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 particular, is repeatedly revised rather than consolidated. Initial forms of recognition are consistently requalified, reinterpreted, or rendered insufficient by subsequent narrative developments. As a result, no single interpretive designation of Jesus remains stable across narrative time; instead, recognition is continuously re-negotiated in light of new discursive or symbolic contexts. This produces a pattern in which recognition functions less as an achieved state than as an ongoing process of revision.