Bloomsbury Text, Context and the Johannine Community: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Johannine Writings (The Library of New Testament Studies)

Text, Context and the Johannine Community adopts a new approach to the social context of the Johannine writings by drawing on modern sociolinguistic theory. Sociolinguistics emphasizes language as a social phenomenon, which can be analysed with reference not only to its broad context of culture, but also to its narrower context of situation. The Johannine writings have been increasingly seen as the product of a distinct Johannine Community, depicted by some scholars as a sectarian group, opposed both to wider Jewish society and to other Christian groups. This model has largely been constructed on historical-critical grounds, yet given our lack of reliable external information about the origin of the Johannine writings, a more fruitful approach may be to examine their lexico-grammatical and discourse features to see what they suggest about interpersonal relationships. This study compares selected 'narrative asides' from the Gospel with a passage from 1 John and with the two shorter Epistles. It concludes that register analysis of these passages does not support the idea of a close-knit sectarian group.