Gospel of John: A Commentary, The

The Gospel of John: A Commentary The Gospel of John: A Commentary. 2 vols. By Craig S. Keener. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. xlviii + 1636 pp., $79.95.

The publication of a major new commentary on John's Gospel is always a significant event in NT studies. While somewhat different in orientation, the scope of Keener's two-volume work puts him in the league of the likes of Raymond Brown and Rudolf Schnackenburg, each of whom produced multi-volume commentaries on this Gospel. As the accolades on the dust jacket from a "Who's Who" of Johannine scholars attest, Keener's commentary is set to make a major contribution to the field for years to come. The following review will seek to provide a representative (though obviously not exhaustive) assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this monumental achievement. Beyond this I will interact with Keener's specific interpretive positions in my forthcoming BECNT commentary on the Gospel of John.

The present work begins with 330 pages of introduction and concludes with 400 pages of bibliography and indexes (the scope of both of which is astounding, especially considering the small font size used for the entire volume). Between these lengthy sections are 900 pages of closely argued commentary, an estimated third of which is footnotes, which leaves about 600 pages of commentary text. Perhaps if the reader realizes that out of 1600 pages only about 600 pages are actual commentary, this will make the task of working through Keener's tome seem a bit less daunting. Even so, in my judgment this commentary is not for the general reader, but for the Johannine specialist, who will find in the pages of Keener's work a wealth of ancient references to consult and explore.

The primary contribution to Johannine studies envisioned by Keener himself is that of examining the Gospel in light of its social-historical context. While Keener's commentary was published at the end of 2003, the bulk of the commentary was completed in 1997, which, in light of the furious pace of Johannine scholarship, does date his work to a certain extent. In some cases, the material may be even more dated, as in the case of Morris's commentary, where Keener refers to the original 1971 edition rather than the 1995 revised edition. At the same time, however, it must be said that Keener's bibliographic control is on the whole magisterial (though hardly anyone can claim to be fully abreast of all of Johannine scholarship in this day and age any more).

With regard to introductory matters, Keener suggests that John falls into the general genre category of biography, though he believes that John has taken "more sermonic liberties" (p. 51). According to Keener, John is both historian and theologian, presupposing a Jewish salvation-historical perspective in which God reveals his character by his acts in history (p. 46). Keener provides extensive discussions on genrerelated matters, such as the nature of the Johannine discourses, with sections on oral cultures; note-taking; disciples, learning, and memorization; and John's discourses in relation to ancient speech-writing. The historical reliability of John's Gospel is not viewed as a foregone conclusion, but Keener is open to establish it upon close investigation (pp. 79-80).

The almost sixty-page long section on authorship came as a pleasant surprise to me as one who affirms the Gospel's apostolic authorship. Keener states at the outset that the apostolic authorship of John's Gospel has often been opposed out of dogmatism and contends that "traditional conservative scholars have made a better case for Johannine authorship of the Gospel . . . than other scholars have made against it." Keener (who did not affirm Matthean authorship in his recent Matthew commentary) contends that the case for Johannine authorship is stronger than that for Matthean, Markan, and Lukan (!) authorship (p. 83) and that he leans toward the view that "John [the apostle] is the author of the Gospel as we have it" (p. 83). In the following pages Keener provides a strong critique and refutation of the view (held, among others, by Martin Hengel) that Papias distinguished between the apostle John and a "John the elder." Keener contends that Eusebius (our source for Papias's writings) had an agenda (namely, that of driving a wedge between the apostle John as author of the Gospel and John the elder as author of the Apocalypse) that rendered him anything but unbiased and skewed his interpretation of Papias.

The thesis that the apostle John was the source of a tradition later reworked by others, likewise, according to Keener, is "a workable compromise solution" that "is tenable but probably not necessary" (p. 100). After an insightful discussion of the plausibility of postulating apostolic authorship in the face of John's advanced age at the time of writing (John was at least eighty years old), Keener assesses Brown's theory of the Johannine community's development and concludes that this theory is "at most possible" (p. 110, italics his). He also states that Culpepper's argument in his seminal 1983 monograph The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel is "brilliant" but one with which he disagrees (p. 112). Sections on the relationships between John's Gospel and the epistles and Revelation respectively (pp. 123-39) are well worth reading as well.