Befriending the Beloved Disciple

Adele Reinhartz engages in five different readings of the fourth Gospel. Each approach views the Beloved Disciple differently\* as mentor, opponent, collegue and as other. In the course of each of these readings she elucidates the three narrative levels that interpenetrate the Gospel\* the historical, the cosmological and the ecclesiological. In the latter she deals at length with the so-called expulsion theory, the dominant scholarly notion that the Johannine community, which included believers of Jewish, Gentile and Samaritan origins, engaged in a prolonged and violent controversy with the local Jewish community, culminating in a traumatic expulsion from the synagogue.Read less