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 the historical Jesus, one will have to turn to the synoptic gospels. The Lord's Words develops a new explanation model for the genesis of the Johannine Jesus speeches: These speeches are based on "core words" from the Johannine church tradition, which the evangelist received, reflected in the monologues and dialogues of the gospel, and so worked out his speech compositions.

The study is not, as in an older branch of research, the apologetic attempt to connect John to a presumed Jesus tradition by tracing the development of the "words of the Lord." Rather, the book focuses upon the literary and theological hermeneutics of the evangelist in dealing with those "good words."

At the same time, the book pursues the goal of uncovering the origins of the high Johannine Christology ("Wisdom Christology"), investigating the trauma of the Johannine Christians' schism from the Jewish synagogue.