Divinity United

It has been a while since posting, but I have been meaning to get to this one. I wanted to formally apologize to Dr. Saeed Hamid-Khani for not making use of his published thesis in the writing of my own thesis on the Gospel of John. Hamid-Khani's thesis was published as: Revelation and Concealment ofChrist: Theological Inquiry into the Elusive Language of the Fourth Gospel  (WUNT II/120; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000) . It was examined by William Horbury and C.K. Barrett. John Philip M. Sweet was Hamid-Khani's supervisor.  In the course of working on an essay related to the topic of "revelation" in the Gospel of John, I ran across the title of Hamid-Khani's book. I was able to get a copy through interlibrary loan and waded my way through the immense amount of work that the volume contains. The striking contribution of Hamid-Khani's thesis is his  challenge  to Rudolf Bultmann's claim that what is revealed in John's Gospel is an empty revelation fo...

John Ashton's book The Gospel of John and Christian Origins was published this spring by Fortress Press . I did have the opportunity to read earlier versions of about half the chapters, and it has been enjoyable to read through the finished book. Ashton has continued themes from his previous book on John, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (1st ed. 1991; 2nd ed. 2007). Ashton made significant changes between the two editions of Understanding , but the third section on "Revelation" (pp. 303-528 in the 2nd ed.) was largely left unchanged. (See my comments on that volume here .) Ashton acknowledges he is revising that section in Gospel of John and Christian Origins , but he is also making more explicit his arguments for the history behind the Gospel, its writing, and Johannine Christianity. The primary interlocutors and support for Ashton throughout the book are Wayne Meeks, Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Käsemann, and J. Louis Martyn. Coupled with the title, it is clear that ...

An excellent Pre-SBL conference is being jointly hosted by St. Mary's Seminary and University and the John, Jesus, and History Group. The headline speakers will be James Dunn and Alan Culpepper who have been outstanding contributors to Johannine scholarship. Other noteworthies include John Ashton, Jan van der Watt, Craig Koester, and Catrin Williams. The conference is subtitled "Engaging the Legacies of C.H. Dodd and R.E. Brown." Looks to be a highlight of SBL even before SBL begins. Details below: John, Jesus, and History Engaging the Legacies of C.H. Dodd and Raymond E. Brown A Pre-SBL Conference at Saint Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore November 20-22, 2013 Program as of May 1, 2013 Sponsored by the John, Jesus, and History section of SBL and St. Mary’s Seminary & University Conference fee: $150 (June 1 to October 15; $170 thereafter) (includes program, lunch and dinner Thursday, coffee breaks, reception) WEDNESDAY ...

Reading through a section of John Ashton's Understanding the Fourth Gospel , I ran across a classic Ashton comment that I can't pass up. Ashton sides with the hermeneutic of the original audience/original meaning of the text against postmodernism. "The greatest challenge [to the theory of the Johannine community], according to Kysar, is 'the question of the locus of meaning '. Perhaps it is true that 'a text means differently as it is interpreted by different readers'. Nevertheless, swimming as strongly as I can against the tide of postmodernism, I still believe that it makes sense to look for the meaning that the first readers of a text would have found in it. There is no obvious decline in the study and composition of books on history, and these are still separated from fiction and historical novels in all the bookshops that I know. I trust that the worst of Kysar's fears are ill-founded." -- pp. 23-24.

I have recently finished reading through John Ashton's second edition of his work Understanding the Fourth Gospel (OUP, 2007), and it is not merely the Technicolor version of the original publication (1991), although it may look that way. His introduction has had a significant overhaul in the second edition that streamlines the discussion, but the first edition's introduction may offer further background for readers on the state of play prior to Ashton, especially regarding Bultmann's contribution. The second edition has some rearrangement of chapters and four new excursuses. John Ashton's overall study remains the same: he argues for the importance of the theme of revelation in John's Gospel and disagrees with Bultmann's conclusion that all Jesus reveals is that he is the Revealer. Ashton concludes that the mode of the revelation, the gospel, has a part to play in the revelation. For the Fourth Gospel, revelation is not just about Jesus' words or the...