Abstract
This chapter presents a brief critical survey of the representation of the minor characters in modern Johannine scholarship. Its concealed goal is to create an interpretive framework through which to explore the otherness of minor characters and the identity of Jesus. After examining literary and ideological approaches, it suggests that a combination of narrative criticism (as a method) and deconstructive postcolonial criticism (as a critical optic) is conducive to a new construction of the minor characters, one that aims at wrestling with the Johannine dualistic worldview as a literary and ideological production.
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Notes
- 1.
Misunderstanding, irony, and symbolism are the modes of implicit commentary, a way of “silent” communication operative in interaction with the reader.
- 2.
R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 178.
- 3.
It is important to remember that it is the exclusive nature of the binary system such as understanding/misunderstanding and belief/unbelief that operates irony.
- 4.
Paul D. Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 17.
- 5.
Francisco Lozada, A Literary Reading of John 5: Text as Construction, Studies in Biblical Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 22.
- 6.
Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel, 45.
- 7.
Ibid., 149.
- 8.
J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 3rd ed., The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 30.
- 9.
Gail R. O’Day, Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claim (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1986), 10.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid., 31–32.
- 12.
Lozada , A Literary Reading of John 5: Text as Construction 25–26.
- 13.
On the relationship between characterization and theological thinking in the Gospel of John, see also Christopher Skinner, John and Thomas: Gospels in Conflict? Johannine Characterization and the Thomas Question (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 209), 230–231.
- 14.
On recently escalated research interest in characters and characterization in Johannine scholarship, see Christopher W. Skinner, ed. Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2013); Steven A. Hunt, D. F. Tolmie, and Ruben Zimmermann, Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Approaches to Seventy Figures in John (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). In spite of differences between the two volumes’ approaches and scope, there are some overlapping features. First, both volumes, wittingly or unwittingly, foreground minor characters in the analysis of Johannine characters. What is more, neither work dedicates a chapter to the characterization of Jesus. Clearly, when compared to research in past years, interest in minor characters in the Gospel of John has increased. Even so, I deem it problematic to concentrate solely on the other characters without discussing Jesus. I find that one would arrive at a deepened understanding of the minor characters through analysis of the dynamics between Jesus and the minor characters and vice versa. Second, neither volume demonstrates interest in irony as a literary device in an either/or framework. Rather, both volumes participate in a new trend in Johannine scholarship that takes a more comprehensive approach to characterization, with particular attention to more complicated dynamics between characters. To illustrate, both volumes highlight such themes as ambiguity, complexity, and polyvalence to reveal the intricacy of John’s minor characters. However, some essays in these collections embrace and explore polyvalence, while others instead perpetuate a traditional binary of understanding versus misunderstanding, albeit in a more sophisticated form. These essays still portray minor characters as misunderstanding Jesus’ words rather than acknowledging the validity of their understandings. Third, while Johannine scholarship in past years focused exclusively on the implied author, both volumes make room for equal treatment of the implied reader on the assumption that meaning-making occurs in the communication between the implied author and the implied reader. This move is promising because it offers the perspective of the implied reader as another vantage point from which to view the minor characters. In contrast to increased interest in the implied reader, however, these volumes do not consider the role of real readers in interpreting the minor characters in the Gospel. An engagement with real readers’ social locations would sharpen ideological focus on a variety of issues, including, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, economy, and colonialism. On Johannine characterization, see also Judith Hartenstein, Charakterisierung im Dialog (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007); Alicia D. Meyers, Characterizing Jesus: A Rhetorical Analysis on the Fourth Gospel’s Use of Scripture in its Presentation of Jesus (London: T & T Clark, 2012).
- 15.
Fernando F. Segovia, “The Gospel of John,” in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 158–163.
- 16.
Ibid., 163–189.
- 17.
Cf. Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006); Richard J. Cassidy, John’s Gospel in New Perspective: Christology and the Realities of Roman Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992); Lance Byron Richey, Roman Imperial Ideology and the Gospel of John, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2007); Warren Carter, John and Empire: Initial Explorations (New York: T & T Clark, 2008).
- 18.
Tom Thatcher, Greater Than Caesar: Christology and Empire in the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 6.
- 19.
Ibid., 11.
- 20.
Ibid., ix.
- 21.
Ibid., 135–136.
- 22.
Cf. Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Tyranny, Boundary and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, no. 73 (1999).
- 23.
Musa W. Dube, “Reading for Decolonization,” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey Lloyd Staley (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 51–75.
- 24.
Adele Reinhartz, “The Colonizer as Colonized: Intertextual Dialogue between the Gospel of John and Canadian Identity,” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey Lloyd Staley (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 170–192.
- 25.
Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, “Border-Crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7.53–8.11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused,” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey Lloyd Staley (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 129–152.
- 26.
Ibid., 137.
- 27.
Colleen M. Conway, “Speaking through Ambiguity: Minor Characters in the Fourth Gospel,” Biblical Interpretation 10, no. 3 (2002): 325–326.
- 28.
Ibid., 340.
- 29.
On postcolonial narratology, see Marion Gymnich, “Linguistics and Narratology: The Relevance of Linguistic Criteria to Postcolonial Narratology,” in Literature and Linguistics: Approaches, Models, and Applications, ed. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), 61–76. “Postcolonial narratology, thus, shows how concepts of identity and alterity or categories such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender are constructed, perpetuated or subverted in narrative texts” (62). My interpretive framework is greatly indebted to the approach of Marion Gymnich. To take it a step further, I propose a deconstructive postcolonial approach to narrative because postcolonial agenda would be more effective within deconstructive parameters.
- 30.
Stephen D. Moore, “Deconstructive Criticism: Turning Mark inside-Out,” in Mark & Method, ed. Janice Capel Anderson, and Stephen D. Moore (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 95–110.
- 31.
Ibid., 96.
- 32.
Ibid., 99.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Stephen D. Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 62.
- 35.
Ibid., 72.
- 36.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 239. It is important to note that Butler makes a distinction between performance and performativity: the first concerns theater and ritual, and the second, discourse. She succinctly argues that the “reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (234).
- 37.
A. K. M. Adam, What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 30. Under the aegis of deconstruction criticism, one can see the line customarily drawn between major and minor characters as arbitrary rather than natural. The reason for this is that, within a deconstructive framework, “there is no center by which we can orient ourselves with respect to the margins.”
- 38.
Ibid., 28. As A. K. M. Adam argues, “deconstruction decenters that which has been constructed to be central.”
- 39.
On “strategic essentialism,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 205.
- 40.
For an excellent overview of postcolonial theories of Said, Spivak, JanMohamed, Lloyd, and Bhabha, see Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Postcolonial Criticism: Echoes of a Subaltern’s Contribution and Exclusion,” in Mark & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 213–215. Please notice that my analysis in this section is greatly indebted to Liew for his outstanding introduction to postcolonial theorists—namely, Said, Spivak, JanMohamed, and Llyod—except for Trinh.
- 41.
Ibid., 213–214. Otherness in a colonial context is originally invented to grant stable identity to the colonizer. According to Michel Foucault, those cultural others classified as insane, criminal, and deviant were confined to a mental hospital, prison, or concentration camp with a view to establishing the normative Western self in modern society. In a colonial society, the category of cultural others is extended to the colonized as the counterpart of the colonizing Western self (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)). Megan Vaughan notes that “the need to objectify and distance the ‘Other’ in the form of the madman or the leper was less urgent in a situation in which every colonial person was in some sense, already ‘Other’” (Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 10). As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin suggest, colonial-imperial discourse constructs the colonized other as drastically different from the colonizing self in order to construct the identity of the latter in stark contrast to that of the former: “In order to maintain authority over the Other in a colonial situation, imperial discourse strives to delineate the Other as radically different from the self” (The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 102).
- 42.
Cf. Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism, 2nd ed., Key Ideas (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 38–39.
- 43.
Said, Orientalism, 332.
- 44.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
- 45.
On Spivak’s revised position on the subaltern woman, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 306–311.
- 46.
“Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 308. It is important to note that Spivak describes her polemical statement as “an advisable remark” in the revised version. On this, see A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 308.
- 47.
Liew, “Postcolonial Criticism: Echoes of a Subaltern’s Contribution and Exclusion,” 214.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1.
- 50.
Ibid., 2. JanMohamed and Lloyd state that “those who, despite their marginalization, in fact constitute the majority should be able collectively to examine the nature and content of their common marginalization and to develop strategies for their reempowerment.”
- 51.
Ibid., 9. JanMohamed and Lloyd insist: “The theoretical project of minority discourse involves drawing out solidarities in the form of similarities between modes of repression and struggle that all minorities experience separately but experience precisely as minorities.”
- 52.
Ibid., 10.
- 53.
T. Minh-Ha Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 104. Trinh states thus: “The same holds true for the choice many women of color feel obliged to make between ethnicity and womanhood: how can they? You never have/are one without the other. The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics…. The pitting of anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against one another allows some vocal fighters to dismiss blatantly the existence of either racism or racism within their lines of action, as if oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms.”
- 54.
On the development of narrative criticism in Mark and John, see respectively Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “Characters in Mark’s Story,” in Mark as Story: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Kelly R. Iverson and Christopher W. Skinner (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011); Tom Thatcher, “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel: Past, Present, and Future Probes,” in Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature, ed. Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008). On characterization theories in biblical scholarship and the humanities, see also Michal Beth Dinkler, “Building Character on the Road to Emmaus: Lukan Characterization in Contemporary Literary Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature no. 136 (2017): 687–706.
- 55.
Robert C. Tannehill, “The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology,” Semeia, no. 16 (1979): 57–95. On a philosophical reflection on narrative identity, see also Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Paul Ricoeur states: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character” (147–148).
- 56.
Tannehill, “The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology,” 58.
- 57.
Sheridan, “Identity, Alterity, and the Gospel of John,” 201.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, In the Company of Jesus: Characters in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 193. See also “Characters in Mark’s Story,” 61.
- 60.
On the constructions of identity and alterity in John’s narrative, see Sheridan, “Identity, Alterity, and the Gospel of John,” 188–209. On identity and alterity constructions in narratives, see also Monika Fludernik, “‘When the Self Is an Other’: Vergleichende erzähltheoretische und postkoloniale Überlegungen zur Identitätskonstruktion in der (exil)indischen Gegenwartsliteratur,” Anglia 117 (1999): 71–96.
- 61.
Cf. Sheridan, “Identity, Alterity, and the Gospel of John,” 202. In the words of Sheridan, “The narrative identity projected in the Gospel of John constitutes a ‘performative’ identity.”
- 62.
Cf. John A. Darr, On Character Building: The Reader and the Rhetoric of Characterization in Luke-Acts, Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 59. John Darr aptly states: “The process of constructing character is neither neutral nor unidirectional.”
- 63.
Ibid., 25.
- 64.
Cornelis Bennema, “A Theory of Character in the Fourth Gospel with Reference to Ancient and Modern Literature,” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 4 (2009): 410.
- 65.
Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 273.
- 66.
R. S. Sugirtharajah, A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 93.
- 67.
Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 1–7. Syrotinski aptly states that “deconstruction as a highly vigilant reading practice can inform our critical understanding of specific postcolonial contexts” (59).
- 68.
Cf. Ibid.
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Lim, S.U. (2021). Interpretive Frameworks for Otherness and Identity in the Johannine Narrative. In: Otherness and Identity in the Gospel of John. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60286-4_2
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