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eBook details

• Title: Jesus' Thirst in John 19:28-30: Literal Or Figurative?
• Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
• Release Date : January 22, 1996
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 224 KB

Description

I In his book Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (1989), Stephen D. Moore concludes his last substantial chapter with an exegesis of the way the Johannine water metaphor is used in the Gospel's text. His intention is to give a deconstructive analysis that pays attention not only to "the forces of difference within the text" but especially to "the possibility that the text might also differ from itself." (1) He uses his reading of John to give exegetical substance to his theoretical discussions about the role of the reader. In this way the exegesis of John receives a prominent place. His conclusion is that, indeed, John's text differs from itself since its figurality is inconsistent. According to Moore, Johannine irony fails in the end because it collapses into paradox (Criticism, 163, 168). This conclusion hinges substantially on his exegesis of John 19:28, where Jesus at the cross does not satisfy the desire for living water, as we would have expected, but he himself is thirsting for the literal earthly water, just as he was first depicted at the Samaritan well. Moore thinks it very strange that Jesus, the source of the figural water, is now thrust into the very condition of the literal thirst that his discourse has led the audience to transcend. Moreover, the satiation of Jesus' physical thirst in 19:30 is an arrestingly strange precondition for the symbolic yielding up of that which is designed to satiate the supra-physical thirst of the believer, that is, the Spirit (Criticism, 161). This means that two levels of meaning that should have been kept apart--viz., the literal and the figural--are collapsed. The result is a kind of cognitive paralysis that makes the Gospel's irony become paradox (Criticism, 163). So we could say that the reader of the Gospel is fooled by the narrator. The reader becomes the ultimate victim of the Gospel's irony. Gospel characters such as Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and others who had reacted on the literal, down-to-earth level rather than on the figural are thoroughly vindicated at last.

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