The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church

The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church, by Charles E. Hill. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 550. $150.00 (cloth). ISBN: 0199264589. One current emphasis in NT scholarship is a renewed interest in biblical interpretation in the early church. Charles E. Hill's The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church contributes to this interest by looking at references to Johannine literature in the second century. Hill's driving question is: To what extent did second-century Christian writers use the Fourth Gospel and what was their attitude toward it? The formulation of the question is mine, but it captures the sense of this meticulously researched monograph. As an introduction, Hill surveys a broad spectrum of Johannine scholars and finds that the majority of them (the primary exception is Martin Hengel) adhere to a "orthodox Johannophobia paradigm (OJP)." This paradigm includes three theses: (a) that by the end of the second century, orthodox writers were wary of dangerous tendencies in John; (b) that gnostics in particular latched onto John; and (c) that writers before Irenaeus were virtually silent regarding John. According to this paradigm, Irenaeus helped wrench the Gospel back into the orthodox fold through a strong defense of it in Against Heresies. Hill systematically attacks each of these components of the paradigm by painstakingly combing through all available sources. He concludes that the OJP is wholly foundationless: "The long-prevalent understanding of the rise of the Johannine corpus in the Church must be abandoned and replaced with something more historically accurate" (p. 475). This "something" is that throughout the second century, the Gospel of John held a prominent place within orthodox Christianity and was only marginally useful to gnosticism. Hill's book does not seek to nuance current scholarship; he aims to overthrow it. The book addresses the three legs of the OJP, and I will describe and evaluate Hill's treatment of each of these. In order to dismantle the notion that the gospel needed "saving" from the clutches of heterodoxy at the time of Irenaeus, Hill begins with incontrovertible references to John in the late second century (pp. 170-200). Using a pattern that his entire book follows, Hill explores almost every possible writer and text; in this section, that would be Theophilus, Athenagoras, the Epistle of Vienne and Lyons, Irenaeus, Hegesippus, the Sibyllines, Polycrates, Victor of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, the Muratorian Fragment, Apollonius of Ephesus, Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicitas, Gaius's Dialogue with Proclus, and a host of biblical manuscripts. I will not recite such catalogs for the other sections of the book, but the voluminous sources are impressive throughout. Hill also includes an interesting section on Christian art works (with photos) that illustrate particular Johannine scenes such as the raising of Lazarus and the Samaritan Woman. This argument is the strongest of the book, and after examining it, one wonders why this first leg of the OJP ever was formulated. Irenaeus is the main figure here, and serves to demonstrate Hill's insights. Irenaeus, of course, placed John alongside the synoptics in the fourfold canon in the famous passage of Against Heresies 3.9.1. This passage led Hans von Campenhausen, among others, to say that Irenaeus was the first proponent of the four-Gospel canon and led other scholars to assert that Irenaeus strives to defend the Gospel against heretics. In contradiction to the idea that Irenaeus is mounting a defense, Hill writes, "Looking at his use of this Gospel as a whole, however, we fail to see the signs of this [defense]. Irenaeus does not defend the Fourth Gospel, he merely uses it. He uses this Gospel unselfconsciously and authoritatively" (p. 98). The commonsensical explanation (which applies to many other writers of the late second century) of the relationship between John and the church is that Irenaeus feels at ease about using John because his audience feels the same way. …