Text Context and the Johannine Community

<i>Text Context and the Johannine Community</i> adopts a new approach to the social context of the Johannine writings by drawing on modern sociolinguistic theory. Sociolinguistics emphasizes language as a social phenomenon which can be analysed with reference not only to its broad context of culture but also through the use of register analysis to its narrower context of situation.<br/> <br/> The Johannine writings have increasingly been seen as the product of a distinct Johannine Community depicted by some scholars as a sectarian group opposed both to wider Jewish society and to other Christian groups. This model has largely been constructed on historical-critical grounds yet given our lack of reliable external information about the origin of the Johannine writings a more fruitful approach may be to examine their lexico-grammatical and discourse features to determine what these imply about interpersonal relationships. This study compares selected 'narrative asides' from the Gospel of John with a passage section from 1 John and with the two shorter Johannine Epistles. It concludes that register analysis of these texts does not support the idea of a close-knit sectarian group.