This volume comprises a collection of ten essays on John 6 that provides an overview of current Johannine scholarship and a showcase for methodologies now being used in Gospel studies. The essays deal with a challenging array of critical issues.

A collection of essays on John 6 illustrating various current approaches to biblical interpretation. To understand this chapter, one must deal with most of the issues that confront serious readers of the Fourth Gospel. Historical issues and questions regarding the composition of the Gospel, the nature of the Johannine community, the literary design of the Gospel and its theology all come to focus in a unique way in John 6. The essays in this volume are written by ten of the leading Johannine scholars in America, Australia, Europe and Scandinavia. The collection, therefore, provides an overview of current Johannine scholarship and a showcase for the various methodologies now being used in Gospel studies.

Each chapter is summed up in its contents, each paragraph reduced to its proper heads, the sense given, and largely illustrated with practical remarks and observations.

Many interpreters read John 6 as a contrast between Jesus and Judaism: Jesus repudiates Moses and manna and offers himself as an alternative. In contrast, this monograph argues that John 6 places elements of the Exodus story in a positive and constructive relationship to Jesus. This reading leads to an understanding of John as an interpreter of Exodus who, like other contemporary Jewish interpreters, sees current experiences in light of the Exodus story. This approach to John offers new possibilities for assessing the gospel’s relationship to Jewish scripture, its dualism, and its metaphorical language.

The essays in Reading the Gospel of John’s Christology as Jewish Messianism: Royal, Prophetic, and Divine Messiahs seek to interpret John’s Jesus as part of Second Temple Jewish messianic expectations. The Fourth Gospel is rarely considered part of the world of early Judaism. While many have noted John’s Jewishness, most have not understood John’s Messiah as a Jewish messiah. The Johannine Jesus, who descends from heaven, is declared the Word made flesh, and claims oneness with the Father, is no less Jewish than other messiahs depicted in early Judaism. John’s Jesus is at home on the spectrum of early Judaism’s royal, prophetic, and divine messiahs

This book explores the accounts of communal meals and the metaphorical use of food and drink language in the narrative world of the Gospel of John. It argues that the Johannine community regularly gathered for communal meals in which the food and drink on the menu would have taken on a spiritual significance far exceeding the physical sustenance. The study employs a socio-rhetorical methodology and consequently moves from text to context. It tentatively describes the texts’ influence on the formation of early Christian identity and suggests that the Johannine meal accounts provide a way to imagine the demographic composition of the community and its historical context.