ABSTRACT
A third arena is social and cultural texture. This arena differs from the arena of intertexture by its use of anthropological and sociological theory to explore the social and cultural nature of the voices in the text under investigation. Study of a particular sector of early Christianity with sociological theory appeared in Wayne A.Meeks’s study of ‘The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism’ (1972). Meeks analyzed both ‘the special patterns of language’ in the Gospel of John and the special logic of the myth of the descending and ascending redeemer (p. 44), integrating a close, rhetorical reading of the text with anthropological and sociological insights into the formation and maintenance of sectarian communities. His interpretation demonstrates the profound relationship in Johannine discourse between the redeemer who belongs to the ‘world of the Father’ yet comes into the ‘world which does not know or comprehend’ him, and those who are ‘in the world’ yet are drawn to the redeemer by ‘believing’ in him. In the end, the reader sees that the redeemer’s foreignness to the world is directly related to the sect’s perception of itself as foreign to the world-‘in it but not of it’. In Meeks’s words:
The Fourth Gospel not only describes, in etiological fashion, the birth of that community; it also provides reinforcement of the community’s isolation. The language patterns we have been describing have the effect, for the insider who accepts them, of demolishing the logic of the world, particularly the
world of Judaism, and progressively emphasizing the sectarian consciousness. If one ‘believes’ what is said in this book, he is quite literally taken out of the ordinary world of social reality.
