Gospel according to Saint John, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Shidemantle, C Scott

The Gospel according to Saint John. By Andrew T. Lincoln. BNTC. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2005, ix 584 pp., $29.95.

"Of the writing of commentaries on the Gospel of John there is no end," one might say when confronted with this latest addition to the Black's New Testament Commentary series by Andrew T. Lincoln, Portland Professor of New Testament at the University of Gloucestershire. With the confluence of such helpful commentaries published in the last fifteen years by D. A. Carson, C. S. Keener, A. J. Kostenberger, L. Morris, H. Ridderbos, and R. A. Whitacre-not to mention some other commentaries that remain widely used and insightful even after being with us for thirty years or so, such as those by R. E. Brown and R. Schnackenburg-one may wonder "Why yet another?" The question before us is this: what new ground does Lincoln cover that makes his commentary a necessary and helpful resource for the pastor's or scholar's library given the plethora of commentaries on John's Gospel available today? This book review will make three observations about the commentary by Lincoln in an attempt to answer this question.

The first observation is that this commentary does indeed break with many of the more recent commentaries in that it revisits the issue of the relationship between the Synoptics and the Gospel of John by making the argument that the writer of John knew the Synoptic tradition and utilized that tradition in the writing of his own story of Jesus. Many recent commentaries have adopted the thesis made popular by C. H. Dodd that the writer of John's Gospel did not know the Synoptics, but rather both the writer of John's Gospel and the Synoptic tradition utilized a common oral tradition. This explains, Dodd argued, how there can be points of similarity between John and the Synoptics but yet no direct literary dependence. Lincoln diverges from most contemporary Johannine scholarship on this point by arguing that the writer of John's Gospel knew Matthew, Mark, and Luke and intentionally altered them to emphasize the theological perspective of the Johannine community. In fact, Lincoln argues that the writer of John's Gospel exercised a great deal of "creative and imaginative freedom" (p. 38) in his use of the Synoptics to refocus them in a Christological direction, a perspective that will be disturbing to most evangelicals, as our subsequent analysis will demonstrate. For the sake of space, I will point out only two examples. First, Lincoln sees behind the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17 a creative reworking of the Lord's Prayer (Matt 6:9-15; Luke 11:1-4). The writer of John's Gospel begins with the Lord's Prayer as a base, creates an extended prayer, and then places that prayer on the lips of Jesus in such a way that the high Christology of the Johannine community is emphasized. Second, Lincoln sees in the story of the healing of the paralytic in John 5:1-15 and the subsequent discourse on the Father's testimony about the Son a reworking of a cluster of Markan miracle stories from Mark 2:1 to 3:6 that highlight Jesus' controversies with the Pharisees. In Lincoln's view, the writer of John's Gospel conflates these miracle stories into one healing that takes place on the Sabbath, drops Mark's emphasis on the differences between Jesus' and the Pharisees' approach to the Law, and creatively develops a speech placed on the lips of Jesus that emphasizes the relationship between the Father and the Son.

Most evangelicals will be uncomfortable with Lincoln's analysis of those texts in John where he sees dependence on the Synoptics-like Lincoln's analysis of John 5 and 17 mentioned above-because the end result is that the historicity of this material is treated as suspect. Subsequently, Lincoln argues that what is important is not historical reliability but whether or not the Gospel of John reliably draws out "the significance of the life which it narrates" (p. 48). A further demonstration of Lincoln's tendency on the one hand to minimize the historical reliability of portions of the Gospel of John but on the other hand to retain the view that they contain some "significance" is his analysis of John 3 and 4. In Lincoln's analysis of Jesus' conversations with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well, he makes this observation relative to their historicity: "it is unlikely that the content of the conversations with Niocodemus [sic] and the Samaritan woman have any claim to be reliable historical tradition" (p. 40). Lincoln goes on in the commentary to make this interesting follow-up observation on the Nicodemus passage: "The inconclusiveness of the historicity discussion should also serve as a reminder that, for the evangelist, the material we have been considering is not of interest in its own right but only as it serves as a platform on which John can provide his final testimony" (p. 167).

The second observation about this commentary is actually an extension of the first observation relative to how Lincoln approaches the historicity of the Gospel of John. It is clearly stated in Lincoln's commentary that he is favorable toward and has adopted J. L. Martyn's two-level approach to reading the Gospel of John, whereby the issues facing the Johannine community as they are in conflict with their opponents are collapsed into the issues that Jesus originally faced in his conflicts with the religious leaders of his day. Thus, what we often have in John's Gospel is an anachronistic reading of the ministry of Jesus through the lens of the Johannine community's faith experience in and around AD 90. Lincoln states it this way: "Frequently the moulding of the story of Jesus by the concerns of a later perspective is such that the two are collapsed together and Jesus, in the setting of his mission and in debate with his opponents, expresses the convictions of the evangelist and his community in their debates with opponents" (p. 47). The classic reading of this approach in Johannine literature is the reference in John 9 to the blind man who was healed by Jesus and subsequently cast out of the synagogue because of his new allegiance to Jesus. Lincoln follows the typical two-level interpretation of this passage by stating that the casting out of the healed man in John 9:22 is historically dubious. He argues that it is a created story meant to represent those in the Johannine community who had been cast out of the synagogue due to the adoption of the twelfth of the eighteen Synagogue Benedictions established around AD 85. What is unfortunate about this aspect of the commentary is that Lincoln does not interact with the recent scholarship that is quite critical of this two-level reading of John 9. For example, while Lincoln lists C. L. Blomberg's book The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel as a conservative approach to issues of historicity in the "For Further Reading" section of the introduction to his commentary, he does not give any indication in his actual treatment of John 9 that he has interacted with it.