The Identity and Composition of οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι in the Gospel of John

Abstract

This article examines the referent of the term οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι in the Gospel of John. The debate is whether the term refers exclusively to the religious authorities, to a religious party, to the religious authorities and common people, or simply to the Jews in general. This article makes three contributions to the debate. First, Second Temple Judaism already knew of the term οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as a broad reference to the adherents of the Judaean religion transcending the earlier ethnic-geographic sense, and John had this particular religious group in mind. Second, οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι is a composite group with the chief priests rather than the Pharisees as its leaders. Third, within οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, John portrays a shift in hostility from a religious-theological conflict with the Pharisees in the middle of Jesus’ ministry, towards a religious-political conflict with the chief priests later in Jesus’ ministry.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.