via Paul Werner -Thanks Paul! “The Fourth Gospel’s Way of Warning Us Against a Literal Reading.” On almost every page John is screaming at the reader not to take his words literally. The author uses two different methods to accomplish this. First, Spong said that the Gospel “ridicules people who cannot think outside fixed religious boundaries.” For example, Jesus said that Nicodemus needs to be born again, meaning that he needed to embrace a new dimension of what it means to be human, but Nicodemus, who can only take that statement literally, is baffled by the idea of being literally born again because he is so old. The second way in which John told his readers that he was not to be taken literally was through the use of exaggeration. It was understood in Middle Eastern cultures that exaggeration was a way of storytelling, so if something was distorted well out of proportion, it was not to be believed as literal truth, Spong said. These exaggerations are found throughout the Fourth Gospel.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 17:17:28 +0000
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