Customer Reviews

Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel

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There is no question that any scholar who wishes to understand the Gospel of John will have read this book. Dr. Culpepper provides a scaffolding whereby the reader can approach the literary context of the Gospel on any of its many levels. If I had to reccomend the essential Gospel of John library, and could only include four books, it would include this one (as well as C.H. Dodd's two books and R.E. Brown's commentary). Admittedly, I am biased. Dr. Culpepper is a friend. However, you can verify my words by checking the index of any commentary on John which was written after the publication of this book. Count how many time Dr. Culpepper is mentioned

There cannot be a more forensic study of the book of John than Culpepper's Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel. This scholarly book opens up the world of the Gospel of John like no other in the protestant world. This book should be mandatory reading for every Doctoral student in Biblical Studies (and probably master's as well).

I was introduced to this book soon after it was published. I return to it first whenever I find myself in a study of John. Culpepper brings a new depth to understanding John as literature. It was this book that helped me appreciate the literary depth of this gospel. Your appreciation of the details will be wonderfully expanded. Highly recommended.

(I came to this site in Amazon hoping to find the book to give to a pastor preaching through John. I was delighted to find it still in print.)

R. Alan Culpepper is not a new name to the corpus of Johannine literature that has been released over the last dozen or more years. It was the recommendation of many writers that prompted me to buy this book. I would like to say that I prefer to give good reviews to books and do my best to look for the positive aspects of a book to give it the highest review as I can. Unfortunately, I did not have the same experience as the previous reviewers.

The first thing I would like to say is that Dr. Culpepper is a very intelligent man. His command on literary analysis is impressive and quite useful. I did not find the book accessible to general audiences but I did find it tolerable and certainly penetrable to anyone who wants to do the work. I attribute one's success with it to one's previous exposure to the process of literary review.

His initial idea was very sound. He attempted to analyze the gospel in the same way that he analyzes secular literature and there were a lot of great nuggets of thought. The problem that he has is that looking at the gospel as a kind of novel has skewed his ability to see the Gospel appropriately. While the gospel is a literary creation it is also a piece of truthful material. Claiming to respect the gospel of John while claiming its stories are basically fiction is a backhand not a compliment. The Writer is certainly artistic but having studied this book through repetitive reading and commentaries I am most convinced that the Author of the Gospel (John the Son of Zebedee) fully expects the reader to believe that he is telling the "honest-to-God" truth. Here are a few of the problems that I had with this book.

1. He affirms that there were as many as three writers who wrote this book. There are the stories of the "beloved disciple" who he seems to imply is unlikely John of Zebedee. He simply refers to him as the "Whispering Wizard." Then there is a later writer who wrote the stories down followed by a redactor (a.k.a. liar) who inserts comments and ties the stories to polemics between Christians and Jews in his own time. He gives little to no support for this concoction. Of course, the beloved disciple is not necessarily real or at least not in the form he appears in the book which means there was a liar in the ancient world who run around telling everyone that he was Jesus' best disciple or another liar that made up stories about a imaginary disciple.
2. There are as usual assumptions made about the Johannine Community which had their own secret language and way of communicating which may been so sectarian as to have been isolated from the rest of the church. This of course, is so clearly not the case, and the gospel itself bears witness to the fact that people reading the story have probably already heard about these people in the stories before. John introduces the reader to stories that have not yet happened in his gospel as if they are already aware of it, meaning he is not talking to a group who are segregated from the others.
3. Culpepper does not really believe that the gospels reflect the real Jesus at all. In the very beginning he says that the gospel is not a window into the ministry of Jesus and later in the book he says "the future role of the gospel in the life of the church will depend on the church's ability to relate both story and history to truth in such a way that neither has an exclusive claim to truth." The problem is how do you recognize something as being valid when the author of the work practically swears to you in John 19 that he saw all of this with his own eyes? How can you then say "when art and history, fiction and truth, are again reconciled we will again be able to read the gospel as the author's original audience read it." The suggestion would be laughable if it was not embarassing. Let me make a few comments about this. The author wants the reader to know that all the things he has said happened because he saw them with his own eyes. Furthermore, he puts words in Jesus' mouth and has Jesus affirm them with an official form of "court-swearing via- 'amen, amen or truly, truly'" while fully expecting his readers to know that this is really a fictional story to read like a modern reader might read "The Shack?" First of all, lying is bad enough. Lying about Jesus and pawning it off as true is worse. Putting a solemn oath in Jesus' mouth that he never uttered is sick and borders on blasphemy. If Culpepper is right then maybe we should throw John out of the Bible!

Despite these significant issues there are lots of admirable qualities about the work including his section on irony and symbols. In fact, his section on symbolism was quite excellent and was on par with many of the ideas proposed by Craig Koester in his book on symbolism in John.Overall, I think that the book has it's good sides but found some of the assumptions unpalatable and unacceptable. Having read a large body of literature on John I find that these Bultmann followers are more harmful to the scriptures than helpful. Unfortunately, I can't give this book two thumbs up as it missed the mark...