BibleScholar

 Culpepper’s role-based characterization and Resseguie’s cognitive-perceptual model both assume a degree of interpretive stabilization in character response. Yet Johannine characterization exhibits persistent instability. Biblical characters do not develop toward interpretive clarity (contra Resseguie), nor stabilize within narrative roles (contra Culpepper), but remain structurally non-consolidated. Interpretive positions within the Fourth Gospel are characterized by continual instability rather than cumulative progression toward settled understanding. Rather than moving through a linear sequence of increasing epistemic clarity, characters repeatedly shift interpretive stances without these shifts consolidating into durable or integrated knowledge. Each new episode of perception or dialogue does not secure prior insight but frequently reopens interpretive uncertainty, preventing the formation of a stable cognitive trajectory within the narrative. Recognition of Jesus, in ...

 Both R. Alan Culpepper and James L. Resseguie assume that Johannine discourse ultimately moves toward interpretive resolution. In Culpepper’s narrative model, resolution is secured through the implied author’s design, where irony and misunderstanding guide the reader toward coherent recognition. [1] In Resseguie’s cognitive approach, ambiguity functions as a stimulus for readerly processing that culminates in integrated understanding. [2] In both cases, meaning is treated as ultimately stabilized through either narrative structure or cognitive synthesis. Johannine dialogue repeatedly resists interpretive convergence, thereby placing sustained pressure on narratological models that assume discourse functions primarily as a mechanism for resolution. Metaphorical speech frequently produces semantic displacement, in which referential stability is continually deferred rather than secured, generating multiple and structurally sustained interpretive trajectories. [3] In such instanc...

  James L. Resseguie extends narrative-critical analysis by emphasizing the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of reading John. In this model, meaning emerges through the reader’s active engagement with shifting perspectives, perceptual gaps, and narrative ambiguity. Resseguie’s contribution is significant in shifting focus from authorial design to readerly cognition, but it retains a central assumption inherited from Culpepper: that interpretive activity leads toward integrative understanding. In this cognitive-narratological framework, ambiguity is typically construed as a stimulus for interpretive processing that ultimately yields determinate meaning, rather than as a persistent structural feature of the text. Narrative gaps are likewise understood as functional sites of engagement that activate the reader’s inferential activity, directing attention toward resolution and coherence rather than sustained indeterminacy. On this account, readerly participation produces a progress...

Culpepper’s narratology remains foundational in its claim that the Fourth Gospel is a unified literary composition governed by an implied author who strategically employs irony, misunderstanding, and characterization to guide the implied reader toward correct interpretation. Culpepper’s narratological model of the Fourth Gospel rests on a relatively stable assumption about the teleology of irony: that Johannine irony, while frequently generating dramatic misunderstanding within the story world, ultimately functions as a literary strategy for guiding the implied reader toward correct recognition.  In this view, episodes of misrecognition (for example, misunderstandings of metaphorical discourse or symbolic actions) are not structurally open-ended but pedagogically ordered. Irony therefore operates as a controlled gap between surface misunderstanding and deeper authorially intended meaning. In this framework, misunderstanding is not an endpoint but a transitional stage within a coher...

 Modern narrative-critical readings of the Fourth Gospel have been decisively shaped by R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, which establishes a model of the text as a carefully constructed narrative system producing coherence through irony, characterization, and implied authorial design. Later developments, particularly in the work of James L. Resseguie, extend this trajectory by emphasizing reader cognition, perception, and the experiential process of meaning-making within the Gospel. This study positions itself between and against these two interpretive frameworks. While both Culpepper and Resseguie account for complexity, irony, and ambiguity, they ultimately preserve a model in which narrative processes aim toward cognitive, interpretive, or theological coherence. This study argues instead that the Gospel of John is structured by sustained non-closure: a formal principle in which discourse, characterization, focalization, and temporality resist final stabilization...