410 - John, the Martyrs Gospel

John, the Martyr's Gospel
By Paul S. Minear
New York, Pilgrim, 1984. 174 pp. $8.95.

Paul Minear, perhaps best known for his book Images of the Church in the New Testament (1960) and now professor emeritus at Yale University Divinity School, has produced a thought provoking study, of the Gospel of John. Adopting a suggestion of J. Louis Martyn, Minear invites his readers to "take up temporary residence in the Johannine community" and to listen in on the conversation taking place between the evangelist and his contemporaries. From his own eavesdropping on that conversation, Minear believes that "John thinks of Jesus as a martyr whose martyrdom forced followers to accept that fate for themselves." The Gospel of John is a martyrology, in which what happened to Jesus (crucifixion) provides the interpretive key to what was happening to the Johannine community (martyrdom). The evangelist (labeled "the narrator" by Minear in accordance with current fashion) was a Paraclete-guided prophet who brought the tradition of Jesus to bear on his contemporary situation. Minear argues that the Gospel of John is fundamentally an appeal to fearlessness and courage in the face of violent death at the hands of the hostile world.

In the course of his exploration of the theological, Christological, and ecclesiological dimensions of this appeal, Minear propounds a number of provocative and, at times, idiosyncratic theses. For example, he argues, against the consensus of modern scholarship, that the prologue to the Gospel was composed by the evangelist, that chapter 21 is neither an appendix nor an epilogue added by a later redactor, and the Gospel was written by, a Jerusalemite in Palestine prior to the Jewish War of A.D. 66-70. Minear's claim that the antithesis of belief in John is not unbelief but fear that leads to "falling away"( 16: 1 f.) and his conviction that the Gospel encourages the faithful to love their enemies are no less provocative though more important.

Minear also argues that John is writing for a double audience: rank -and-file believers and Spirit-guided prophets functioning as teachers and shepherds who, like the evangelist himself, are the successors of the original band of disciples. Minear's own audience are todays counterparts to these two Johannine groups.

Martinus C. de Boer
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.