ALT The Divine Name in the Gospel of John: A Link to the Historical Jesus? Charles A. Gieschen I will present the link with Synoptic traditions using the divine self-disclosure formula, positing the probability that the Gospel of John is presenting tradition that has its roots in the use of a divine self-disclosure formula by the historical Jesus. It is widely acknowledged that the divine name was not vocalized by Jews beginning in the second century BCE. This means that if the historical Jesus had the self-understanding of possessing the divine name, he would have used other ways to express this understanding, such as using this self-disclosure formula or indirect references to his unique name or word.

ALT Conquering the World: Remembering Jesus as Conqueror Ahreum Kim The conquering rhetoric in these texts provokes several questions. For example, what is the exact nature of these Johannine battles? How can the believers conquer the world with their πίστις? Moreover, why is the conquering image of Jesus and his believers so readily reinforced in Johannine tradition? What might be implied in retaining such imagery? The answers to these questions not only reflect the historical context of the time but also point to the development of ideas within Johannine tradition in reaction to the changing times.

ALT History in the Most Christological of Places: A Tentative Case for a Historical Event Underlying John 1:29–30 Michael Vicko Zolondek For followers to leave one leader, and thus leave what was likely considered their fictive kinship group, to follow another leader, and thus enter into a different fictive kinship group, one would expect some significant event to have occurred and acted as the catalyst for this movement. Moreover, given that these followers accepted Jesus as their new leader, Jesus must have gained significant honor prior to this event.

ALT The Johannine Prologue as a Dependent Narrative Confession Amy Whisenand Krall The Prologue (as a didactic hymn) depends on the rest of the gospel for its intelligibility. As the narrative riffs on terms such as light and life, it fleshes out their meanings, interpreting them christologically and inviting the audience into a way of understanding and living in the world.

ALT Rethinking How We Can Use the Gospels as Historical Sources for Jesus-in-Context—With Special Attention to the Johannine Story of Jesus Richard A. Horsley Most fundamental is to recognize that, in the ancient world, religion was inseparable from politics and economics. The gospel stories, like the books of the Hebrew Bible, are about all of life, not just religion. The main theme of Jesus’s proclamation, the kingdom of God, is a political metaphor. In the Lord’s Prayer, the kingdom of God is concretely focused on economic sustenance: sufficient food and the cancellation of debts. Biblical studies cannot remain prisoner to modern Western reductionism.

ALT Composing Colophons: The Fourth Gospel’s Endings among Closure Conventions Nicholas A. Elder I engage the narratological concept of narrative closure to compare the Johannine colophons with other Second Temple and Greco-Roman narratives that provide closure outside their narrative worlds. John’s endings may be aberrant with respect to New Testament narratives, but they are not so different from endings from the Fourth Gospel’s wider literary context.

ALT Memory, Scripture, and Tradition in the Gospel of John: Blending Jewish Scriptures and Tradition within John’s Remembrance of Jesus Rachel L. Danley This essay draws on conceptual blending theory to consider how John provides a historical remembrance of Jesus through his experience of Judaism, Jesus’s ministry, and the postresurrection Spirit. I suggest that the embodied ritual experience of early Jewish Christian believers may account for the movement between explicit and implicit uses of Jewish Scripture and tradition in John’s Gospel.