John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel

Abstract This is an inter-disciplinary work, bringing together historical scholarship (regarding the earliest readers of the Gospel of John), contemporary scriptural scholarship on John, and philosophy, specifically Michel Henry, a French Phenomenologist and another reader of John, to explore how the Incarnation relates to the Passion of Christ, and how we understand and speak of revelation, that is, the relationship between scriptural exegesis and theological discourse. In particular, the work shows how ‘incarnation’ is not an event now in the past, but rather the continuing embodiment of God in those who follow Christ in the present. Those who do so, moreover, are born into life as human beings, giving their assent to the project of God initiated in the opening verses of Scripture, ‘Let us make a human being in our image’. The intimate connection between theology and anthropology, centered in Christology, as this work demonstrates, illumines the nature and task of theology itself, bringing together the various disciplines drawn upon in this study.