Abstract:
The Johannine Jesus from a Samoan perspective is a reading of the Fourth Gospel through an intercultural approach that uses analogy as a way of bridging the temporal and cultural distanciation that is encountered in reading the bible. The project is located in the wider Pacific approaches to the biblical text. As a Samoan reader, I am interested in the way Jesus is presented and the problems which appear to be created by the use of the father-son language and the relationship this language projects so that Jesus’ humanity appear to be diminished. I developed a reading strategy that allowed me as real reader to engage with the issues of the father-son language in the first century through the lens of my social location. The text evokes for me analogical images from the way Jesus is presented. The images make meaningful, in my situation, what the text is saying. The images so evoked create possibilities for constructing cultural correlates in the first century context. Cultural correlates as analogies help imagine a context within which John was moved to construct the FG. Reading John 5:1-47, 13:1-20 and 15:1-17 through this strategy suggest that the more important aspects in the use of the father-son language is the dynamics within which the social roles of “father” and “son” would have been actuated. The FG presents a subversive Jesus that would have enabled readers in the first century to critique their own social-cultural situation by noting how Jesus acts and speaks and the narrative contexts within which he does these. Jesus’ relationship to the divine “father” is part of the FG rhetoric.
