Paul N. Anderson


Paul N. Anderson is a New Testament scholar conducting research on the historical, cultural and theological background of the Gospel of John, the historical Jesus, Quaker studies, and spirituality studies. He is Professor of Biblical and Quaker Studies at George Fox University since 1989 and was a founding member of the John, Jesus, and History Project at the Society of Biblical Literature 2002-2016. He also serves as Extraordinary Professor of Religion at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa and has served as a visiting professor or researcher at Haverford College, Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, the Radboud University of Nijmegen, and Chapman University.
Anderson has published over 200 essays and is NT Editor at the Biblical Interpretation Series, co-editor of the Johannine Monograph Series, and editor of the Quakers and the Discipline Series. He edited Evangelical Friend and Quaker Religious Thought. He has also written many articles for HuffPost and served on a team translating the Johannine writings for the New American Bible.

Education

Anderson received a B.A. in Psychology and Christian Ministries at Malone University and pursued graduate studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Portland State University. He received an MDiv from the Earlham School of Religion and a PhD from Glasgow University.

Research and Career

Thesis

Anderson's Glasgow thesis on The Christology of the Fourth Gospel found diachronic theories of John's composition insufficient in terms of stylistic, contextual, and theological evidence; and because 85% of its material is distinctive, with none of the contacts with other gospels being identical or verbatim, John's tradition is not derivative from Synoptic traditions. Anderson's monograph thus identified four sources of John's theological tensions: the dialectical thinking of the evangelist, the Jewish agency schema, the dialectical Johannine situation, and the rhetorical designs of the narrator. John's theological, historical, and literary riddles are unpacked more fully in Anderson's introduction to John, where his overall Johannine theory is laid out as an improvement over alternative views.

Johannine Theory

Anderson's overall Johannine theory builds on the views of Bultmann, Schnackenburg, Brown, Barrett, Lindars, Borgen, Culpepper, and others, advancing three complementary paradigms. In terms of composition, Anderson follows Lindars and Ashton inferring a basic two-edition theory, seeing John's first edition as the second gospel narrative constructed, to which John the Elder added the Prologue after the death of the Beloved Disciple. John's relations to the Synoptics sees John's first stages of development as reflecting an augmentation and modest correction of Mark, thus featuring five signs of Jesus not included in Mark--filling out the picture chronologically and geographically. Given that Luke departs from Mark over six dozen times in ways that coincide with John, Anderson builds on the view of Lamar Cribbs, who argued that the Johannine tradition was known by Luke. Likewise, the Q tradition shows evidence of some Johannine features implying some sort of contact. The Matthean and later Johannine traditions reflect some sort of cross-influence regarding models of church governance and illustrative details. The history of the Johannine situation reflects engagements with Judean religious leaders and followers of John the Baptist ; leaders of local Jewish synagogues and the impending Roman imperial cult ; and traveling docetizing ministers and tensions with emerging institutional Christian leaders such as the primacy-loving Diotrephes. Engagements with synoptic and other gospel traditions continued from the beginning to the end of the Johannine tradition's development. These dialectical engagements within the emerging Johannine situation are largely sequential but somewhat overlapping, as issues never totally disappear but are displaced by more acute crises.

Dehistoricization of John

Given the fact that John's narrative reflects a self-standing Jesus tradition, despite being theologically developed, it deserves consideration as an overlooked resource for Jesus research. Anderson's monograph on The Fourth Gospel and the Quest for Jesus lays out the case for its historical contribution alongside other gospels, and in 2002, Anderson helped found the John, Jesus, and History Project at the Society of Biblical Literature. Since then, the project has received international scholarly engagement, having published essays by over two hundred New Testament scholars. The project has published eight monographs, five of which Anderson has been a co-editor,. Anderson's research has included the proposition that John has been dehistoricized in scholarship for its distinctive theological and narrative traits, which must be balanced with John's archaeologically detailed narrative and continuity with the Synoptic Gospels. This calls for a Fourth Quest for Jesus, in Anderson's view, as the first three have programmatically excluded John from the mix, and problematically so.

Popular work

Anderson has reviewed the six-part mini-series Finding Jesus and has written for the SBL's Bible Odyssey and Bible and Interpretation. Anderson also served on a team working on a new translation for the New American Bible.

Reception

According to James Charlesworth at Princeton Theological Seminary, Anderson's book The Fourth Gospel and Quest for Jesus "is more than an exhortation to include John in the study of the historical Jesus; it is a polemic against the myopic use of the Synoptics." Larry Hurtado has also received Anderson's work on the christology of John's Gospel in light of Johannine redaction criticism, writing that "in a recent study of unity and diversity in the Johannine presentation of Jesus, Paul Anderson has acutely and persuasively shown that such judgments reflect inaccurate readings of GJohn" but also criticizes his suggestion that the Epistles of John reflect the separation of more than one secessionist group from John's community. On Anderson's work reassessing and challenging the traditional view that the Gospel of John features anti-Semitic tendencies, R. Alan Culpepper writes that "In a tour de force Paul Anderson challenges widely held understandings of the gospel and proposes a reassessment of its relationship to its Jewish setting."

Selected publications

Books