Discovering John: Essays by John Ashton

209 Pages·2021·6.374 MB·English

by  John Ashton, Christopher Rowland, Catrin H. Williams

Discovering John
Discovering John
Essays by John Ashton
John Ashton
Edited by
Christopher Rowland
and Catrin H. Williams
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 227 17751 8
PDF ISBN: 978 0 227 90750 4
James Clarke & Co.
C
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Discovering John
Essays by John Ashton
John Ashton
Edited by
Christopher Rowland
and Catrin H. Williams
C
James Clarke & Co
James Clarke & Co
P.O. Box 60
Cambridge
CB1 2NT
United Kingdom
www.jamesclarke.co
[email protected]
Paperback ISBN: 978 0 227 17751 8
PDF ISBN: 978 0 227 90750 4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A record is available from the British Library
First published by James Clarke & Co, 2021
Copyright © John Ashton, 2020
Published by arrangement
with Cascade Books
All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored
electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without prior written permission from the
Publisher ([email protected]).
Contents
Introduction by Christopher Rowland and Catrin H. Williams vii
1. Discovering the Gospel of John:
A Fifty-Year Journey of Exploration 1
2. Really a Prologue? 64
3. John and the Johannine Literature: The Woman at the Well 84
4. Riddles and Mysteries 101
5. “Mystery” in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Fourth Gospel 113
6. The Johannine Son of Man: A New Proposal 131
7. Reflections on a Footnote 156
8. Browning on Feuerbach and Renan 170
John Ashton (13 June 1931 – 3 February 2016)
by Christopher Rowland 182
Bibliography 187
v

Introduction
John Ashton often spoke to his close friends about the reinvigoration
or new lease of life he experienced after his retirement in 1996, when he
began working again on the Gospel of John. During this time—over the
course of nearly twenty years—he wrote a number of essays on a range
of Johannine topics; he also worked on a second edition of his landmark
study, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (2007), and, two years before his
death in 2016, he published his final book entitled The Gospel of John and
Christian Origins. John also discussed with both of us his plans to publish
in a single collection many of the essays he wrote during this period,
as he had done with other essays several years earlier in Studying John:
Approaches to the Fourth Gospel (1994).
In the last months of his life John asked Chris whether he would be
his literary executor. He was especially concerned that the collection of
essays that he had by now submitted for publication, but without success,
should reach a wider public. The collection that he contemplated, which
is substantially what is contained in this volume but with the addition of
the tribute given at John’s funeral, is distinctive. It was John’s intention to
preface his later essays on the Gospel of John with an autobiographical
essay setting the evolution of his interest in and understanding of the
Gospel of John in the context of his life. It is a remarkable testimony not
only to the origins of John’s thinking but it helps us to “discover John” and
the long journey that led to him to teaching at the University of Oxford—
a journey that continued many years after his retirement. His preface to
what is essentially an exegetical volume is a welcome offering, as it offers
significant glimpses of the ways in which life and intellectual engagement
overlap and interact with each other.
vii
viii introduction
Of particular interest is what John wrote about what he learned from
French biblical scholars and the ways in which those ideas inform his
writing, from Understanding the Fourth Gospel to The Gospel of John and
Christian Origins. But, as Chris wrote in a foreword to the second edition
of Understanding the Fourth Gospel, the climax of John Ashton’s book is
his exposition of the theme of revelation, identified by Bultmann as the
key idea of John’s Gospel yet here located within a thoroughly Jewish mi-
lieu. John Ashton’s original, and substantial, exposition of John’s Gospel
in the light of the apocalyptic tradition is masterful in its economy and
profound in its insight. The phrase he used to describe John, “an apoca-
lypse in reverse,” is so fitting in its allusiveness and also its applicability
to a narrative of the revelation of God in human form. The Apocalypse
and the Gospel of John are very different texts. Both texts, however, offer
in narrative and visionary form words which seek to bring about an epis-
temological and ethical transformation in readers/hearers in preparation
for the eschatological meeting “face to face” either in the New Jerusalem
(Rev 22:4) or in heaven with the exalted Christ (John 17:24).
Nearly a decade ago the two of us had the privilege of gathering
together a group of scholars to explore several aspects of “Intimations of
Apocalyptic,” as had been deftly articulated by John in his Understanding
the Fourth Gospel. On this occasion we are grateful to Cascade Books for
working with us to bring John Ashton’s final collection of essays to publi-
cation, thus fulfilling the end-of-journey wishes of this truly remarkable
Johannine scholar and dear friend.
We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by the follow-
ing publishers to reproduce John’s essays, which are placed in a largely
thematic rather than strictly chronological order: Mohr Siebeck; Cam-
bridge University Press; Westminster John Knox Press; SBL Press; and
Bloomsbury Publishing.
— “Really a Prologue?” In The Prologue of the Gospel of John: Its Literary, Theological,
and Philosophical Contexts. Papers Read at the Colloquium Ioanneum 2013, edited
by Jan G. van der Watt et al., 27–44. WUNT 359. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.
— “John and the Johannine Literature: The Woman at the Well.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Biblical Interpretation, edited by John Barton, 259–75. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
introduction ix
— “Riddles and Mysteries: The Way, the Truth, and the Life.” In Jesus in Johannine
Tradition, edited by Robert T. Fortna and Tom Thatcher, 333–42. Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. 
— “‘Mystery’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Fourth Gospel.” In John, Qumran, and
the Dead Sea Scrolls: Sixty Years of Discovery and Debate, edited by Mary L. Coloe
and Tom Thatcher, 53–68. Early Judaism and Its Literature 32. Atlanta: Society of
Biblical Literature, 2011.
— “The Johannine Son of Man: A New Proposal.” NTS 57 (2011) 508–29.
— “Reflections on a Footnote.” In Engaging with C. H. Dodd on the Gospel of John:
Sixty Years of Tradition and Interpretation, edited by Tom Thatcher and Catrin H.
Williams, 203–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
— “Browning on Feuerbach and Renan.” In Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading
the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll, edited by Alastair G. Hunter and Phillip R.
Davies, 374–94. JSOTSup 348. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.
Christopher Rowland and Catrin H. Williams
18 March 2019