and the groups in the Gospel perform their various and complex mutual relations with difference and similarity.149 In addition, the relationship between the center and the margins as encompassing both social and cultural reality from a number of different angles shows a range of disciplines within postcolonial studies.150 Among postcolonial themes, perspectives on the relations between the center and the margin and hybridized identities in the colonial society will be employed in my book. In short, clarifying their identities in a colonial society can be a key to postcolonial interpretation of the Gospel of John, particularly regarding the identity of the Johannine Jesus as decolonizer,151 knowing that difference and similarity between the colonizer and the colonized is a major contact point between postcolonialism and the Fourth Gospel.
Secondly, one of the topics of postcolonial reading in biblical studies is a discourse of resistance and emancipation. Segovia says,
The proposed postcolonial optic in biblical studies is obviously a discourse of resistance and emancipation. It takes as its reading lens the geo-political relationship between center and periphery, the imperial and the colonial, not only at the level of the text but also at the level of interpretation, of readings and readers of the text. It does so, moreover, with decolonization and liberation in mind, as it proceeds to highlight the periphery over the center and the colonial over the imperial.152
Sugirtharajah also says,
[Postcolonialism] is an active confrontation with the dominant system of thought, its lopsidedness and inadequacies, and underlines its unsuitability for us. Hence, it is a process of cultural and discursive emancipation from all dominant structures whether they be political, linguistic or ideological.153
In the Gospel of John, we can discover a discourse of resistance and liberation. By the employment of a variety of christological titles from the center as well as from the margins, the Gospel presents the identity of Jesus as king. It challenges its readers in the colonial world to believe and follow him as the real king who liberates the margins of the colonized world and eventually, from the darkness.
Thirdly, when “postcolonial studies engage in examining the complex web of desire and distantiation between the colonists and the colonized,”154 three major concepts, such as ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridentity, become “touchstones for debates over colonial discourse, anti-colonial resistance, and post-colonial identity.”155
1) Ambivalence is used to describe a continual interchange between both opposites, namely the center/the colonizer and the margins/the colonized. Therefore, it suggests both compliance and resistance in a colonial subject. In postcolonialism, it refers to a simultaneous attraction and repulsion, which marks the complex relationship between them.156 In this respect, collaboration and resistance in a colonial society become unavoidable. In addition, postcolonial ambivalence gives the margins room for collaboration with the central power and/or resistance against the center. As a result, “ambivalence decenters authority from its position of power” to that of the margins.157 For example, the Johannine readers as the margins could see a resistant tendency in the Gospel against this earthly Imperialism, but a collaborating tendency toward the heavenly kingdom (the Johannine new world), when they met its ambivalent usage of the Johannine christological titles, which could imply various definitions in different contexts.
2) Postcolonial mimicry is also used to describe the ambivalent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The phrase, “a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,”158 conveys the force of mimicry quite well. Mimicry requires simultaneous similarity and dissimilarity. It relies on resemblance, on the colonized becoming like the colonizer, but always remaining different. In addition, mimicry is related to the fear of loss. Van Bruggen remarks,
After the exile the Jews were not the only inhabitants of Palestine. They lived among all kinds of non-Jews, and this made it necessary for them to preserve a clear identity if they were to avoid being absorbed into the other cultures in Palestine. This potential loss of Jewish identity had been a real threat on several occasions.159
In postcolonialism, however, the fear of loss that had been a real threat to the colonized on the one hand, works as a kind of resistance against the colonial power on the other. “Mimicry, as a repetition that is ‘almost but not quite’ the same as an original, queries not only the definition but the self-identity of the ‘original.’”160 Therefore, mimicry also produces a disturbing effect on colonial rule.161
Mimicry is another ambivalent (re)assertion of similarity and difference and it therefore poses a challenge to the normalized knowledge of colonized and colonizer; not least by making one an imitation of the other while preserving differences of, for example, liberty, status, and rights. . . . The imitation must always remain distinguishable from the original and so poses two troubling questions. On the one hand, it asks what constitutes the “original” and preserves its difference from any “imitation.” . . . On the other hand, it asks what “deformation” of this original is visible in the imitation, which is never exactly a copy and therefore something more or less than the “original.”162
In this respect, we can see that John uses mimicry in the Gospel, particularly, in the christological titles in terms of kingship. We can regard the employment and adaptation of them for kingly identification of Jesus as mimicry in terms of resistance. The Gospel of John adapts many christological titles originating in and used by a variety of cultures to introduce Jesus as king, but more fully describes Jesus as a universal and ideal king than those described as king in various other contexts. For example, Jesus as Messiah in the Gospel is a more fully idealized Messiah (Christ)/king than is found in Jewish culture (1:49; 7:31; 11:27). Jesus is truly the Savior of the World (4:42) rather than the Roman emperors. Jesus is of a truth the Prophet like Moses (Deut 18:15)163 who is to come into the world (7:14). Jesus is a more fully personalized, dramatized Lord and God (My Lord and My God) than any other one, and so on.
To attempt a new reading of the Gospel of John from a postcolonial perspective, therefore, I will employ three major postcolonial subjects in my book: 1) identity issues of the characters, using differences and similarities between the colonizer and the colonized (mimicry as a colonial process as well as a kind of resistance);164 2) a discourse of resistance and emancipation; 3) the ambivalent relationship between the center and the margin in hybridentity.
Literary Criticism and Postcolonial Theory
In this sub-section, in order to discover some bases of postcoloniality in this Gospel, I will deal with the relationship between literary criticism and postcolonial theory, and as an example, I will discuss the matter of the genre of the Gospels.
First, it is necessary to indicate that both inside and outside biblical scholarship there is a growing variety of conflicting views on the subject of the value of the Bible, the difference between biblical texts, and between biblical texts and other literary texts. Without any clear consensus
