cover image Jesus and the Jews: The Pharisaic Tradition in John

Jesus and the Jews: The Pharisaic Tradition in John

Alan Watson. University of Georgia Press, $25 (158pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1703-8

Although Watson, a legal historian, is hardly the first reader of John to be struck by its departure in fact and spirit from Matthew, Mark and Luke, he nevertheless strikes a new chord in Johannine exegesis by arguing that there is evidence, in John, of reliance upon a source from Jewish oral tradition identified as ``S.'' Noting ``the Christian scriptures were a battleground of textual alteration and rewriting in the first hundred years of their life,'' he writes that John is a ``composit'' of narrative lore. He probes the cultural and legal circumstances in which the gospel was compiled, the range of oppositional messages it was intended to convey, summarizing the relations among the Jewish splinter groups in the Roman outpost at whom it was aimed. Whether John himself was or was not a Jew, Watson holds, he was ``actively hostile to Jewish religious traditions,'' especially those of the Pharisees. And that, claims Watson, is why in John, but not the synoptic gospels, Jesus' resurrection occurs before the Passover. In addition, Watson finds Jesus' in-your-face attitude about conventional Judaism revealed in the sexual innuendo of his exchange with the Samaritan woman at the well and the indifference to Nicodemus, a Pharisee. Tightly focused and provocative, this beginning of Watson's trilogy on the link of religious and secular law to the Jesus story anchors theology in the detail of history. (Aug.)