Concepto del Negocio

For those studying the Gospel of John, interest in a possible Samaritan sub-group amongst the earliest followers of Christ was driven by a desire to explain perceived Jewish hatred for Johannine Christians, as well as explicate disaffection for the

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Temple amongst (Jewish) Christ-followers. When this interpretation of the history of early Christ-followers fell out of favour, the importance of the Samaritans as a window into or explanation of the trials of that specific group also faded.30

Within Johannine studies, John L. Martyn commonly receives credit for sparking a still unresolved discussion in Anglophone scholarship during the 1960s -70s about how to best read the Gospel, and paved the way for Samaritan involvement.31 _He

argued that redaction-critical approaches opened a window through which the first- century Johannine community could be viewed, and the various interest groups within that community identified by their response to Jewish threat and ejection from synagogues. This response to threat is marked particularly by sharp polemic against the Ioudaioi in passages such as John 12:42, in which many do not confess their belief in Christ for fear that the Pharisees will drive them out. The Samaritans enter this theorization due to their maintenance of specific types of Moses traditions. Thus, Wayne Meeks posited a similarity between Johannine Moses-tradition and those of Samaritans, and argued that the Johannine community had drawn members from a Jewish community “whose piety accorded very great importance to Moses and the Sinai theophany,” as well as “Samaritan circles which held very similar beliefs.”32

Oscar Cullman, similarly, suggested the Johannine community was best understood

30 _{See also Bourgel, “Modus Vivendi,” 1-3. Bourgel does not track through Martyn, but does}

identify the same trend.

31 _{James L. Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John}

Knox, 2003 [1968]). See, for instance, Michael G. Azar’s recent volume, which diagnoses Martyn’s intervention as sea change in scholarly trends; Exegeting the Jews: The Early Reception of the Johannine “Jews” (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 30-32.

32 _{Wayne A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology}

(Leiden: Brill, 1967), 318-319. Chapter 5 is dedicated to a typology of Samaritan Moses traditions that possibly circulated in the first century, though Meeks admits the reconstruction relies on late sources (216-267).

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with reference to “heterodox Judaism and kindred phenomena”—including Samaritans.33

Around the same time, Hans Kippenberg’s influential study of Samaritan worship and practice similarly stimulated interest in attempted reconstructions of a Johannine Samaritan-Christianity.34 Kippenberg introduced what had been something of a fringe interest—at least for non-Israeli scholars—into the mainstream of New Testament studies.35 Following Kippenberg, Raymond Brown, in his Community of the Beloved Disciple, argued that a Samaritan connection underpinned the intense conflict with Ioudaioi in the Gospel.36 In this way, Brown provided the capstone to a conversation underway in Anglophone scholarship for decades.37 Building on Martyn in reading the specific nature of the Johannine community from the source text, Brown suggested that John 4:4-42 might represent the conversion of a large group of Samaritans by Jesus himself. He also suggested that this suppressed backstory could represent a second stage in the growth of the Johannine community; one which involved a mixed group of anti-Temple Jews and Samaritan converts. These

33 _{Oscar Cullman, The Johannine Circle: Its Place in Judaism, among the disciples of Jesus and}

in Early Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1976), 30-62, at 51. Cullman understands Samaritan traditions as an important part of what he classifies as “heterodox Judaism.”

34 _{See Hans G. Kippenberg, Garizim und Synagoge: Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen}

zur samaritanischen Religion der aramäischen Periode (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971).

35 _{On this, see further discussion in chapter 4 below.}

36 _{Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.} 37 _{John Bowman, “The Fourth Gospel and the Samaritans,” BJRL 40 (1958): 298-308; George W.}

Buchanan, “The Samaritan Origin of the Gospel of John” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of E.R. Goodenough, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 149-175; Edwin D. Freed, “Samaritan Influence in the Gospel of John,” CBQ 30 (1968): 580-597. See also Purvis, “The Fourth Gospel,” although Purvis himself argues Gerizim-based Samaritanism would have been as opposed to a Johannine community grounded in Jerusalem-based Judaism. For Purvis, the evidence of the gospels is sufficient to establish the locale for the community was Samaria or Samaria -Galilee; the theological traditions “developed independently of the Samaritan community centred at Gerizim” (“The Fourth Gospel,” 191).

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Samaritan connections contributed to increased hostility towards the followers of Jesus on the part of Temple-dedicated Jews.38

Interest in Johannine Samaritans largely died down in the 1980s, however.39 From the 1970s onwards, sparked by Ellis Rivkin and borne to full term by the work of Jacob Neusner, as well as Peter Schäfer, histories of ancient Judaism were dramatically reconfigured.40 _{Those scholars who had linked the gospel to specific}

Samaritan connections had relied on late sources, and thus met with the sort of skepticism expressed by Lindars: “all these studies,” he wrote, “are highly speculative.”41 _{Lindars’ skepticism was borne out. As Hartwig Thyen notes, most}

38 _{Brown, Community, 35-41.}

39 _{Azar (Exegeting the Jews, 33-46) narrates the turn towards the literary-critical and the ethical}

that accompanied this, culminating (in his reading) in the Leuven conference that produced the field standard volume, edited by Reimund Bieringer, Didier Pollefeyt, and Frederique Vandecasteele - Vanneuville, Anti-Judaism and the Fourth Gospel: Papers of the Leuven Colloquium 2000 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000).

40 _{See for this shift, especially on the relationship between rabbis and Pharisees, and for extensive}

bibliography Annette Yoshiko Reed, “When Did Rabbis Become Pharisees? Reflections on Christian Evidence for post-70 Judaism,” in Envisioning Judaism: Essays in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Klaus Herman, and Reimund Leicht (TSAJ 119; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 2:859-96. For the Neusner trajectory, see Ellis Rivkin, A Hidden Revolution (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978) and especially Jacob Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 (Leiden: Brill, 1971). For Neusner’s often controversy-laden impact on the study of Judaism more broadly, see now Aaron Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: NYU Press, 2016). For a brief overview of the strands of

argumentation coming out of the 1970s and 1980s Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 180-184. It should be noted that the traditional view of a reconfiguration of Judaism in dramatically “Pharisaic -rabbinic” form does still crop up in New Testament studies; see recently Markus Vinzent’s acceptance of a “victory of pharisaic-rabbinic Orthodoxy at the “Synod of Jamnia” at the end of the first century AD” in Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33.

41 _{Barnabas Lindars, The Gospel of John (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1972), 37}

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scholars do not think a Samaritan background to the Gospel of John is credible.42

Straightforwardly, the similarities are more adequately explained “on the basis of a shared scripture.”43

Scholars consequently shifted attention away from the internal ethnic or religious composition of the group towards issues onto which social scientific or rhetorically- focused methods could more efficiently shed light; the boundaries of the community and its strategies for differentiating itself from others (especially, in the case of the Johannine community, from the Ioudaioi).44 _{Scholars did not lose sight of Martyn’s}

understanding of the gospel as the product of multiple stages of editing. But their excavation of those stages increasingly focused on internal literary and rhetorical characteristics, rather than the concerns of external, identifiable communities.45

This dip in interest concurrent with a scholarly shift away from straightforward emergence of Christ-following groups from a Jewish backcloth suggests that what attracted scholars to Samaritans was the historical possibility that they offered an

42 _{Hartwig Thyen, “Joh 8,48f: Die Ἰουδαῖοι werfen Jesus vor, er sei ein dämonisch besessener}

Samaritaner: Indiz für eine besondere Nähe unseres Evangelisten zu samaritanischer Theologie?” in Studien zum Corpus Iohanneum (WUNT 214: Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 554-60. Margaret Pamment argued similarly in “Is there Convincing Evidence of Samaritan Influence on the Fourth Gospel?” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 73.3-4 (1982): 221-230.

43 _{Pamment, “Convincing Evidence,” 230.}

44 _{See in particular Wayne A. Meeks, “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism, ” JBL}

91.1 (1972): 44-72. Also, for good examples of literary readings: Mary I. Coloe, “The Woman of Samaria: Her Characterization, Narrative, and Theological Significance,” in Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John, ed. Christopher W. Skinner (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 182-196; Hans Förster, “Die Begegnung am Brunnen (Joh 4.4-42) im Licht der “Schrift”:

Überlegungen zu den Samaritern im Johannesevangelium,” NTS 61 (2015): 201-18.

45 _{See Adele Reinhartz, “The Johannine Community and its Jewish Neighbors: A Reappraisal,” in}

What is John? Literary and Social Readings, ed. Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 111-38; Raimo Hakola, Identity Matters: John, Jews, and Jewishness (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Judith M. Lieu, “Anti-Judaism, the Jews, and the Worlds of the Fourth Gospel” in The Gospel of John in Christian Theology, ed. Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 168- 82.

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approach from the margins to the breakage between Jewish and Christian identity. What had drawn Martyn, Meeks, Cullman, and others to Samaritans in J ohn was the possibility that thinking with Samaritans might help explain the otherwise messy process by which Temple-observant Jews became Temple-rejecting Christians. With the clarity of this binary undermined, and the connection of the Johannine literatu re to a clearly-bounded community complicated, Samaritans dropped off the radar.46