Content area
Full Text
BRUCE 1. MALINA and RICHARD L. ROHRBAUGH, Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998). Pp. x + 326. Paper $19.
This commentary is written primarily for undergraduate students of the NT The authors' aim is "to present a historically sensitive, cross-cultural, comparative set of lenses with which to hear (or read) the Gospel of John as its original audience did" (p. ix). Now that Malina and Rohrbaugh have added this commentary to their earlier commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992]), they have completed their goal of writing a social-scientific supplemental analysis of the canonical Gospels. The use of the term "supplemental" is deliberate. Even though M. and R. are cognizant of traditional Johannine scholarship, their objective is to provide "what these more traditional approaches do not: insight into the social system in which John's language is embedded" (p. 20).
The term "language" is not accidental. M. and R. set forth "models and scenarios of Mediterranean norms over against which the work might appropriately be read" (p. 19). The heart of their effort is a sociolinguistic analysis that draws from work done in the neo-Firthian tradition. John writes for persons...