The Johannine Jesus regularly speaks in terms that are ‘misunderstood’ by dialogue partners. That is, Jesus’ dialogue partners fail to appreciate his words in the profound register he apparently intends and which the paradigmatic reader is apparently able to grasp. Taken at face value, however, in a mundane register, the remarks constitute acts of deception. The exchange between Jesus and his brothers in Jn 7.1-9, combined with the narrator’s comment in 7.10, offers the clearest instance of this pattern. Jesus’ brothers hear his words in a mundane sense, are deceived and depart. The figure of Jesus, furthermore, despite having preternatural access to ‘what was inside a person’ (cf. 2.24-25), appears unaffected by their deceived state and does nothing to remedy it. This too is consistent with his speech profile in the Fourth Gospel, where he is represented as uninterested in guiding conversation partners towards the profound, higher-order ‘truths’ of his verbal revelations. These tendencies of the Johannine Jesus to mislead his conversation partners on the mundane level and subsequently leave them in the dark, I argue, have been largely obscured by a tradition of apologetic hermeneutics reaching from antiquity to modern New Testament study.
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