Jesus the Ironic Christ in John's Gospel

De: Suresh Shenoy

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Jesus the Ironic Christ in John’s Gospel brings to a unified whole the research begun with my doctoral thesis on the Judaean War as a narrative five-act tragedy. Like Flavius Josephus, the four evangelists used Genres Disjunction with one or more texts behind their foreground text in the Gospel genre. They confirmed Quintilian’s theory of structural irony as they also practised it with nuance. The present study proves how radical John was in his understanding of Jesus as the Christ. To claim that the Gospel of John is anti-Christological is unthinkable for New Testament scholars and Christians worldwide. Equally to conclude that the four Gospels, each in its turn repudiates the foundations of the Christian Faith is surely scandalous. However, the Gospels read as literature will convince even a sceptic of what is both unthinkable and scandalous. Whatever the cost, truth be told and long denied justice be done to the four Evangelists. So, I chose the path less travelled of reading the Gospels as classical literature. That for sure was the goal of my study Jesus the Ironic Christ in the Fourth Gospel. The conclusions drawn on the Fourth Gospel have been found to apply with equal weight to the Synoptic Gospels as well, as argued in my other New Testament studies. Without exception, the early Gospels indirectly and John’s directly targeted Paul’s teachings on Jesus as the Christ. John, in keeping with the strategy of narrative analepsis, dramatized what it would mean to Jesus the Galilean if he acted as though he was the Christ as Paul thought of him. It would make the Galilean a laughingstock of his family and of his Jewish foes and confuse his naïve disciples. John linked the crucifixion of the Galilean to his delusions as the Christ. Biblical scholars spend a deal of time and energy in learned disquisitions on the minutiae in the works of the Evangelists. They seem to know much about the work of the “sacred writers”, little of what they have to say to them. They do not heed the Evangelists when they warn their readers off the fictional and fictitious narratives, while upholding what is worth upholding, that is, the fivefold values of Jesus the Galilean.