Theological Studies

50 (1989)

CRISIS IN JERUSALEM? NARRATIVE CRITICISM IN

NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES
PHEME PERKINS
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass.

H ISTORICAL-CRITICAL STUDY of the New Testament recognized from

the beginning that in the context of the great classical works even
the best of NT writings cannot be considered "literature. " For English
speakers, the noble prose of the Authorized Version coupled with an
idealized, romantic interpretation of the religious content of the NT kept
this fact from the consciousness of literary critics and English depart-
ments that continue to treat the "Bible as literature" within the bound-
aries of the Western literary canon.1 As a result, literary studies of the
Bible are often considered spurious to the serious task of NT scholars:
historical-critical analysis and theological interpretation.
Though historical criticism tended to emphasize the development of
NT writings out of smaller units of tradition and the correlation of such
tradition histories with the emergence of distinctive religious language
and theological ideas, it could not ignore altogether the challenge posed
by ancient literature. What, if any, literary models did the various authors
use in composing their works? How does a presumed genre shape the
message which the author presents to the first-century reader? Attempts
to answer these questions have created a flood of analyses of ancient
literary remains that do not enjoy "classical" status, such as romances,
fragments of ethnic histories, school books on rhetoric, papyrus letters,
and the like.2
The study of ancient literary composition plays an important role in
the task of redaction criticism. The exegete is asked to construct a
"theology" of a given Gospel on the basis of the way in which the author
has edited and arranged traditional materials. Usually such theologies
1
See the discussion of this phenomenon in A. Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The
Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1971) xi-xxx.
2
These debates and their associated literature have been ably summarized by D. E.
Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987).
Aune's treatment is particularly important because it recognizes that both Greco-Roman
and Jewish materials must be taken into account in describing the context of N T writings.
Aune finds the Christian literary problem exemplified in Paul's own combination of Jewish
traditions and Hellenistic rhetorical forms: "The Christianity reflected in Paul's letters is
consciously rooted theologically in this Judaism and yet is struggling to discard the cultural
markers of Jewish ethnic identity" (12).
296
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 297
emphasize the Christology of the individual writers.3 Attention to ancient
literary patterns may prevent the exegete from drawing false conclusions
about the significance of particular features in a gospel. For example, the
frequent misunderstanding by Jesus' disciples in Mark are neither his-
torical reports nor the theological devaluation of Christians attached to
Jesus as miracle worker. Misunderstanding of divine revelation is char-
acteristic of writings claiming to present revealed teaching throughout
the period. As part of the stock literary content one also finds the
encounter with hostile authorities and accounts of the weaknesses of the
followers of the great man.4 This comparative approach has also fueled
debates about the historical and biographical intent of the evangelists.
Pointing to such common elements as an edifying or ideological point of
view, entertaining fictions, constructed speeches, and fictional episodes
in other ancient writings which are nonetheless considered historical or
biographical, some scholars are abandoning the radical skepticism of the
earlier historical-critical method, which had insisted that one could
recover nothing except the ideology of the evangelists from the gospel
narratives.5
Since the materials required to study NT writings in their ancient
context are even less accessible than the established classics, the gap
between such study and treatment of the Bible as literature by literary
critics remains. The most powerful presentation of biblical narrative as
3
Some critics pursue the redaction-critical task by first constructing a detailed map of
source material and editing by the evangelist, as in R. T. Fortna's The Fourth Gospel and
Its Predecessor: From Narrative Source to Present Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
Others do so by isolating structural elements that result from the use of transitional
passages (for a critic of this method, see C. W. Hedrick, "The Role of Summary Statements
in the Composition of the Gospel of Mark: A Dialogue with Karl Schmidt and Norman
Perrin," Novum Testamentum 26 [1984] 289-311), or the positioning and use of key
Christological titles (e.g., J. D. Kingsbury, The Christology of Mark's Gospel [Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1983]). In some cases a particular theme may be seen as structuring both the
narrative and the Christology of a Gospel. D. Lee-Pollard has proposed that Mark is shaped
around power and powerlessness. The opening sections demonstrate the immense power of
the kingdom in Jesus' ministry; the passion, its renunciation in obedient trust in God,
which is at the same time the triumphant coming of God's rule and destruction of the
temple ("Powerlessness as Power: A Key Emphasis in the Gospel of Mark," Scottish Journal
of Theology 40 [1987] 173-88).
4
Aune, New Testament 55-56.
5
So Aune, ibid. 55-65, 80; and from the perspective of a detailed study of the literary
presentation of Galilee in the gospels complemented by archeology and sociological recon-
struction of the Jesus movement, S. Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary
Approaches and Historical Investigations (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988). J. H. Charlesworth
has also mounted a defense of historical Jesus research based on analyses of intertestamen-
tal Jewish writings and archeological investigation (Jesus within Judaism [New York:
Doubleday, 1988]).
298 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

a formative element in the Western literary canon in recent years has

been Northrop Frye's construction of biblical typologies.6 However, the
"narrative" in this instance is a great construct of biblical history from
Exodus through the Apocalypse from which the types of metaphors
emerge as embedded in different writings of the Bible. The narrative
patterns of individual writings or the peculiarities of their authors have
all been swallowed up into the code.7 A more nuanced position on these
issues is evident in The Literary Guide to the Bible edited by a specialist
in OT literary analysis, Robert Alter, and the distinguished professor of
English literature Frank Kermode.8 Christian treatment of Jewish Scrip-
tures in terms of type and antitype, as well as the plotting of "world
history," is carefully distinguished from a Jewish or literary reading of
the same writings. The diverse mixture of authors, both exegetes and
literary critics, as well as a varying understanding of literary analysis
and disagreement over whether the text to be analyzed is a text-critically
reconstructed Hebrew or Greek original, the Authorized Version, or some
other English rendering, makes the volume a better example of the
problems in attempting such a task than a guide.
Exegetes dissatisfied with the literary analyses appropriate to historical
criticism have approached the NT narratives with methods of literary
analysis taken from contemporary criticism. Two elements of the redac-
tional-critical approach make its use of literary parallels invalid as
literary criticism in this view. First, redaction criticism fails to perceive
that the form of the work as a whole and the reader's participation in
that work is the goal of interpretation, not moving from the text to
theology.9 Second, redaction criticism is the victim of a literalist fallacy
that underlies the treatment of biblical narrative from the beginnings of
modern criticism: it mistakes realistic narrative for claims about a
historical reality seen through the text.10 Historical critics may well
e
N . Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1982).
7
Frye's construction is certainly a brilliant demonstration of the way in which the
biblical code shapes English literature. However, typology not only destroys the literary
qualities of the narrative wholes within the canon; it has also been the weapon by which
Christian apologists have misread and reshaped Hebrew Scriptures to their own ends.
Harold Bloom protests that Frye stands in a long line of such apologists (in H. Bloom, ed.,
The Gospels [New York: Chelsea House, 1988] 1-15).
8
Cambridge: Harvard University/Belknap, 1987.
9
W. A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970)
1-13.
10
The emerging concern for NT narrative has been strongly influenced by Hans Frei's
account of the historical turn away from biblical narrative in 18th- and 19th-century
hermeneutics (The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative [New Haven: Yale, 1974]). It should be
noted that the criticism has contributed little to the solution. The problem of a hermeneutics
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 299
object to both challenges. While reader participation in creating the
meaning of the text can even be seen in the work of exegetes, modern
Western aesthetic and emotive responses cannot be projected onto an-
cient audiences. Much of the detail of comparative material from the
ancient world that loads our commentaries, not to mention the major
difficulties faced when we translate into modern languages, is an effort
to create a more appropriate context for evoking meaning and engage-
ment with the text than can be derived from literary theorists. Second,
"narrative realism" is simply a variant of first-order naivete about the
text. It presumes an author in imaginative control of a fictional world
which he or she creates. This model of authorship is not appropriate to
the use of tradition in composition of the Gospels. The NT is not
"literature" in the terms that modern criticism requires.
Narrative criticism of the NT being done by exegetes often responds
to such objections by incorporating the results of historical-critical analy-
sis or by insisting that a method of grasping the text as a narrative whole
is the necessary first stage to any other form of analysis that might be
pursued using the text as "data."11 Justification for the turn toward
narrative in particular often points to the narrative character of human
life, which is lived as the embodiment of stories on both the personal and
national level.12 Narrative permits a rendering of the complexity of
human lives and choice, as well as the dynamic engagement of readers
of understanding and the question of the relative authority of "author" and "interpreter"
in relationship to a text posed by Schleiermacher (Frei, Eclipse 287-306) remain on the
agenda of all but the formalist literary approaches. Since narrative criticism attends to the
role of the reader in constructing the meaning of the text, the reader's construction as it
responds to both text and reader's context may indeed be "privileged" over that of the
author. Since narrative analysis frequently seeks to describe a "world" created by the text
which seeks to engage the reader in its system of valuations, the hermeneutics of under-
standing, especially as developed by Ricoeur and Gadamer, can be enlisted in the enterprise.
For a critique of formalist methods and a development of the case for such a hermeneutical
approach, see L. M. Poland, Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Critique of
Formalist Approaches (Chico: Scholars, 1985).
11
See the discussion of the relationship between the historical-critical paradigm and
literary criticism by N. Petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1985).
12
E.g., W. A. Kort, Story, Text and Scripture: Literary Interests in Biblical Narrative
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 1988) 6-15. Kort's actual treatment
of biblical materials, forcing them to read as exempla of his schematic elements of narrative
and globalized misreadings of critical theories with which he disagrees, makes the book an
unreliable contribution to the discussion. For a sustained treatment of fiction and critical
pluralism that faces the questions of "world building" and ethical and ideological criticism
in a way that will be illuminating for students of biblical material, see W. Booth, The
Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California, 1988) 227-
373.
300 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

in responding to the story, that is lost with the translation of the NT

into evidence for historical events or theological concepts. Narrative
criticism seeks to facilitate entry into the complexity of the narrative
world, not exit from it into history or theology.

THE COHERENCE OF NARRATIVE

Human storytelling implies patterns of coherence that shape the world
in which humans find themselves. Fragmented, incoherent, and discor-
dant experiences become coherent when incorporated into an intelligible
story. Such processes are nowhere more evident than in the NT creations
of a new story out of its experience and tradition.13 Historical criticism
has shown that the complexes of oral material inherited by the evangelists
did not contain within themselves the principles of narrative organization
required by a gospel.14 While redaction criticism attributes all the shaping
and editing that goes into the gospel story to the evangelist as author,
narrative criticism complicates the simple model of author and narrative
assumed by redaction criticism.
Coherence is not found in a theological agenda discovered in the
narrative and described as the intention of the writer. The narrative is
not simply the vehicle by which a message passes from author to reader.
Instead, narrative coherence is as multifaceted as narrative itself. The
critic must recognize that the "author" projected by the hints and choices
made in a text is distinct from the real individual who composed the text.
This "implied author" is also distinct from the voice of the narrator, who
speaks directly to a listener. As a story progresses, the audience may
discover that the narrator is both reliable and even omniscient as to
events in, behind, and beyond the story and the thoughts, motives, and
responses of characters. An "omniscient narrator" is characteristic of the
gospels. Or the reader may discover that the narrator is unreliable, in
which case the reader may identify with the implied author against the
narrative voice.15
A narrative creates its audience in the assumptions that it makes about
13
Wilder (Rhetoric 55-70) emphasizes the importance of story from the earliest oral
shaping of the Christian message. He insists that in Christianity the narrative mode took
on a unique importance not evident in other religious and philosophical traditions. Christian
faith can be presented simply by telling the story, without the mediation of sacred text
(56). Stories are the primary imaginative vehicle for shaping what is considered ethical
action (60).
14
E. Best, Mark: The Gospel as Story (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983) 3-14; Kermode,
"Matthew," Literary Guide 387.
15
The most widely used treatment of narrative criticism among NT critics is S. Chatman,
Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University,
1978).
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 301
the values and beliefs which the world of the narrative presumes to be
true, through remarks that the narrator addresses to the audience and in
numerous assumptions an author makes about what the audience knows.
The reader addressed by the narrator at the specific point may differ
from the "ideal reader" projected by the story as a whole, one who
perceives the ironies and interconnections in the development of the plot
and who shares the implied author's presentation of the various charac-
ters. Anxious to press on to creating a picture of the "community for
which the evangelist wrote," redaction criticism has neglected the dis-
tinctions between narrative audiences, ideal readers, and actual readers.16
To speak about the coherence of a gospel as narrative whole, then, can
be understood as a description of the successful establishment of an
implied reader. The importance of this process in narrative analysis of
the NT quickly becomes evident in the growing appeals to "irony" to
explain the divergence between what happens on the narrative line of
the story and meanings which the reader is intended to discern based on
the superior knowledge that he or she possesses either of Jesus' identity,
the eventual working out of the plot according to a plan established by
God, or even the reader's presumed knowledge of the unnarrated future
spread of Christianity.17
The relationship between coherence, plot, characterization, and estab-
lishment of an "implied reader" who can decode the various hints given
in the gospel is clearly exhibited by the debates over the ending of Mark's
Gospel. The earliest manuscripts end at 16:8a, the women fleeing the
tomb and saying nothing to anyone out of fear. How is such an ending
16
See the treatment of the implied reader in John by A. Culpepper, Anatomy of the
Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 205-27. Comparative literary analysis of OT
as well as other ancient materials enters into the discussion of "implied reader" when it
appears that the ideal reader is expected to recognize such literary patterns as "type scenes"
from the OT, as is the case in the Matthean infancy narratives (Kermode, "Matthew,"
Literary Guide 395-98).
17
While the treatment of irony and misunderstanding is most developed in discussions
of the Fourth Gospel (see Culpepper, Anatomy 165-80), it appears in analyses of all the
gospels. Irony has become the primary explanatory term whenever an author is describing
the apparent conflict between the implied author's view that the rejection of Jesus by the
Jews is appropriate to a divine plan and the intentions of the agents responsible for Jesus'
death in the narrative. Consequently, Jesus' opponents are the primary victims of irony.
The disciples are secondarily victims when they misunderstand Jesus* intent to suffer.
Unlike the ironies of modern fiction, however, the gospels never make the reader a victim
of irony (Culpepper, Anatomy 179). Irony as a polemical weapon frequently appears in the
Pauline letters, especially in contexts in which the apostle is describing his own afflictions
(see K. A. Plank, Paul and the Irony of Affliction [Atlanta: Scholars, 1987]), and has even
found its way into rhetorical analysis of 2 Peter (D. F. Watson, Invention, Arrangement
and Style: Rhetorical Criticism of Jude and 2 Peter [Atlanta: Scholars, 1988] 117, 127).
302 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

coherent with the angelic announcement of the resurrection and Jesus'

fulfilment of his promise to the disciples (Mk 14:28) in the previous verse
(16:7)? The various longer endings to Mark provided in the manuscript
traditions, which make the Gospel's conclusion coherent with the resur-
rection-appearance traditions of the other Gospels, show that even in
antiquity Mark was felt to have failed to attain suitable closure.18
Narrative critics who emphasize the importance of the reader's iden-
tification with the disciples as crucial to the reader's response to the
narrative find failures in the disciples during the passion a clue to the
Gospel's instruction about faithfulness.19 Though the passion-resurrec-
tion predictions in the Gospel make it evident that the reader knows
some version of the resurrection kerygma, Mark's unwillingness to close
his narrative in this way indicates to the reader that failed discipleship
is still possible in the postresurrection community. The author has shown
that the words of Jesus are reliable, but presents an audience which could
put its trust in Jesus' word or could fail to follow him.20
Satisfactory resolution of the ending in Mark presumes that the reader
recalls Jesus' earlier words about his passion, as well as the distinction
between human and divine perspectives. The ambiguity of the promise
to see Jesus again may also recall the warnings about false prophets and
messiahs in Mk 13:9, 11, as well as the anticipation of Jesus' return at
the Parousia (13:24-29). In fact, the reader hears two stories: Mark's
narrative, which ends with the hint of a return to Galilee, and the story
implied by Jesus' predictions, which ends with the Parousia.21 Unlike the
false prophets who claim that the end is at hand, the Markan story
remains open-ended. The reader is invited to perceive the irony built up
18
In the most striking "reconstructive surgery" to account for the peculiarity of Mark,
J. D. Crossan (Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of the Canon [Minneapolis:
Winston, 1985] 149-81) uses the apocryphal Gospel of Peter to reconstruct the pre-Synoptic
source for Jesus' burial and resurrection which included a triumphant vision of the risen
Lord and confession by both Jewish and Roman authorities. Mark is said to have truncated
that account by relocating it into the Transfiguration scene and replaced it with the story
of the women at the tomb.
19
E.g., R. Tannehill, "The Role of the Disciples in Mark," Journal of Religion 57 (1977)
386-405; idem, "The Gospel of Mark as a Narrative Christology," Semeia 16 (1979) 62, 69-
70, 82-84.
20
Tannehill, "Christology" 84; Best (Mark 47 f.) rejects Tannehill's claims about the
ambiguity of the ending on the ground that the reader knows that this obstacle was
overcome by the successful mission of the disciples. Weaknesses in the disciples only serve
to highlight the power of God. Best points to other examples in which Mark presumes that
the reader knows about the future life of the Church, such as healing by prayer and the
Eucharistie practices of the Church, without including them in the narrative (Mark 120).
21
See N. Petersen, "When Is the End Not the End? Literary Reflections on the Ending
of Mark's Narrative," Interpretation 34 (1980) 152-64.
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 303

by the contrast between Jesus' certainty of the divine purpose on the

way to his passion and then to Galilee and the persistent confusion
shown by the disciples. However, the eschatological warnings of chapter
13 minimize the failures of the disciples, since they will uphold Jesus'
word against the words of such false prophets.22 The coherence of the
narrative depends upon the imaginative expansion of the story by the
implied reader.
CHARACTER, ROLE, AND ETHICAL CRITICISM
The dilemmas posed by Mark's ending point to another element of
narrative criticism: treatment of characters. Where modern fiction em-
phasizes the internal development of character, ancient characters tend
to be static embodiments of particular characteristics. Consequently,
treatment of character in narrative analysis of the NT focuses on char-
acters as the expression of particular roles in the narrative.23 Roles stand
between character and plot, since the role requires that one describe the
characters in relationship and actions to others. The reader's perception
of the plot of the narrative creates a unity which establishes the signifi-
cance of the actions of the various characters.24 But the unity which the
reader perceives in the actions of the characters carries with it an
evaluative point of view. Both the implied author and the narrator provide
perspectives from which the reader views the characters and their actions.
In the gospels, call stories as well as statements about how the disciples
share Jesus' mission made by the narrator provide the reader with the
criteria for evaluating their actions within the story. Such devices some-
times even suggest future actions in the unnarrated time beyond the
gospel, which the evangelist shares with the implied reader.25
The Fourth Gospel prefaces the passion events with extensive revela-
tion discourses. These discourses point beyond the narrated events of
the Gospel to a "return" by Jesus to his own when the meaning of his
words will become clear. From the beginning of the Gospel, both Jesus
(e.g., Jn 1:51) and the narrator, whose voice and point of view coincide
with Jesus', had already hinted at such future understanding (2:22).
Consequently, misunderstandings by the disciples at the level of the
narrative do not form a hindrance to their role as followers and eventual
22
Ibid. 163,166.
23
Culpepper, Anatomy 101-4; Tannehill ("Christology" 63-65) focuses on the roles that
Jesus assumes in relationship to others.
24
So R. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation 1
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) xiii-xiv, 1-4.
25
Mark provides such clues in 1:16-20; 3:13-19; 6:7-13; 8:34-38 (Tannehill, "Christology"
64 f.).
304 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

witnesses to the Son in a hostile world.26 The situation is quite different

in relationships between Jesus and the Jews, whose hostility drives the
plot to its culmination in Jerusalem. Their representational role as
"enemies" sweeps away all the diverse characters one finds in the other
Gospels. Even the most sympathetic character, the Jewish teacher Nic-
odemus, remains an "outsider" and hence destroys any expectation that
"the Jews" might overcome their misunderstanding and rejection of
Jesus.27
While the ambiguity of Mark's ending and its consistent portrayal of
flawed discipleship created narrative incoherences which the implied
reader must resolve on the basis of later actions of the disciples which
are not narrated, the sharp distinctions which the Fourth Gospel draws
between "Jesus' own" (both the postresurrection disciples and the en­
lightened reader) and "the Jews" (the hostile world of unbelief) leave no
narrative ambiguity about the judgments the implied reader is to pass on
the world represented by these characters. John apparently uses the
expression "Jews" as a consistent term for those descendants of Abraham
closed to God's revelation in Jesus. The narrative links Jesus' brothers
with "the Jews" (7:1-10), so the reader is not surprised that when Jesus'
mother reappears at the foot of the cross she is not accompanied by "his
brothers" as she had been in Capernaum (2:12). Instead, she is entrusted
to the Beloved Disciple, who takes her into his home (19:26-27).28
At the level of narrative criticism, the rising hostility of the Jews and
even the crowds merely contributes to the dramatic intensity of a plot
whose outcome the reader has known from the opening verses: God's
Son is to be rejected in a cosmic drama of belief/unbelief, but those who
do believe will enjoy a new status as children of God (Γ.1-18).29 Variants
on this plot are played out in the smaller confrontations between Jesus
and "the Jews" which make up the ministry of Jesus. But it is the very
consistency and sharpness with which the evangelist draws the lines
between "insiders" and "outsiders" that may require contemporary read­
ers to challenge the ethical point of view represented in the narrative.
Narratives do require readers to assent to their values as they follow the
story through to the conclusion. In that act of assent the lines between
actual and implied readers become much more difficult to draw, since
26
Culpepper, Anatomy 118.
27
See the treatment of "the Jews" as characters in Culpepper, Anatomy 125-35. He
observes that the evangelist repeatedly uses irony to emphasize the culpability of Jewish
leaders for a rejection of Jesus, which is rejection of the God they claim to worship. The
irony culminates in the trial scene, in which the Jews themselves become apostates. Pilate's
verdict mocks them (Anatomy 169-72).
28
Freyne, Ga/itee 130-31.
29
Culpepper, Anatomy 86-91.
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 305

even assenting to those things which we accept only for the sake or
duration of the story may engender commitments that we should other-
wise resist.30
The hostile irony and even bitterness which the Johannine narrator
shows toward "the Jews" has not gone unnoticed by historical critics.
Fortna's redaction-critical analysis finds most of the references to "the
Jews" and the preoccupation with Jesus as the one who "overcomes" or
replaces Jewish feasts and religious practices to be the work of the
evangelist.31 Where narrative criticism risks short-circuiting any engage-
ment with the ethical perspective of a text by insisting on merely formal
analyses of characters, roles, and plot, historical criticism explains the
text as an example of the "history of the community." Suggestions that
Christians were expelled from Jewish synagogues for their belief in Jesus
(9:22; 12:42 f.; 16:l-4a) become the traumatic separation of Jewish
Christians from their synagogue home and former compatriots. Exiled
from Judaism and threatened by hostility from others as well, the
community saw all those outside its borders as condemned for unbelief.
Jews and perhaps even Christian Jews who would not confess Jesus as
the only revelation of God have no place in salvation.32 Scholars some-
times treat the violence of John's symbolic language as though it were
evidence for the violence of persecution and loss suffered by the com-
munity, without any reflection on the narrative use of dualistic symbols
or the locus of the emotions presumed to be associated with this use of
symbols.33
CRISIS IN JERUSALEM: SYMBOLIC OPPOSITIONS IN NARRATIVE
Both historical-critical and narrative analyses of John have recognized
that not only does the author attach differing symbolic values to Galilee
and Jerusalem/Judea; he even breaks up the anticipated linear pattern
of Galilean ministry, journey to Jerusalem, crisis/death in Jerusalem into
somewhat awkward journeys between the two. Historical critics are even
30
Booth, Company 8-9, 32, 43, 111-14, 139-43.
31
Fortna, Fourth Gospel 54, 61, 87, 103, 115, 125, 151-54, 263. Fortna proposes that the
"signs gospel" which the evangelist reworked stems from a throroughly Jewish-Christian
milieu (220-23).
32
Ibid. 292.
33
A more radical hermeneutic of suspicion would employ as subtexts works such as
Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew or Freud's treatment of aggression, guilt, and superego in
Civilization and Its Discontents (see the use of modern psychoanalytic works as subtexts in
the interpretation of the dynamics of narrative in Judges by M. Bal, Death and Dissym-
metry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges [Chicago: University of Chicago,
1988] 52-196). Freud suggests that the internalized aggression of the superego does not
correlate directly with the external force exercised by a child's parents but with the
emotional force of the child's response.
306 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

tempted to rearrange the Johannine narrative to resolve the awkwardness

this juxtaposition creates.34 Resisting the temptation to rearrange, nar-
rative criticism seeks to discover any keys to narrative coherence or
codes that might be discovered in the work itself. The symbolic values of
place in religious narratives, particularly boundaries, sacred mountains,
doors and thresholds, barriers, temples, tombs, rivers, oceans, wilderness,
and the like, cannot be treated as items for a modern geography.35 They
may easily encode multiple levels of religious significance, as is evident
when the crowd at the Johannine feeding miracle is metaphorically
transformed into its ancestors murmuring against Moses in the wilder-
ness (6:25-50), even though they are not in the wilderness but at Caper-
naum (6:24), where we are told that Jesus was teaching in the synagogue
(6:59).
John's narrative anticipation of the final crisis in Jerusalem has
episodes of withdrawal from anticipated danger in Judea (4:1-3). At the
same time, the reader is frequently reminded that Jesus cannot be harmed
before his "hour" and that Jesus' true place is neither in Judea nor in
Galilee but with the Father, a place to which his opponents cannot come
(7:28-31, 32-35) but which his return to glory with the Father will open
for his followers (14:1-6; 17:24). Early in the Gospel a major episode takes
place between Judea and Galilee: Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan
woman and the conversion of a number of Samaritan villagers to believing
in Jesus as "savior of the world" (4:4-42). The naive realism of historical
critics has often found this episode evidence for Samaritan converts to
the Johannine community whose Moses traditions shaped the high
Christology of the Gospel. Feminists are eager to claim the Samaritan
woman as a prominent Christian missionary whose story points to the
codiscipleship of women and men in the earliest communities before the
corrupting influence of patriarchy distorted the true vision of Christian
discipleship.
Rather than approach the text with an agenda for historical reconstruc-
tion, the deliberate place of this significant episode between Judea and
Galilee, its suggestive symbolic connections with stories of the patriarch
Jacob (already invoked in the image of 1:51), and its definitive relocation
of true worship neither on the sacred mount of the Samaritans nor that
of the Jews suggest that this text may have more to tell us about the
troubling picture of "the Jews" in Johannine narrative than the univer-
salist Christology of its conclusion. Hendrickus Boers has subjected this
34
Fteyne, Galilee 118-25.
35
For a symbolic anthropological approach to place and the calling of the disciples to be
fishers of men in Mark, see E. Leach, "Fishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness,"
Literary Guide 579-99.
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 307

narrative to a detailed structuralist analysis, following a modified version

of the model created by A. J. Greimas.36 It is impossible to summarize
the formal presentation of the logical exchanges or failures to undertake
an offered program at each sequence in the narrative or the logical
squares of oppositions and contraries established in working through the
text.
However, Boers's analysis of the narrative points up the importance
of the cultural opposition Jew/Samaritan. When it leads the woman to
refuse Jesus' request for water because of a burden of not associating
with Samaritans which she attributes to Jews (4:9), Jesus shifts the
program to his offer of water to her. When the woman refuses that claim
(v. 15 is taken as a refusal, not the beginning of faith in Jesus), the
program shifts again. Though Jesus' knowledge of her past impresses the
woman and is the ground for her subsequent report about him in the
village (v. 29), she once again challenges Jesus on the basis of religious
separation between Samaritans and Jews, laying the blame on Jewish
claims that God is to be worshiped in Jerusalem.37 Though the woman
recognizes that Jesus is a prophet and qualified to decide the issue of
worship, her response to his claim that true worship of God is now "in
Spirit and truth" rejects that authority by deferring resolution of the
question to the coming of the messiah (v. 25). Contrary to most historical
and literary critics, who presume that Jesus' "I am he" in v. 26 represents
a confession of faith that the woman now shares,38 Boers's logical analysis
suggests that she refuses this insight just as she had Jesus' claim to
provide "living water," which led her to challenge Jesus' status: "Are you
greater than our father Jacob?" (v. 12a). Her only positive sanction for
Jesus' continued action is the miraculous knowledge shown about her
past.
None of the needs expressed in the narrative sequences have been
fulfilled by the time the reader reaches v. 26: Jesus' thirst; woman's
thirst, lack of understanding about living water; woman's understanding
of Jesus' identity; resolution of the division between Jew and Samaritan
over association between the groups; resolution of the division between
Jew and Samaritan over the right place to worship. The issue of water
will be resolved indirectly in Jesus' exchange with the disciples about
food (= doing the will of the Father who sent him, w . 27, 31-34). The
questions of Jesus' identity and association between Jews and Samaritans
36
H. Boers, Neither on This Mountain Nor in Jerusalem: A Study of John 4 (Atlanta:
Scholars, 1988).
37
Ibid. 4-15.
38
E.g., Culpepper, Anatomy, 137: "As the light of understanding begins to break, the
Samaritan woman shows herself at each stage ready to receive it."
308 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

are resolved in the encounter with the Samaritan villagers (w. 39-42).39
Though redaction critics have often presumed that the scene with the
disciples was superimposed on a narrative about the Samaritan woman,
the logical connection of actions and resolution shows it to be necessary
to complete the sequence of actions in the narrative.40
The variations on contraries and oppositions in the logical square
provide a clue to the encoding of values within the narrative. The
individual Jewish man and Samaritan woman become representative of
Jews and Samaritans, and at a more abstract level the securities that
come from adherence to one's group. Food and water are opposed as
physical realities or Jesus' "other," spiritual food, and at a deeper level
they represent the oppositions of life/death, good/bad. Similarly, the
story begins with the apparent invasion of Samaritan sacred space by a
"Jew." (The significance of the narrator's comment, "it was necessary
for him to pass through Samaria," is transferred beyond the question of
physical travel routes as the sequence progresses.) Factional division
between Jew and Samaritan would affirm both refusal to participate in
Jesus' initial project, request for water, and to tresspass in the sanctuary
of another. The values encoded in the narrative proposed to overcome
such divisions with a different image of the solidarity of "true worshipers"
who now dwell together. Unlike the woman's initial refusals, the Samar-
itan villagers extend hospitality to Jesus, which he accepts.41
Samaria is no longer "alien" to Jesus, because the sacred space which
had marked the separation of Jew/Samaritan has been dissolved with
the coming of "true worshipers." In dissolving the dichotomy of space,
Jesus also reveals that the necessity which led him to pass through
Samaria was not geographical in the physical sense, but represents his
commitment to doing the will of the One who sent him. The harvest
sayings identifying the immediacy of sowing and reaping dramatically
illustrate the successful accomplishment of the task implied in this
sending. Structuralist analysis does not identify the meaning of the text
only with the most abstract levels of opposition, but with the totality of
meanings encoded in it.42
This form of narrative analysis attends to logical, syntactic, and
semantic structures within the text. The extent to which the world of
the story corresponds to other historical information about Jewish and
39
Boers, Mountain 23-27. The significance of Jesus' dwelling with the Samaritans for
two days in the Johannine symbol system evidently reflects the full presence of salvation
(so Jn 14:3; Boers, Mountain 28).
40
Boers, Mountain 73.
41
Ibid. 79-96.
42
Ibid. 79.
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 309
Samaritan relationships, legends concerning Jacob, actual relationships
between men and women, and messianic speculations in the first century
are irrelevant to its methodology. The significance of the Christological
titles—prophet, messiah, and savior of the world—is not given by exter-
nal examples of Jewish, Samaritan, and early Christian usage. It emerges
in the course of the narrative itself. Jesus becomes "savior of the world"
in breaking down the oppositions encoded in the fundamental antago-
nisms of Samaritan/Jew, this mountain/Jerusalem. With some difficulty
he enlists the aid of the Samaritan woman in accomplishing this task.43
The implied opposition between "this world," where geographical divi-
sions matter, and "true worshipers," attached to the heavenly world,
which is Jesus' real "home," is hinted at in the concluding act of
hospitality. The theme becomes explicit in the Farewell Discourses, which
emphasize the fellowship of love that binds the Father, Jesus, and those
who have received Jesus together.
Johannine narrative forms a cofaiplex web of symbolic interconnec-
tions. This story points backward as well as forward to the culmination
of the plot. The Samaritan woman presumed that Jesus would identify
with "the Jews" in affirming Jerusalem as the place in which God is
worshiped (v. 20). His reply immediately disengages from that context
to the wider framework of "true worshipers" and the Father.44 In so
doing, Jesus creates a new point of view from which the reader is to view
the rest of the narrative. At the same time, the reader may remember
that Jesus has already engaged the issue of the Jerusalem temple in the
episode frequently referred to as "cleansing" the temple (2:13-22). Jesus
does not, in fact, cleanse or purify the temple; he rejects its claim to
represent "my Father's house."
The complex historical-critical problems of tradition and redaction,
relationship between the Johannine version of the episode and those in
the Synoptics, and its apparent chronological dislocation from the pas-
sion events to an earlier visit to Jerusalem do not impinge upon its
narrative significance. The narrator provides an interpretive framework
by addressing the reader directly. When the Scripture and the word of
Jesus are fulfilled in the passion/resurrection, then it becomes clear that
the "temple" is not the edifice to which "the Jews" are attached but
Jesus' own body. The narrator goes on to observe (2:23-25) that Jesus
refused the faith of many who believed in his signs because he knows
what is inside human beings—an ominous warning. An ambiguous ele-
ment of threat resulting from Jesus' popularity with the crowds (4:1-3)
had led Jesus to depart Judea. Thus the reader knows that the terms on
Ibid.
Ibid. 71.
310 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

which the Samaritan woman includes Jesus among "the Jews" as one
who demands worship in Jerusalem is false as soon as she utters the
sentence.
These connections highlight the jarring quality of verse 22, which
appears to demand recognition of the ethnocentric superiority of the
Jewish religious position over against the Samaritans, who are second-
class citizens. The verse has not troubled Christian exegetes, who swallow
its objectionable character up in the grand sweep of salvation history,
from Israel, through Jesus, to the Church. But Jacob Neusner has rightly
protested that with this scheme Christian scholars have also created a
fictionalizedfirst-centuryJudaism, said to be the "background" for early
Christianity. He insists that much of what Christians say is easily
intelligible on the basis of such backgrounds, such as the need for the
messiah to "cleanse" the temple, makes no sense at all. There is not one
shared history of salvation but two competing claims about God and
salvation. The Christian construes salvation in universalist terms. The
Jew insists upon the separateness and sanctification of the people, Israel.
Jesus could only appear to be a madman disrupting the sacrificial order
essential to the holiness of the people.45 (At least John was more honest.
Jesus' action could not be understood until after the symbolic restruc-
turing of Scripture and Jesus' word required by his death and resurrec-
tion.)
Neusner's ethical criticism of Christian scholarship should give us
pause in accepting the common "salvation history" resolution of the
difficulty in Jn 4:22. Boers's structuralist analysis creates even more
uneasiness with the verse, since it violates the logical patterns underlying
the narrative. Our own literary correlation of this passage with the
previous episode in the temple also suggests that it is unacceptable to
the narrator. Culpepper's study of the narrator's voice in John hints that
the "we" in this passage is anomalous.46 If it is not appropriate to the
structuring patterns discovered by various forms of narrative analysis to
presume that Jesus re-engages in a partisan frame of reference, then we
are compelled, as Boers suggests, to question the authenticity of this
verse.47 He sees verse 22 as a later misunderstanding of the episode, in
which it is taken to affirm the correctness of Christian views over against
45
J. Neusner, "The Absoluteness of Christianity and the Uniqueness of Judaism: Why
Salvation Is Not of the Jews," Interpretation 43 (1989) 18-31.
46
Culpepper, Anatomy 46. He does not pick up this problem when he returns to the
treatment of "the Jews" as characters, but seems to interpret the passage according to the
salvation-history model (127).
47
Boers, Mountain 72.
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 311
both Samaritans and Jews.48 In this challenge to the authenticity of verse
22, the narrative critic may either resort to a theory of multiple redactions
of the Gospel or to an even older tool in the historical-critical arsenal,
text criticism. On the latter view, the comment reflects an early interpre-
tive gloss which was immediately accepted into the manuscript tradition,
since it represents the unchallenged self-understanding of Christians.
Jn 4:4-42 presents Jesus as savior of the world because he rejects the
divisions into which the fundamental patterns of human identity fall:
with one's ancestral origins, one's "people," one's place, and the sacral
character which the religious place of worship gives to such ordering
boundaries. At the same time, the use of "the Jews" asfiguresof unbelief
in the narrative seems to precipitate the emergence of just the kind of
Christian tribalism evident in 4:22. Though Christian scholars often
resolve the charge of anti-Semitism by insisting that "the Jews" are
symbolic actors standing for unbelief and hence humanity in general,49
the subtle and deliberate use of Samaritan/Jew as cultural and religious
poles in John 4 makes it difficult to agree that the author would accept
a symbolic substitution, "the unbelievers," for "the Jews" in his narrative.
Secure in their construction of the "Jewish heritage" of Christianity,
exegetes often emphasize the assertion that Jesus is a Jew when con-
fronted by the overwhelming separation between Jesus and "the Jews"
posited by the narrative.50 If we accept the possibility that 4:22 is a gloss,
than we must challenge the assumption that identification of Jesus as "a
Jew" is to be evaluated positively by the reader of the Gospel. In fact,
the assertion only appears in settings of hostility and rejection. If 4:43-
45 does imply that Judea is Jesus' homeland, then it claims that the
homeland dishonors him. The prologue speaks of the Word rejected by
"his own," a symbol that the narrative leads the reader to fill out with
"the Jews" who reject the "light" (1:11; 12:36b-50). In both instances
where Jesus is identified as "a Jew" by a character, the intent is negative.
The Samaritan woman (4:9) and Pilate (18:35) are refusing a proposal
made by Jesus by using a category, "Jew," to separate themselves from
him. Both narratives go on to reject the socio-religious categories by
appealing to a nonearthly standard (18:36; note that Jesus distinguishes
himself and his followers from "the Jews"). Finally, the polemic ex-
changes in 8:31-47 reject the claim that Jesus' Father, God, is "father"
to "the Jews." The cumulative effect of such symbolic patterns in the
48
Ibid. 27. The same perspective characterizes the other "we" passage which Culpepper
identifies as anomalous, Jn 3:11.
49
So Fortna, Fourth Gospel 312-14.
50
E.g., ibid. 312.
312 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

narrative loads "the Jews" with negative connotations and separates

Jesus as far as possible from any association with them.

WHY NARRATIVE CRITICISM?

Our examples of narrative criticism in NT studies show that biblical

scholars are much more able analysts than most literary critics. Although
narrative criticism demands that one attend to the text and not construc-
tions derived from outside the symbolic world that it creates, the expe-
rience of reading the OT and other literature of the period that is brought
into the exegetical enterprise by those who seek to study the literary
context of biblical writings is fundamental to judgments even about the
surface structures and language of the narrative. Modern theories of
narrative communication and techniques of analysis provide fruitful
approaches to NT narrative, but our expectations of them must also be
schooled by as many examples of ancient performance as the literary
critics who devised the categories of analysis brought to the task from
the modern world of literature. Narrative criticism cannot provide a short
cut around the older elements of historical criticism.
We have also seen that narrative criticism poses a challenge to widely
held assumptions of the historical-critical paradigm: its assumptions
about redaction and textual coherence; its easy move from text to history;
its reliance upon constructed syntheses like "Judaism in the first cen-
tury." Narrative criticism also runs up against some of the theological
convictions operative in historical-critical syntheses. It demonstrates the
pervasiveness of the salvation-history paradigm as an explanatory model
for the emergence of Christianity and the justification for Christian
rewriting of Jewish traditions into completely different and even alien
patterns of signification. As ethical criticism, narrative criticism can
demand that we attend to the values encoded in the world presented by
a text in a way that does not simply assign those which we find unac-
ceptable to the fragments of some past ideology. The powerful effect of
narrative in shaping character can be developed in reflection on the
complex dynamics of reader-response and creation of a self through acts
of reading.
At the same time, the plurality of readings which narrative criticism
suggests frustrates what may be the most pervasive goal of theological
readings of Scripture: to fix the meaning of the text, to compel it to make
an authoritative pronouncement on some issues of theological or ethical
concern. (In this regard narrative criticism also opposes monolithic
ideological schemata for rendering the real message of the gospel whether
for liberationist theology, women's equality within the Church, or their
equally dogmatic opponents.) Narrative analysis does not yield the kind
 NARRATIVE CRITICISM 313
of conceptual syntheses which might provide the introductory paragraphs
to systematic expositions of Christology, ecclesiology, Christian disciple-
ship, or ethics. The meanings which the stories convey in their symbolic
structures and dynamic unfolding in narrative are not frozen proposi-
tions. A hermeneutics attentive to narrative as invitation to participate
in a "world," a particular orientation of life and character, may provide
a way of speaking about the multiple invitations that we receive from
Scripture. But in the end the encounter of readers and narrative is also
a new reading, contextually bounded and yet always changing in its
results.
Narratives may embody values, the complexity of human characters
in their moments of social and personal decision, even the unconscious
and deformed desires of human beings. Narratives may bring all that
reality into touch with signs and symbols of another reality which
transcends them and even asks whether the attachments we struggle so
hard to preserve are vehicles of life or death. In the Christian tradition
our stories have provoked theological and ethical reflection, but they do
not hand us theology or ethics on a platter ready for consumption. We
create and re-create them. Within such a context narrative criticism is
not a linguistic game played with endlessly self-referential markers. It
serves to facilitate encounters with the reality opened up by our stories,
so that, like the Samaritan villagers, readers must decide whether or not
it might be true to claim of Jesus, "This is indeed the savior of the world"
(Jn 4:42).