Abstract
This book sets out to reconfigure our understanding of the role of purity concerns in the Fourth Gospel, in particular, to read them within the context of biblical and early Jewish traditions related to purity. It states its thesis in the beginning: ‘In the Fourth Gospel, purity prepares for perception of Jesus’s identity with God, makes possible Israel’s participation in God’s life, and imparts the capacity to keep Jesus’s commandment that his disciples love one another in the same way that they were loved by him’ (p. ix).
The author points to instances where purity is directly mentioned in the gospel, such as the stone jars at Cana (2:6), purification before Passover (11:55) and avoiding the defilement of entering Pilate’s praetorium (18:28), but also to its relevance for understanding John the Baptist’s baptism, the washing of the blind man, and Jesus’ rendering the disciples pure in John 13 and 15, related also to the love commandment. He challenges the widespread assumption that purity concerns reflected in John are to be seen as relics of a system now replaced by Jesus. While lacking the disputes over purity found in the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel clearly assumes notions of purity and, the author argues, reflects contemporary Jewish discussion of both ritual and moral purity. Ritual impurity is not sin, but its purification renders one able to have access to the holy. Its neglect is sin. Moral purity relates to the removal and absence of defiling sin and the presence of holiness.
The author argues that the gospel sees John the Baptist’s purification ritual as preparation for the revelation of God in the Word, in a way analogous to Moses’ washing of Israel in preparation to receiving the Law (Exod 19:10–11). Thus, he argues, ‘the Fourth Gospel employs Israel’s embodied theology of purity in service of its Christology’ (p. 148). Was his baptism a means of bearing witness or, as the author suggests, a necessary prelude to revelation? I find this debatable but one may ask whether John’s baptism has really been stripped also of its ritual meaning when transferring its significance for the forgiveness of sins alone to Jesus (1:29). To claim that the fourth gospel ‘is concerned with ritual purity as the bodily state needed to perceive what God revealed of God in Jesus’ (p. 150) appears to go beyond the evidence. On the other hand, the author demonstrates convincingly that at least notions of moral purity and presuppositions of ritual purity are to be taken seriously in the gospel, not to be viewed as fossilised remains. This book, well written and documented, challenges common assumptions and is worthy of careful reading as part of a growing awareness that John’s gospel is be understood within the context of Jewish thought of the time, knowledge of which it reflects extensively.