crucifixion and exaltation), misunderstanding (cf. Nicodemus’s question on how it is possible to be “born a second time,” 3.3–5), and irony (e.g., 7.34–35, in which the crowd thinks that Jesus might “go to” the Diaspora when the reader knows he is speaking of his death and return to the Father).
    Narrative patterning
    The Gospel of John narrates fewer events than do the Synoptics, but the stories are more developed and stylized, perhaps in order to make them easier to follow. The narrative structures of these stories are easily discernible and tend to follow similar patterns. One example consists of “signs” stories, the accounts of Jesus’ miracles.