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The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church

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Over the course of the last several years, Chuck Hill has emerged as one of best conservative patristic scholars around. This particular book is the fruit of extensive study and scholarly battles regarding the reception of the Johannine corpus by the early church. It is a book that in many respects will demand engagement from those interested in Johannine studies within the scholarly world.

Many average evangelicals are blissfully ignorant of the direction Johannine studies have gone in. The accepted paradigm for decades within mainstream NT scholarship has been that the Apostle John wrote none of the NT books traditionally attributed to him. Further, the very gospel (John's) that evangelicals in particular often adore the most is the same gospel that, according to most scholars, was considered highly gnostic by the early church, and this was the reason for its very late canonicity. According to this paradigm, 1 John was written after the Fourth Gospel to provide a correct interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in order to redeem it from the gnostics, and this is the only reason it got into the canon. Raymond Brown, in particular, has been the crucial advocate of this position, and his paradigm has become the dominant interpretation of how the Johannine corpus came into being.

In this book, Hill accomplishes a number of things. Most importantly, he goes a long way towards setting Brown's paradigm on its head. Hill convincingly demonstrates that not only was the Fourth Gospel embraced by the orthodox church prior to Irenaeus, but also that the gnostics were far less enthusiastic about the Fourth Gospel than Brown and others have conjectured. If Hill is correct, then not only is the prevailing paradigm wrong about the acceptance of the Fourth Gospel by the early church, it is also wrong about the purpose behind the writing of 1 John.

Unlike prevailing scholarship, Hill takes the early church witness seriously in formulating his proposals. It is an accepted practice within NT and patristic scholarship circles to dismiss the truthfulness of Irenaeus as it relates to his relevant musings concerning John's writings and their purpose. Thankfully, Hill does not embrace such a cavalier attitude toward Irenaeus. As is the usual Hill style, the early church citations and analysis in this book is thorough, careful, and responsible. Hill is smart enough to know that a proposal that takes issue with the accepted thinking demands exhaustive documentation and formulation. This is clearly achieved here. The reader will be particulary informed by Hill's chronological treatment of the progression of thought in Johannine studies that have gotten us to this point. Very informative and succinct.

With prevailing scholarship dismissing the possibility of Johannine authorship of the Johannine corpus, coupled with the increasing agnosticism regarding who John is writing against in the Johannine epistles in particular (as well as the Fourth Gospel), much of traditional orthodox thinking regarding the Johannine corpus has been completely undermined. Most evangelicals are completely unaware of any of this, or even that a number of evangelical scholars have bought into certain aspects of this thinking. Hill provides a needed antidote, and brings us back to a place where the acceptance of the Johannine literature can be examined from a position of evidence rather than convenient speculation. Though one wishes that Hill himself was a bit less coy regarding his own views about Johannine authorship, this book takes an important first step in responsibly advancing a conservative position that takes the early church witness seriously, and challenges the accepted paradigm with intellectual integrity. This should prove to be a standard evangelical work in Johannine studies for years to come, and is highly recommended for NT professors, seminary students, and pastors.

Since Walter Bauers's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesen Christentum (Tübingen, 1934) an important scholar trend deems that the Johannine corpus met in the Early Church the suspicion and avoid of the orthodox due to its presence and importance in gnostic milieu. Hill names this alleged antique attitude `orthodox Johannophobia' (11), and challenges the general trend holding this position over more than four hundred pages of demonstration divided in two main parts. The first part contains a historiographical presentation of past scholarship concerning this matter, from Bauer to Nagel (11-55) and an argument for the present book (56-71). The remainder of the book is also divided in two, of which the first is a detailed analysis of the presence of the Johannine writings in texts of the second century that forms the bulk of the book (73-446), while the second explores the evidence for their common use as a corpus in the same era (447-75). The volume also contains a chronology (476), a bibliography (478-98), and three indexes: ancient texts, modern authors and a subject index (499-531).
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