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 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 instances, meaning is not clarified through progressive disclosure but remains distributed across competing possibilities that are never fully collapsed into a single determinate reading.

Within Culpepper’s narrative-critical framework, such instances of misunderstanding are typically interpreted as part of a structured literary design in which irony and misrecognition function pedagogically, guiding the implied reader toward correct recognition and coherent theological interpretation.[4] On this account, ambiguity is ultimately subordinated to narrative unity, and misunderstanding serves as a transitional stage within a broader trajectory of interpretive resolution rather than as a persistent structural condition of the discourse itself.

From a reader-oriented cognitive perspective, Resseguie similarly construes Johannine ambiguity as a catalyst for interpretive activity that culminates in integrated experiential understanding.[5] Narrative gaps, symbolic indeterminacy, and shifts in perspective are understood to activate cognitive processes that progressively stabilize meaning through readerly engagement. However, this model presupposes that ambiguity is ultimately resolved through cognitive synthesis, thereby retaining a teleological orientation toward interpretive closure.

Yet the sustained recurrence of misrecognition, recontextualized explanation, and renewed ambiguity across Johannine dialogue complicates both frameworks. Even episodes that appear to move toward clarification frequently reintroduce interpretive instability through intensified metaphorical or symbolic language, preventing final consolidation of meaning.[6] Accordingly, Johannine discourse is better described not as a system oriented toward resolution but as one in which meaning is generated and sustained through persistent non-closure

[1] Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 17-29.

[2] Resseguie, The Strange Gospel, 14-24.

[3] Paul D. Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1985), 35–58.

[4] Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 159-174.

[5] Resseguie, The Strange Gospel, 29-54.

[6] Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:293–303.

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