The aforementioned characteristics make it a difficult volume to summarize. But hopefully what I write here will make clear why it should be of great interest to anyone interested in the Gospel of John and/or in the application of cultural anthropology to the study of the New Testament. Although focused on John, in the process of studying this specific piece of literature Neyrey provides a wide array of general information about cultural values from Mediterranean societies, such as status, honor, space, labels, concepts of limited good, agency, patrons and clients, secrecy, and much more. Neyrey has the very helpful tendency to use charts and diagrams to clarify concepts and to highlight parallels of structure, language and concept between passages. A question he asks more than once is “What do we know if we know this?” (pp.81, 398; cf. 434) – in other words, he consistently shows a concern to make explicit how the general cultural information and literary parallels he discusses are relevant to our understanding of specific passages.
The only real criticism I have of the book relates to the treatment of the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4. Neyrey sums up Jesus’ statement to her and the woman’s recounting of the incident in terms of her “sexual history,” and he uses this phrase with surprising frequency (see pp.41-42, 70, 157, 160-161, 163, 166). I doubt that, if Jesus had told a man how many wives he had had, this phrase would have been used. But the ancient cultural context in which the Gospel of John was written didn’t treat women and men as equals, and so the more important question is whether the woman’s “sexual history” is the focus in the story as it is likely to have been understood in that time. It is not clear that Samaritans allowed women to initiate divorce, and at any rate it is unlikely that a woman who had been divorced by several men would have found a new husband so many times. And so the most likely scenario is that the woman had been widowed multiple times (a possibility Neyrey mentions in passing on p.156 without giving it much attention), perhaps in an echo of the story in the Book of Tobit. Nor is it clear that concubinage would have been viewed as sinful in this time and context. And so it seems that there is reason to doubt that the woman’s testimony about Jesus meant “Come see a man who told me everyone I ever did.” The woman in the story, I suggest, would more likely have been viewed as a tragic figure than a sexually promiscuous one.
Nevertheless, the failure to break free from the classic tradition of interpretation of this story illustrates well why a book like Neyrey’s is so important. In spite of my criticisms on this one particular point, the book on the whole is not characterized by cultural blind spots but by a wealth of relevant and helpful cultural material, with specific discussion of how knowledge about the cultural context clarifies the meaning of a great many parts of the Gospel of John. This book is a treasure trove for anyone interested in the Gospel of John or in perspectives from cultural anthropology on the New Testament. And anyone interested in Johannine Christology cannot afford to ignore Neyrey’s treatment of key passages, themes and concepts. I highly recommend this book!
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