Original Research - Special Collection: A.G.van Aarde Festschrift
Festivals, cultural intertextuality, and the Gospel of John’s rhetoric of distance
Submitted: 17 February 2010 | Published: 11 April 2011
About the author(s)
Warren Carter, New Testament, Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, United States Department of New Testament, University of Pretoria, South Africa, United StatesAbstract
This article engages these questions by focusing on the narrative presentation of festivals in John’s Gospel (some 42 times) as, amongst other things, occasions of conflict and condemnation. Employing Sjef van Tilborg’s notion of ‘interference’, which prioritises the Ephesian civic interface of the Gospel’s audience, the article argues that the cultural intertextuality between the Gospel and an Ephesian context destabilises and problematises Ephesian civic festivals and shows there to be fundamental incompatibilities between Jesus’ work and Ephesian society, thereby seeking Jesus-believers to absent themselves from festivals. The Gospel’s presentation of festivals belongs to the gospel’s rhetoric of distance vis-à-vis societal structures.
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