SBL Press

ALT SBL Press Annual Meeting Sale . Use code AM2026 for 30% off through 31 December. https://cart.sbl-site.org/books

ALT “By the beginning of my junior year, I was also hooked on archaeology. That too was accidental and somewhat serendipitous. It began as a lark in the summer after my sophomore year. I was seeking an adventurous summer-vacation experience, and I heard that a Harvard Peabody Museum expedition needed students for excavations at a prehistoric site in Wyoming. I joined the dig. It turned out to be hard, tedious work, much less adventurous than I had imagined. Yet it was nonetheless exciting—intellectually exciting to learn about people who lived thousands of years ago by painstakingly uncovering and analyzing the material remains of their daily lives.” Carol Meyers, “Accidental Biblical Scholar” #TalkaboutBiblicalStudies

ALT "First, a brief account of my journey toward Old Testament teaching and research. Already in high school my favorite assignments were research papers; I loved investigating, digging around in sources to figure things out. My undergraduate program at the College of Wooster included a freshman course in Old Testament. I was captivated from the start by approaches never imagined in my home church experience: the documentary hypothesis, the historical context for prophetic oracles, even the possibility that influences of another religion (Zoroastrianism) might be detected in some biblical texts." —Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, “Society of Biblical Literature Reminiscences” #TalkaboutBiblicalstudies

ALT Book Review What John Knows: Storytelling in the Fourth Gospel Douglas Estes, editor Having these offerings pitched for students and sophisticated lay readers in a single format is a boon for both teachers and students of the Fourth Gospel. Much like the earlier volume on How John Works in terms of storytelling, this volume could be used as a whole or supplementarily in presenting Johannine epistemology. —Sherri Brown, Review of Biblical Literature

ALT Findings: The Johannine Memory of Jesus as a Self-Standing Witness Paul N. Anderson The goal of the John, Jesus, and History Project...is not to advance any particular theory or set of theories regarding the Johannine community or situation, Johannine composition, John’s relation(s) to the Synoptics, or Johannine rhetoric. Rather, it is to draw—with broad disciplinary intentionality and expertise—the Johannine witness into what can be known about Jesus of Nazareth by making use of all worthy sources, which, critically, must include the Fourth Gospel.

ALT Jesus Remembered within the Developing Johannine Tradition: A Response Marianne Meye Thompson No doubt John would be puzzled by modern questions whether his gospel presents the Jesus of history, for it matters greatly in John that Jesus was a figure of the past and that his life displayed contours associated with a specific time and area: first-century Jerusalem, Galilee, Samaria, geographical and cultural features and literary traditions associated with these areas, and so on. I think the question is not whether John thought his narrative gave us Jesus as he really was but what that might have meant for John.

ALT The Divine Name in the Gospel of John: A Link to the Historical Jesus? Charles A. Gieschen I will present the link with Synoptic traditions using the divine self-disclosure formula, positing the probability that the Gospel of John is presenting tradition that has its roots in the use of a divine self-disclosure formula by the historical Jesus. It is widely acknowledged that the divine name was not vocalized by Jews beginning in the second century BCE. This means that if the historical Jesus had the self-understanding of possessing the divine name, he would have used other ways to express this understanding, such as using this self-disclosure formula or indirect references to his unique name or word.

ALT Conquering the World: Remembering Jesus as Conqueror Ahreum Kim The conquering rhetoric in these texts provokes several questions. For example, what is the exact nature of these Johannine battles? How can the believers conquer the world with their πίστις? Moreover, why is the conquering image of Jesus and his believers so readily reinforced in Johannine tradition? What might be implied in retaining such imagery? The answers to these questions not only reflect the historical context of the time but also point to the development of ideas within Johannine tradition in reaction to the changing times.

ALT History in the Most Christological of Places: A Tentative Case for a Historical Event Underlying John 1:29–30 Michael Vicko Zolondek For followers to leave one leader, and thus leave what was likely considered their fictive kinship group, to follow another leader, and thus enter into a different fictive kinship group, one would expect some significant event to have occurred and acted as the catalyst for this movement. Moreover, given that these followers accepted Jesus as their new leader, Jesus must have gained significant honor prior to this event.

ALT The Johannine Prologue as a Dependent Narrative Confession Amy Whisenand Krall The Prologue (as a didactic hymn) depends on the rest of the gospel for its intelligibility. As the narrative riffs on terms such as light and life, it fleshes out their meanings, interpreting them christologically and inviting the audience into a way of understanding and living in the world.

ALT From Orality to Literacy within the Developing Johannine Tradition: A Response Francisco Lozada Jr. Several questions arise for both the authors and the broader scholarly community: (1) The subjectivity of the reader warrants scrutiny, as historians may inadvertently reshape evidence to generate new interpretations. Not all sources (evidence) hold equal weight. (2) The role of power in interpreting the past should be examined critically; the power to declare the memory of Jesus can have significant implications. (3) The past may often distract us from the present. It would be insightful to explore not just how John moved from orality to literacy but how John operates within today’s context.

ALT From Orality to Literacy in the Johannine Memory of Jesus and His Ministry Paul N. Anderson Here we see a record of valued firsthand memory—delivered orally before being preserved in written texts—reflected arguably in the intratraditional development of the Johannine Gospel alongside other memories preserved in Mark and other venues, and perhaps even in dialogue with them from day one to the final stages of their development. That being the case, why was John written, and how did its composition convey its purpose(s)?

ALT Composing Colophons: The Fourth Gospel’s Endings among Closure Conventions Nicholas A. Elder I engage the narratological concept of narrative closure to compare the Johannine colophons with other Second Temple and Greco-Roman narratives that provide closure outside their narrative worlds. John’s endings may be aberrant with respect to New Testament narratives, but they are not so different from endings from the Fourth Gospel’s wider literary context.

ALT ἐγώ εἰμι in Mark and John: Exploring the Johannine Trajectory of a Received Memory of Jesus Christopher W. Skinner I am working with the hypothesis that John knew, used, and reworked Mark. For our purposes here, I proceed under the assumption that those responsible for the final form of John’s Gospel had direct access to some form of Mark’s written text. This allowed incorporation, alteration, and omission of material explicitly derived from the Second Gospel.

ALT “What Did He Say?”: Repair Questions as Vestigial Features of Remembered Conversations of Jesus in John’s Gospel Douglas Estes As a starting point, I surveyed forty ancient texts close in time and character to the Fourth Gospel to see whether there were any clear occurrences of questions with repair qualities.... Of the forty ancient texts, only six have at least one question with notable repair qualities: Susanna, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

ALT Memory, Scripture, and Tradition in the Gospel of John: Blending Jewish Scriptures and Tradition within John’s Remembrance of Jesus Rachel L. Danley This essay draws on conceptual blending theory to consider how John provides a historical remembrance of Jesus through his experience of Judaism, Jesus’s ministry, and the postresurrection Spirit. I suggest that the embodied ritual experience of early Jewish Christian believers may account for the movement between explicit and implicit uses of Jewish Scripture and tradition in John’s Gospel.

ALT The Fourth Gospel in First-Century Media Culture: A Response Holly Hearon Focus on media...reminds us that the historical Jesus was both a meaning-making agent and interlocutor. What we have access to through the Fourth Gospel, as well as the other gospels, is the response of multiple interlocutors to Jesus as a generator of meaning-making communication events and, in turn, evidence of their own agency, generating new meaning in response to those communication events and ever shifting sociohistorical circumstance.

ALT Larger Than Life but Not Docetic: Revisiting John’s Portrayal of Jesus William R. G. Loader The following essay pushes back on the suggestion that John’s narrative, by virtue of its symbolic, sensory, and theological qualities, cannot also be historical in value. To this end, the following will apply a sensory focus to the text to explore the following question: What if the presence of sensory elements contributes to the historical quality of the gospel because they are sensory? That is, is it possible that a sensory element is the fruit of historical memory and not merely the result of theological motivation and mimetic practice?