Abstract
Cast Out of the Covenant is Adele Reinhartz’s self-avowed final book on the Gospel of John. Through an extended rhetorical analysis (five of her seven chapters, exclusive of introduction and conclusion), she demonstrates convincingly that John’s language, characterizations, and narrative structure all seek to appropriate the scriptures and identity of Judaism for Christ-followers, while disinheriting and vilifying actual first-century Jews.
My interest in this book arises from Reinhartz’s underlying methodology. As a Canadian whose immigrant grandparents homesteaded on “free” (i.e. cleared and colonized) land, I coined the term “Aware-Settler biblical hermeneutics” to describe the approaches some of us who are both Settlers and biblical scholars are beginning to use. Flagged by language like “appropriated,” “expropriated,” “usurped,” and “resistance,” I asked Reinhartz whether a Settler perspective had influenced her writing. She said it had.
“Aware-Settler hermeneutics” owe their existence to the work of colonized and resurgent Indigenous peoples. The research of Margaret Kovach, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, George Tinker, and Chris Andersen informs me, alongside the mentorship of Raymond Aldred and Kenneth Deer. Indigenous scholarship is diverse and multivocal, but certain themes recur. These provide the framework for an Aware-Settler parsing of ancient texts. In Cast Out of the Covenant Reinhartz undertakes a number of such methodological steps.
Firstly, she situates herself (xxviii, 163): “exegesis cannot be separated from our identities and social locations” (165). Learning from Indigenous methodologies, Aware-Settler hermeneutics understand that we are who we are because of specific Land and the histories and identities linked to it. This includes our belonging in and to “textual territories” such as the Tanakh, the Pseudepigrapha, and the Christian Testament, points central to Reinhartz’s thesis about the expropriation of Jewish identity markers in John. Reinhartz describes herself as a Jewish scholar, a Canadian, and a daughter of Holocaust survivors (xxviii). Identifying with the expropriated complicates this book as an Aware-Settler reading, yet one wishes more New Testament scholars undertook such situating.
Secondly, Reinhartz examines the rhetoric of story. While attention to narrative is increasingly common, Aware-Settler exegesis (relying on Indigenous methodologies) recognizes that we are not only part of the stories we tell but also those told about us. The author pays close attention to classical rhetoric (e.g. external proofs), but also Phelan and Booth’s work on rhetorical narrative. By inventing “Alexandra,” a compliant hearer of John’s Gospel, Reinhartz tests how oral presentation was the intended mechanism for affiliation (with the Christ-movement) and disaffiliation (from the Ioudaioi). John’s rhetorical pairings include affiliation and disaffiliation, appropriation and repudiation, even hatred (151) of Jews, by definition those who “should have accepted Jesus but did not” (88, 161). For Reinhartz, that the Church Fathers so readily used this Gospel in their supersessionist writings is proof of John’s effectiveness.
A prime concern of Indigenous methodologies, and of any Aware-Settler hermeneutic in dialogue with them, is asking what benefit or harm one’s research brings to the community. Cast Out of the Covenant pays explicit attention to the spiritual and ethical implications of its conclusions, not only concerning John’s aim, but also the Gospel’s later canonical status and popularity among Christians. An important part of this book is its attention to what Indigenous commentators often call “all my relations” (to borrow phrasing from D.R. Wildcat's 2013 essay “Just Creation: Enhancing Life in a World of Relatives”). Reinhartz’s final judgement is that John’s rhetoric was - and remains - amenable to anti-Semitism. John’s rhetorical intent to build and destroy relations is at the crux of Cast Out of the Covenant. She suggests that (non)compliance with a rhetorical text advocating hate is ultimately an ethical choice.
Finally, Reinhartz frequently uses terms such as “appropriation”, “resistance,” and “expropriation” (e.g. 53, 67, 136). She notes that the rhetoric of the Fourth Gospel encourages non-Jewish Christ-following readers to “stake their claim” to “the status and perhaps even the name of Israel” (62). Reinhartz does not explicate the use of Settler phrasing; it would perhaps have been helpful to have included these in her Notes on Terminology. That she situates the implied author of the Gospel as a Jew poses the question as to whether one can appropriate one’s own identity markers. For Reinhartz, in John Ioudaioi is emptied of substantive meaning (161) other than as opponents of belief in Jesus as Messiah (146). The disciples are never referred to as Ioudaioi (84–85) and rarely is Jesus (85, 162). By so distinguishing the new community of Christ-followers, John makes of them, including any Jewish Christ-adherents, a new entity capable of appropriating from the old (87, 148).
Aware-Settler exegesis not only yields more just results; it also helps answer traditional historical- and literary-critical questions. Reinhartz concludes that there is no necessary community behind the Fourth Gospel, although one arose from its rhetoric. John’s implied audience is not Jewish, but gentile. She maintains that John’s “boundary creation” (132) was among the earliest steps in the so-called, and much-discussed Parting of the Ways. As part of her critique of a late “parting” and of the concept in general, Reinhartz seems to posit a greater continuity between first-century and later, Rabbinic Judaism.
Reinhartz effectively shows how in the minds of its hearers John’s rhetoric of expropriation was designed to dissociate Jews from their Temple, scriptures, and even genealogy (78), assigning these identity markers to the new community of Christ-followers. In Cast Out of the Covenant, Reinhartz again challenges Martyn’s expulsion hypothesis and its hypothetical Jewish-Christian outcasts (111–125, 159). Martyn’s theory – very nearly dogma in New Testament Introduction courses - lays blame for community ruptures at the door of the synagogue. Where Martyn portrayed an early Johannine community as victims of expulsion, Reinhartz sees this as the fate of John’s Jewish neighbours, who were rhetorically “Cast Out of the Covenant.” “The Fourth Gospel,” she writes, “appropriates Jewishness at the same time as it repudiates Jews” (xxi).
Cast Out of the Covenant stands at the end of almost four decades of Reinhartz’s close study of the the Gospel of John. It is a book well worth reading, as a witness to why she is now, finally, unfriending the Beloved Disciple.