Volume 22, Issue 1, February 2009

This is an important book that, if taken seriously, will generate a new paradigm for the interpretation of the Gospel of John. To put the matter more starkly: if the main thesis of Warren Carter’s book John and Empire is correct, the bulk of Johannine studies over the past 150 years will have to be marginalised. The author has suggested that he merely wishes to continue the dialogue, but that is not the way the book reads. While repeatedly stating the religious, socioeconomic and socio-political context of Roman Ephesus to be only one of the factors that have influenced the Gospel of John, he nonetheless insists that Johannine scholarship is too docetic and “religious”, removing a flesh and blood Christian community from its real-life setting: Roman Ephesus. Tracing the spiritual and theological forces that generated the Fourth Gospel, claims Carter, has been a post-Enlightenment enterprise. His study is an attempt to overcome the problem.