Reconsidering the Rhetoric of Temporality in Johannine Literature

In this volume, Chang Seon An argues that the writer(s) of the Gospel of John used Greek, Roman, and Jewish temporality to align the story of Jesus's death and resurrection within existing temporal frameworks. The Johannine Epistles built on this rhetoric, linking the imagined audience with the time of Christ genealogically and temporally, distancing them from a targeted "anti-Christ." This "shared sense of time" informed the literatures and practices of a group of Johannine Christians known as the "Quartodecimans." Temporality calculations were central for Christian self-definition: time was a way of elaborating forms of sameness and difference, and claiming an elevated role for Christ. Christ-followers debated what time can mean. If the imagined audiences of Christian, Jewish, Greek, and Roman works adopted the temporal schemes they defended, differences among and between groups would become obvious.