The Lord's Words: The Hermeneutics and Theology of Memory in John's Gospel

The great Johannine speeches of Jesus in the fourth gospel exert an unbroken magic on their listeners. They accomplish this by use of vivid imagery (e.g., bread, vine, shepherd, way) and their many repetitions of crucial insights. What seems at first monotonous actually draws one into a deep spiral of knowledge.

Apart from a few exceptions, interpreters of John's gospel agree: The historical Jesus did not speak as John styles his Jesus. If the goal is to reconstruct the message and words of...