ABSTRACT
John transforms the live metaphor typology, among other things, by stating: ‘he that hath seen me hath seen the father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the father?’ (14: 9). A presupposition of this identification partly derives from the polemics of John 10. The disputants misconstrue the force of the metaphoric referring function in theos with regard to agency: ‘thou, being a man, makest thyself God’ (10: 33). Their mythologisation of Christ’s relational stance is fraught with a witless almost Neo-Platonic ontological litany of media misrepresentation. They seem nearly to purvey the recurrent tendency to ossify the count noun theos into a proper name. Having undermined the interlocutors with the neuter ‘I and my father are one [what]?’ the Johanine narrator reports that the correct move is to instantiate the live metaphor of Psalm 82: 6, which triggers into ironic life their singular theos, bound by their referent God’s first person pronoun, with the plural theoi, which effectively quantifies over the first person and deconstructs their singularity: ‘I said Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?’ Here the metaphoric agency function of theoi, which embraces the scope of ’lhym, is thrown down as a gauntlet to block the equality claim. Perhaps the role of Psalm 82: 6 here, and the way it acts as a deconstruction to fix the assertion of Christ being the son of God, requires attention different from some traditional treatment of John 10.
