February 13, 2002

Dear Student,

The minor midterm paper will be due Friday, March 1, but will gladly be received earlier. The sooner you do it, the more passages you have to choose from, and the sooner you can present it to the class.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce you to the tools of the trade: the commentaries on the Bible and other reference works that you will find helpful to consult during the rest of this semester and in the future. Remember, this is not meant to be a major research project. It need only be 4-6 pages long. I just want you to demonstrate that you have used, and therefore can use, the reference works intelligently. If you spend more than several hours on the project, you are probably doing too much.

This is the way you should proceed. First, pick a passage from the Gospel of John that interests you, that we have not yet covered in class, and that is of sufficient scope (in length or depth) to have extensive comments written on it in these reference works. Ordinarily, a passage of 10-12 verses would be about right; but you could pick a much-discussed passage of only a few verses. Do not try to cover (superficially) a long passage of 20 or more verses. Second, go to the Philosophy-Religious Studies Reading Room on the third floor south of Mullen Library and read at least three good commentaries on your passage and summarize each one separately. You need not type the paper, so you can do this part of it right then and there in the library. Individual summaries should not much exceed one side of a paper. Be sure to view your passage not as an isolated unit but in the context of the entire gospel, with the author's viewpoints, literary and theological themes, techniques, and purposes taken into account. Third, after you have summarized, analyzed, and compared at least three commentaries on your passage, go home and think about it for a while and then write your own commentary, a verse-by-verse synthesis that will show that you understood and assimilated what you read in the other commentaries. Your synthesis will therefore constitute the fourth commentary--your interpretation of the passage in light of what you have read in the other commentaries and assimilated from the course so far. This is what you will present in class when we get to your passage.

The accompanying bibliography lists the recommended commentaries. Other books of interest may be found in the same reading room and more general studies of the Bible under the BS call numbers in the stacks. But for the purpose of this paper, avoid books on the Bible written before 1950 and popular, devotional, and nonacademic works, including most material on the internet.