Is Jesus John’s Mouthpiece? Reconsidering Johannine Idiom

Abstract

Scholars commonly move from the premise that Jesus in the Fourth Gospel speaks in Johannine idiom to the conclusion that the evangelist elaborated Jesus’s teachings. We can evaluate this claim better if we distinguish paraphrase from elaboration, restricting the former concept to reports that would be recognizable both in content and in historical context. We should further distinguish different things that could be meant by the phrase “Johannine idiom.” When we do both of these, we can see the weakness of the argument from idiom to elaboration. There is also positive evidence supporting the counterclaim that John was scrupulous in recording the teachings of the historical Jesus. Two lines of such evidence come from the narrator’s explanatory “asides” and from unexplained allusions in Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel of John.

Keywords

• johannine idiom
• historical jesus
• paraphrase
• fourth gospel
• johannine discourses
• gospel historicity