Johannes Beutler

New Testament scholar Johannes Beutler brings together a lifetime of study and reflection in this acclaimed commentary, first published in German in 2013 and now available to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Moving through the Gospel of John with a careful and critical eye, Beutler engages the relevant primary and secondary sources; summarizes the existing discussion; and presents syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses of the text. As he meticulously examines the Fourth Gospel, Beutler pays special attention to the influence of Old Testament and Early Jewish traditions, to the overall structure of the Gospel of John, and to evidence suggesting a later stratum of contextualized "re-readings" in the composition of the Gospel. Bold, literary, and theological, this volume represents a landmark work of German biblical scholarship.

The influence of the Old Testament and Early Judaism on the Fourth Gospel is the subject of various contributions of this book, as well as the influence of the Synoptic tradition. However, the author's interest also lies in the latest stratum of the Gospel of John. The interpretive model of relecturing allows the study of the relation between texts without the need to hypothesize about their authors and sources. At the same time, it is easier to consider the message of the Gospel in the past and in the present day in the light of the complete text. John invites his readers to not only have faith in Christ, but also to fearlessly profess their faith. Of the twenty contributions to this volume, originally published since 1998, three have been translated from Italian or Spanish, and five have remained in the original English.

In this study, the First Farewell Discourse of Jesus (Jn 14) is read in the light of the Old Testament and Early Judaism. At the beginning of the chapter, influence of Psalm 42/43 can be shown. In the central part of the chapter, the subjects of loving God / Jesus and keeping the commandments seem to go back to Deuteronomic covenant theology. In the final part, prophetic announcements of eschatological salvation are echoed. Thus, Jn 14 makes use of the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. This is important for Jewish-Christian dialogue. The English edition of this book is based on the German original of 1984. In a Postscript the contributions on the chapter since the first publication are reviewed, and an additional bibliography has been added.