Cast Out of the Covenant

The present book marks a concluding step on this brilliant Jewish scholar’s long journey of befriending the author of the Fourth Gospel. Reinhartz is not willing to follow the apologetic moves of many of her Christian fellow-exegetes to explain away John’s anti-Jewish polemics as a still inner-Jewish dispute or a merely marginal element of the gospel text. In her view, the anti-Jewish stance is at the core of its rhetorical construction, and thus more closely linked to the tragedies of later Christian anti-Judaism than most exegetes care to admit. -- Jörg Frey, University of Zurich
With historical-critical precision and literary-critical acuity, Reinhartz dismisses popular reconstructions of a pre-gospel Johannine community, demolishes standard apologetics for John’s vituperations, and convincingly indicts the Gospel for anti-Jewish rhetoric. The volume represents not only the culmination of decades of Johannine studies, it portends a paradigm shift in the field. -- Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University
Regular Reinhartz readers will not be surprised that she has published another book on John that challenges widely held views of its origin and purpose. She is no “compliant reader” of the Gospel, but she presents “Alexandra,” who is. This engaging exploration of John’s rhetoric and its effects almost assures that conversations about John will now be using new terms, such as “affiliation,” “disaffiliation,” “expropriation,” “propulsion theory,” and, yes, “Alexandra.” -- R. Alan Culpepper, Mercer University
In this book Adele Reinhartz presents a fresh synthesis of her many years of diligent scholarship on the way the gospel of John relates to Judaism. Guided by historical imagination, the six chapters of this book offer a comprehensive approach to the central question of Johannine exegesis: how do Jewishness and anti-Judaism relate to one another in the fourth gospel? Creative thinking outside the box has long been Reinhartz’s trademark, and this new book is no exception. Reinhartz is not afraid of challenging scholars who become too self-assured of their convenient convictions. She sketches the different dimensions of rhetoric which are at play in John’s narrative presentation of the Jews. Marked by a disarming honesty, this book confronts us with an ‘inconvenient truth’, or at least Reinhartz’s ‘inconvenient truth’ with regard to a research topic of greatest importance, both in historical and in contemporary perspective. A vintage Adele Reinhartz book which is a must for every student of the gospel of John, especially those of us who will not be inclined to agree with her central thesis. -- Reimund Bieringer, Catholic University of Leuven