(Part 1)

JBTM Book Reviews
165
and Köstenberger 4 in his own proposal—evincing a major break between Jesus’s parting
prayer (17:1–26) and the passion narrative (18:1–19:42).
Numerous strengths mark Harris’s work. First, Harris’s work is affordable, approachable
(benefiting even the non-specialist), as well as concise—thus, ensuring the work’s viability
and readability. Harris is able to synthesize much of the fruit of his detailed analyses in a succinct
manner, which should prove beneficial to the busy pastor or teacher working through
the Greek text. Second, despite his brevity, Harris spends the necessary time and space to
explain key exegetical, syntactical, and text-critical details behind hotly-debated passages
such as John 1:1 (15–20) and the so-called Pericope Adulterae (i.e., John 7:53–8:11; 166–67), as
well as key theological concepts including the importance of “believing” in the Fourth Gospel
and the idiomatic, prepositional phrase pisteuō eis (“believe in”) that John uses to express
this crucial concept—with Christ typically being the “divine object of faith” (31–32). Third,
Harris recognizes the importance of the subject of oidamen (“we know”) in John 21:24 (346),
explains the five possible interpretational options (given the evidence), and adopts a position
contra the consensus view (Johannine community view) regarding the authorship of the
Fourth Gospel (3–4). Moreover, Harris highlights the importance of the term aposynagōgos
(“excommunicated,” or “excluded from the synagogue”) regarding Martyn’s exclusion hypothesis
5 as a primary motivation for the writing of John’s Gospel denoted by the threefold
repetition of aposynagōgos in John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2 (189). Against Martyn, Harris sees both
“missionary and pastoral purposes” (evinced in the purpose statement of John 20:31) as the
primary motivations for the penning of John’s Gospel (5–6).
However, Harris’s work is not without faults. First, Harris’s comments often become esoteric
due to the superfluous amount of abbreviations throughout. Second, since the EGGNT
series is based off the UBS⁵ Greek text (xxii), it would have been helpful for Harris to include
the UBS⁵ Committee ratings for verses containing textual variants. Interestingly, Harris comments
only briefly on thirty-one of the forty-two C-rated textual variants 6 in his work, and
monolithically cites Metzger 7 regarding his text-critical evaluations. Third, Harris’s sources
seem outdated, with the most recent of his “recommended commentaries” being Köstenberger’s
2004 BECNT volume (13).
David N. Freedman; Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–1970), 1:cxxxviii.
⁴Andreas J. Köstenberger, John (BECNT; eds. Robert W. Yarbrough and Robert H. Stein; Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 10–11.
⁵J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) 31–41.
Martyn suggests that the exclusion of the Johannine community was an enforcement of the Birkath
ha-Minim (i.e., “the Benediction against the heretics”), which was a means of expulsion by self-exclusion.
Cf. David A. Lamb, Text, Context, and the Johannine Community: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the
Johannine Writings (LNTS 477; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clarke, 2014), 8, n. 22.
⁶This is according to the count of this reviewer.
⁷Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd. ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).