Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John

Adele Reinhartz engages in five different "readings" of the fourth Gospel. Each approach views the Beloved Disciple differently: as mentor, opponent, collegue and as "other". In the course of each of these readings she elucidates the three narrative levels that interpenetrate the Gospel: the historical, the cosmological and the ecclesiological. In the latter she deals at length with the so-called expulsion theory, the dominant scholarly notion that the Johannine community, which included believers of Jewish, Gentile and Samaritan origins, engaged in a prolonged and violent controversy with the local Jewish community, culminating in a "traumatic expulsion from the synagogue."