ABSTRACT
Extracting a sense of a character from a biblical text is by no means a simple process. Biblical narratives are notoriously gap-filled and enigmatic and, unlike characters in nineteenth-century realist fiction, the characters are not so much described as inferred through a process of reader response. This chapter explores how the figure of Jonah has been read through Christian eyes in a way that validates the Christian 'universalistic' gospel and denigrates the anachronistic 'nationalist' Jew. It is about the evolution of a particular biblical character, Jonah, and one of the strongest of interpretative communities, the Christian church. The chapter is a study of Jonah and Fish, not in the old-fashioned sense of speculations over whether Jonah's scaly friend was shark or whale, myth or reality, but a study that looks at the way the evolution of Jonah the Jew seems to confirm some of Stanley Fish's claims about what readers do with texts.
