The Kingship of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Sehyun Kim

157. Samuel, “Postcolonial Reading,” 51; see also chapter 6 of this book; Thiong’o, Moving the Center.

158. Bhabha, Location, 86.

159. van Bruggen, Jesus, 36.

160. Childs and Williams, Introduction, 132.

161. Childs and Williams, Introduction, 130.

162. Childs and Williams, Introduction, 131.

163. However, Jesus is greater than Moses in the Fourth Gospel is (see John 6:32).

164. See chapter 3 of this book. In this section, I will deal with 2) and 3).

165. On the variety of the biblical methodology, see Haynes and McKenzie, To Each Its Own Meaning; Black and Dockery, Interpreting the New Testament. On attempts at a dialogue between the historical approach and the literary approach, see Barton, “Historical Criticism,” 3–15; de Boer, “Narrative Criticism,” 35–48; Motyer, “Method” 27–44.

166. Robey and Jefferson, Modern Literary Theory, 13.

167. Segovia, “Journey(s),” 23–54; Segovia, “Biblical Criticism,” 49–65. For example, Segovia remarks that there has been the development of biblical criticism as a process of “liberation” and “decolonization,” one with reference to a fundamental transformation “in theoretical orientation and reading strategy” as well as “in the ranks of the discipline” (Segovia, “Biblical Criticism,” 51–52).

168. The meaning of the text and the author’s intention are not automatically and completely the same. About “intentional fallacy,” the presupposition that one can find the meaning of the text exclusively through the intention of its author, see Barthes, “Death,” 167–72. About the “surplus meaning” of the text, that is, meaning that written texts acquire beyond the meaning intended by the author, see Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory.

169. These major forces, however, “including social discourses and social practices, are apparently not overdetermined, resulting as they do from such a complex and unpredictable network of overlapping and crisscrossing elements that no unilinear directionality is perceivable and in fact no final or efficient cause exists” (Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism,” 416).

170. Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism,” 419.

171. On the limitations of the method of reader-response criticism, which have analogies to those of postcolonial criticism, see McKnight, “Reader-Response,” 247–48.

172. On the variety of view of the genre of the Gospels, see Aune, “Gospels,” 205–06; Aune, New Testament, 17–115; Carter, John, 3–16.; Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, 26–54; Attridge, “Genre Bending,” 3–21 (Attridge focuses on diverse genres within the gospel but pays little attention to the gospel genre itself); Blomberg, “Diversity,” 272–95.

173. Aune, “Gospels,” 204–6; Carter, John, 9–10; Blomberg, “Diversity,” 275. There might be utterly no new creation from nothing in the material world. Therefore, the Gospel of John contains many features of the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman world. However, the New Testament, particularly the Fourth Gospel, came from the multicultural society, although the Gospels show formal parallels to other historical and biographical writings, materially they remain unique. For example, almost half of this Gospel (chapters 12–21) deals with the passion and resurrection of Jesus.

174. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 149.

175. See Aune, New Testament, 46–76.

176. Attridge, “Genre Bending,” 3–21.

177. Longman argues, “While it is true that the individuality of many compositions must be maintained, the similarities between the form and content of text must not be denied. That there are similarities between texts which can serve as a rationale for studying them as a group is especially true for ancient literature where literary innovations were not valued highly as they are today” (Longman, “Fictional Akkadian Royal Autobiography,” 3–4 [re-quoted from Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 150]).

178. Kümmel argues that the Gospels are a new creation in terms of a literary form (Kümmel, Introduction, 37; see also Hurtado, “Gospel,” 276–82).

179. Aune, “Biography,” 81 (Italics are mine).

180. Aune, “Gospels,” 204–5.

181. Blomberg, “Diversity,” 273–77.

182. There are some different emphases and slightly different descriptions of the life of Jesus among the Gospels, because they were written for their own purposes for their own readers, and in their specific historical backgrounds. However, it is also probable that the authors of the Gospels used their contemporary literary devices, terms, genres, and so on in their compositions, but as a postcolonial text, the Gospel of John in particular was produced as a hybridized one, namely, a sort of the Christian literature, which was generated from the first century, in multicultural society. In addition, Blomberg comments, “more differences than similarities appear between the Gospels, and these various genres so that none of these identifications is widely held today” (Blomberg, “Diversity,” 274).

183. Young, Postcolonialism, 2; see also Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 122–40.

184. As Fanon writes, “[The consciousness of self] is not the closing door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension” (Fanon, Wretched, 199).

185. Selden, Widdowson, and Brooker, Reader’s Guide, 226.