Assessment

Seminar Presentation (10-15 mins) 30%; Book Review (500 words) 20%; Major Essay (3,500 words) 50%

Module Aims

This module will (1) equip learners with a variety of New Testament interpretative methods and skills, namely narrative, rhetorical, intertextual, and sociocultural, (2) enable learners to apply the methods to selected texts of the Fourth Gospel, (3) guide learners to compare how the methods function and to evaluate combined interpretative approaches.

Participants demonstrate their acquisition of skills by presenting various approaches to selected texts at the seminar meetings, engaging with appropriate secondary literature, completing a book review and composing a final essay developing their interpretation of the text selected for presentation at the seminar.

Timetable: Semester 1; first meeting 11am-1pm Wednesday 4th October 2023

Learning Outcomes

• — Critique a range of key tools and concepts of the narrative, rhetorical, sociocultural, and intertextual methods as applied to the Fourth Gospel.
• — Articulate how the four methods approach the Gospel text in distinctive ways, and what sort of reading each implies.
• — Apply the narrative, rhetorical, sociocultural, and intertextual approaches to selected texts from the Fourth Gospel.
• — Draw comparisons between different approaches to the same Gospel texts and assess the contributions of each to the overall interpretation of the text.
• — Provide a summary of the diverse approaches with relation to specified texts drawing together the fruits of each approach to provide a broader, deeper, and more balanced interpretation of the Gospel text.
• — Discern the capabilities and limitations of the various methods and how they function with various genres of text. Discern the place of these methods and their results within the broader field of Johannine studies.

Bibliography

• — Myers, Alicia D., Lindsey S. Jodrey, and Craig R. Koester, eds. Come and Read: Interpretive Approaches to the Gospel of John. Interpreting Johannine Literature. Lanham: Fortress Academic, 2020.
• — Estes, Douglas, and Ruth Sheridan, eds. How John Works: Storytelling in the Fourth Gospel. RBS 86. Atlanta: SBL Press. 2016.