John as divine romance : reading the Fourth Gospel with the ancient novel

Abstract

In recent years, the Greco-Roman biography has enjoyed pride of place as the category to which the gospels are assumed to belong. This study brings another ancient literary type into the conversation, reading the Gospel of John (GJohn) with the Greek novel Callirhoe to observe how the latter might inform an understanding of the structural and rhetorical shape of the former. This is accomplished through a comparative literary methodology informed by semiotic theory. Chapters 2-5 compose a close study of four narrative elements observable in the Fourth Gospel and Callirhoe: recognition, beauty, travel, and love. These elements are approached from the perspective of categorical semiotics, informed largely by Umberto Eco’s application of Peircean semiotic theory, and treated as intertextual frames. By doing so, this study focuses on the way these mechanisms pressure the reader to infer meaning through their function in the narratives of Callirhoe and GJohn. Analysis of these intertextual frames informs a hypothetical recovery of the cultural encyclopedia from which authors and (more importantly for this study) readers in first-century western Asia Minor would draw when composing or interpreting a story like the Gospel of John or Callirhoe.

This study focuses on Callirhoe as the prototype and progenitor of the novel genre and an important text living in GJohn’s historical and literary neighborhood. The intertextual frames considered in this study have been selected for comparison because they are prevalent in the corpus of ideal novels and have analogues in GJohn which are significant characteristics of the Johannine Jesus-story that contribute to its particularity among the canonical gospels. In other words, the narrative elements that look like bugs in GJohn’s system when read alongside the Synoptic Gospels appear to be features when it is read with Callirhoe and the ancient novel genre.