BOOK REVIEWS 163

Thatcher is indebted principally to Maurice Halbwachs) to the Fourth Gospel and examines what is
involved in John’s memory of Jesus. The conclusion of this application (p. 157) is that ‘I may now assert
that John wrote a Gospel not to preserve a liquid memory of Jesus, but rather to replace that substance with
something more solid. John did not, in other words, write a Gospel to help people remember information
about Jesus, but rather to ensure that they remembered Jesus in a specific way, a way consistent with his
own thinking about Christ’. The author wants to dispose of the idea (which he considers ‘the consensus
view’) of the Gospels (though John alone is in focus here) as ‘sacred filing cabinets’ (p. 23). One might
wonder about the originality of such a conclusion, novel though some of the phrasing in memory theory
may be. And one might proceed to ask, What did the early church think they were doing in coming up with
Gospels in written form? and is John a special case, or do T.’s principles apply to all four Gospels?
Though unacquainted with Halbwach’s formulation of Social Memory Theory, I have long nourished
an interest (like many a biblical student) in the process of movement of oral material in the biblical period
to written form (whether in the case of Isaiah or of John). My thinking was fostered by remarks made at or
around the time of Vatican II by the likes of Neophytus Edelby and Luis Alonso Schôkel about the
primarily oral character of ‘Scripture’, and I was interested to read thinking on this by Wilfred Cantwell
Smith, William Graham, Birger Gerhardsson, Walter Ong, Sandra Schneiders and Werner Kelber (only
the last of whom acknowledged here by T.). Since Eusebius and other Fathers offered their comments on
this movement in the case of the Gospels, I took account also of them (in a piece later published in
Estudios Bı´blicos as ‘From Good News to Holy Writ: the share of the text in the saving purpose of the
Word’). I was therefore pleased to see T. here (16) adverting to (if contesting) that revealing remark of
Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, that Eusebius derives from Irenaeus, who always looked for insights into
Jesus from his disciples, ‘For I did not suppose that information from books helped me so much as that
from a living and abiding voice.’ Yet that is only one of many testimonies from the early church
transmitted by Eusebius that reflect an ambiguous attitude to written versions of oral material; T. does not
tap fully into this patristic collection, which Gerhardsson for one attributes to the influence of the Judaism
of the day, where teachers and spiritual leaders were also opposed to written transmission of the oral
Torah. So it was not Paul Ricoeur (uncited here) who first raised the question, ‘What happens to discourse
when it passes from speaking to writing?’ in an essay on ‘The hermeneutical function of distanciation’.
The author’s response to this question is prompted in particular by the closing remarks to both chapter
20 and chapter 21 of John’s Gospel, where he sees the evangelist admitting ‘a rhetorical purpose for
writing’(p. 45); in other words, ‘the Fourth Gospel was produced in service of specific rhetorical objectives’,
not to produce a ‘sacred filing cabinet’. Many another Johannine commentator would surely speak rather
of the evangelist’s theological purpose. T., for whom the Epistles precede the Gospel in the Johannine
corpus, makes this rhetorical/theological purpose explicit: ‘a written Gospel would be the ideal weapon in
John’s conflicts with the AntiChrists’ (p. 154), some members of the community having developed a
‘countermemory’ of Jesus that may be styled AntiChristian (p. 73). T. is therefore not in sympathy with the
aspiration of Papias, seeing John rather as aiming to ‘suppress the living memory of Jesus’ (p. 163).
This reviewer, with his earlier interests in the question of the function of Holy Writ as distinct from
Good News, clearly supports T.’s initiative in focussing on the specific contribution of text (who was it
said, ‘In the beginning was the text’?). Eusebius shows that the question was as urgent in the early church
as Ricoeur shows it to be in our time. Perhaps, however, a definitive answer, whether or not supplied via
the principles of Social Memory Theory, would need to take all four evangelists’ work into account (as
both Eusebius’s subjects and Kelber highlight Mark). For T. the issues raised in the Johannine Epistles
prove something of a distraction, and are relevant only at times. Even if we agree not to be content with
seeing any Gospel as merely ‘archival’ or as a ‘sacred filing cabinet’, we can surely acknowledge the
evangelist’s contribution in all cases as more than ‘rhetorical’. Would the great commentators on the
Gospel of John, like Barrett, Brown, Culpepper, Dodd, Hoskyns, Käsemann, Lindars, Neyrey,
Schnackeburg, Wescott, and Wiles, have been content to see the evangelist involved only in rhetoric?
What about the soaring eagle?

Australian Catholic University, Sydney Robert C. Hill

The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History and Theology in the Gospel of John. By Richard
Bauckham. Pp. 320, Baker Academic, 2007, $29.99.

This is a fascinating collection of essays, though without the unevenness that the genre sometimes
dictates. As is well known, Bauckham believes that academic writing on John’s gospel has largely got it
wrong, notably in the form of the tendency over the last few decades towards confident reconstruction of
the Johannine community’s various stages of development. The effect of this tendency is to downplay the
historicity of the fourth gospel and the accuracy of ancient traditions about apostolic authorship. For
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Bauckham, all 21 chapters are the work of a single author, a person of theological and literary
competence, and a disciple of Jesus, though not one of the 12. Bauckham identifies the author with the
Beloved Disciple, and even names him, as ‘John’, though not Zebedee’s son of that (not uncommon)
name. Bauckham denies that it is possible to reconstruct the context in and for which this author was
writing, and he insists on the unfashionable, but striking, point that ‘the Gospel’s theology itself requires a
concern for history’ (p.14). Bauckham raises some penetrating questions of the ‘genre’ that really ought to
have been generated by the ‘two-level’ (the history of Jesus and the history of the Johannine community)
reading of the Fourth Gospel: if the gospel is indeed a bios, then it is about a person and not about a
community. Bauckham offers a fascinating account of the difference between the way speeches are used in
the Synoptics and in the Gospel of John, and argues that the latter is clearly not a sectarian work (it is not
written in any sort of code, for example), but instead invites the reader into the mystery, partly by way of
the Johannine irony, the ‘constant misunderstandings that invite the reader to do better’. We are offered a
very attractive account of how the differences between the Synoptics and John might be explained. The
following lines are worth quoting in full, to give the flavour:
‘If the Gospel of John were based on the eyewitness testimony of one of the Twelve, moreover one who
belonged to the inner circle of the Twelve (Peter and the two sons of Zebedee), then it would be
incomprehensible that the story it tells is so different from the Synoptics. But it is comprehensible if the
beloved disciple was not one of the Twelve but a nonitinerant disciple of Jesus, resident in Jerusalem, who
moved in circles of disciples rather different form that of Peter and the sons of Zebedee: other disciples
outside the number of the Twelve (Nathanael; Mary, Martha and Lazarus; Nicodemus) and members of
the Twelve who are prominent in John but not in the Synoptics (Philip, Thomas, Andrew, the other
Judas). John provides a different angle on Jesus’ story, other memories of Jesus, a different selection of
events, because his sources are different, not inferior. This is the direction in which the dominant
approach’s emphasis on the independence of John from the Synoptics should have pointed, rather than
generating the fantasy of a sectarian history of the community’ (pp. 27–28).
Bauckham argues indeed, rather against the run of play at present, that the Fourth Gospel is closer
than the Synoptics to the canons of ancient historiography, and insists that the document bears all the
marks of being written for all Christians, not simply for an ‘in-group’. All the evidence suggests that those
early Christians travelled a good deal, and had a sense of belonging to a world-wide movement, especially
in the case of John’s gospel, with its evident sophistication and careful structuring. Bauckham argues that
as a matter of fact the fourth gospel seems aimed at a wider readership than many NT documents. In the
very interesting chapter 7, Nicodemus is identified as a result of some painstaking scholarly detective
work. Chapter 8 offers the helpful notion of ‘protective anonymity’ for the unnamed woman in Mark 14
who anointed Jesus; there is a very sensible chapter (11) on ‘Monotheism and Christology in the Gospel of
John’, which contains some illuminating insights on the ‘Christology of divine identity’, with the different
kinds of ‘I Am’ sayings set against the OT background. Bauckham makes the observation (plain as a
pikestaff once you think about it) that whereas all our NT authors knew the LXX as their primary access
to the OT, they were also acquainted with the Hebrew text; and this familiarity was what enabled the
fourth evangelist to preserve Jewish monotheism, while simultaneously redefining it as Christological
monotheism. As a general comment on this book, one may say that for Bauckham the Gospel is not
(merely) an object for academic study, but a text that actually makes a difference in the world, without in
any way undermining the rigour proper to academic enquiry. Not all NT scholars will therefore
instinctively warm to it; and they may be further deterred by chapter 13, which in the course of an
admirably sensible account of the final chapter of the gospel as an intrinsic part of the entire work,
produces some gematrial arguments that will make them blench. I have to confess that I found it very
hard to know how to cope with the observation that there are 496 syllables in John 1:1–18, and that 496 is
the ‘triangle’ of 31, while 153 (the number of fish caught in John 21) is the ‘triangle’ of 17, which provides
a link with Ezekiel 47:1. Indeed Bauckham almost undermines his case by admitting that it is perfectly
possible to read the text without ever adverting to these numerical oddities (and I have only given the
merest hint of the calculations to be met with in this chapter). We shall have to wait and see what the
response will be; but that minor reservation should not deter readers from getting to grips with the
challenge to the majority approach to the Fourth Gospel that this excellent book represents.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

Understanding the Fourth Gospel (New Edition). By John Ashton. Pp. xx, 585, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2007, d65.00.
Sixteen years on from the first edition, John Ashton brings forth a substantially revised version of his
magnum opus on John’s gospel. Gone almost completely is the original first section, some 120 pages on the