Studying for a PhD is no easy task, but I was helped along by a very supportive cohort in Edinburgh, including my wonderful ‘Doktorbruder’, Edward Wong, who started his doctoral research at the same time as me under the supervision of Professor Helen Bond.
Dr Wong is now Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at China Graduate School of Theology. In this short-written interview, I got the chance to ask Dr Wong about his forthcoming book, Representations of Trauma in the Fourth Gospel, which is out in just a few months time.
Ever since Edward first told me about his project, I was totally fascinated by it. It raises so many questions: was John the product of trauma? Should we see John as an anti-semitic text? And how might a scholar’s personal journey shed light on their biblical research? If any of this piques your interest, read this interview – and of course, pre-order the book!
JN: Edward, as some background to you: how did you become interested in biblical studies? Why did you become a biblical scholar rather than something else?
EW: I stumbled into biblical studies during my seminary years as an MDiv student in Canada, thanks largely to my New Testament prof, Sam Tsang. He showed me that the discipline is not just a more professionalised version of the Bible study I had done for years as a Christian — the two aren’t unrelated — but it’s also about learning to read a text with academic rigour by attending to its language, rhetoric, narrative, and the historical world that shaped it.
When we reached John, I was hooked. Here was a writer, apparently Jewish himself, capable of beautiful poetry, yet whose rhetoric against “the Jews” was strikingly hostile. Where the Synoptic Gospels name particular groups, like Pharisees, Sadducees, or scribes, John reaches for the sweeping language of “the Jews.” I was fascinated, too, by an earlier generation of scholars like J. L. Martyn and Raymond Brown, who tried to reconstruct the history behind the text; their reconstructions are heavily contested now, but I still find them a compelling way to imagine how the Gospel came to be.
I never stopped reading John while I served as a pastor. Then came the Hong Kong protest movement in my home city, and I watched “China” and “Chinese” turn into contested terms when vilifying a generalised group, even one’s own kin, was not merely tolerated but encouraged. It sent me back to the Gospel with a new spark: could something similar lie behind, and within, the text of John?
Reading Bart Ehrman’s blog back then had convinced me that high-level research needs the specialised, expert-guided training only a PhD offers. So I decided to try — partly to find out whether I could do it, since you never know if you don’t try, and partly because life felt too short to stay comfortable. I was after an adventure, and I figured the experience would be worth it whether or not I finished. So I crossed the ocean to Edinburgh, and the rest is history.
JN: In a nutshell, what was the argument about John that you made in your doctoral research? What new lens did you bring to bear to the Fourth Gospel?
EW: In a nutshell, I argued that perceived experience of conflict gave shape to the Fourth Gospel, both its story and its rhetoric, and above all its troubling habit of speaking about “the Jews.” My aim was not to reconstruct the precise history behind the Gospel, which the text won’t let us pin down, but to read its language as the trace of a writer working under and through distress, with “the Jews” shaped by how the writer perceived his opponents. Read that way, John can be understood as what I call a “trauma narrative,” a text that claims suffering, names victims and perpetrators, builds protective boundaries, and reaches toward survival.
To get there, I brought together two bodies of theory usually kept apart, the psychology of individual trauma and the study of collective, social trauma. Through that double lens, John’s hostile language looks less like plain prejudice and more like a wound speaking. I tried to show that the same rhetoric that carries the injury is also the writer’s cathartic release and defence, as a way of holding a group together in the midst of bitter group conflict by retelling who they are and who has wronged them.
JN: In your PhD thesis, you bring your background in neuroscience to bear on John’s gospel. In particular, you argue that John – or parts of John – shows signs of trauma. To demonstrate this, you statistically analyse the language of the gospel. Can you unpack how you did this?
EW: In my neuroscience and psychology training, we could wire a person up to instruments that measure heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, brain activity on an EEG, or blood flow on an fMRI, and watch the body react to something frightening. It would be wonderful to borrow a time machine, bring the writer of John into the lab, and see whether his body spiked every time he thought about “the Jews.” Obviously, we can’t. But there is another option. A large body of research shows that when people speak or write about traumatic material, their language shifts in measurable ways across a wide range of settings. They use more first-person singular words like “I”, “my,” and “me,” which signal that attention has turned inward. They use more negative emotion words. And they use more of what are called cognitive processing words, the vocabulary of working something out and trying to make sense of it, words like “know,” “because,” and “think.”
So I put a simple question to John. When the text speaks about “the Jews,” does the language carry more of these trauma-related markers than when the text discusses other characters? I broke the Gospel into scenes and sorted them into two sets, one where “the Jews” are Jesus’ main conversation partners and a control set where he talks with others, such as his disciples or the Samaritan woman. I used a piece of software called LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and ran some straightforward statistical tests comparing the two sets. Across all three categories, the difference came out statistically significant.
This does not prove that the writer was retraumatised every time he mentioned “the Jews.” What it shows is that the language of these scenes turns more inward, more emotionally charged, and more preoccupied with explaining and making sense of things when “the Jews” enter the story. That supports the rest of my argument, the claim that John’s language does not exist in a vacuum, and that lived experience of conflict and distress very likely shaped how the writer told his story and presented his characters.
JN: I know that for a long time, scholars saw John as reflecting a distinct brand of Christianity (‘the Johannine community’) which had been expelled or removed itself from the synagogue. How does your thesis differ from how other people have viewed the relationship of the Gospel of John to Judaism?
EW: Yes, for a long time the reigning picture was the one you describe. Martyn and Brown read the Gospel’s battle between Jesus and “the Jews” as a coded record of one congregation, the so-called Johannine community, expelled from its synagogue largely based on their reading of John 9 and a few verses about expulsion. That reconstruction has come under heavy fire, since we can’t objectively rebuild a precise past from a single narrative. One issue is that biblical scholars sometimes assume that if you can’t reconstruct the traumatic events, you can’t study the trauma in the text at all. But that isn’t so. A represented wound can be studied in the shape of the language, whether or not we can recover what happened behind. We can’t even be sure expulsion happened as an event, only that the writer perceives that kind of danger, and that is the key. A line like “they will put you out of the synagogue… those who kill you will think they are offering worship to God” (16:2) may not record an event so much as mediate a threat the writer feels as real and present. So the question I find worth asking is what the writer is doing with that perceived threat, how he negotiates it and writes his people toward survival by retelling how Jesus himself survived his persecutors.
On the issue of John and Judaism, the field today tends to split two ways. One names John the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels and condemns it. The other, gaining ground as “John within Judaism,” points to how thoroughly Jewish the Gospel is and relocates the quarrel inside Judaism, so the evangelist writes as a Jew among Jews and his invective is just the heat of a family argument, no more hostile in intent than the language of the Dead Sea Scroll writers used on their fellow Judeans. Intra-Jewish, and so the argument concludes, is not really anti-Jewish at all.
My thesis is that this is a false binary. The Gospel is both at once, along two different lines. It is within Judaism in its materials, steeped in the scriptures, the feasts, the Mosaic and Abrahamic traditions it knows intimately and does not leave behind. And it is anti-Jewish in its aim to the extent that it takes that very inheritance and reappropriates it to push its readers to disaffiliate from the Jews who will not follow Jesus. The familiarity does not soften the hostility. So the more useful question, I argued, is not whether John is Jewish or anti-Jewish, but how the evangelist puts his Jewish inheritance to work against his opponents.
I recognise this reflex because I have seen versions of it up close. In Hong Kong, amid seasons of social strain, I watched people who share an ethnic and cultural kinship insist on sharp boundaries against those nearest to them by disowning a resemblance that was their own substance, and watched “the other” swell into a whole people, “the Chinese,” much as John reaches for the sweeping “the Jews.” Trauma can have a generalising effect, both destabilising and reshaping identities. Anyone who has lived through that kind of rupture knows the lines are never as clean as they look.
JN: John’s gospel has often been read in ways that are anti-Semitic. How does your new book contribute to the discussion regarding anti-Semitism in the fourth gospel?
EW: John’s words have had a long and violent afterlife, and we need to take that seriously. The hinge, I think, is the generalising label. Once a sacred text hands you an enemy called simply “the Jews,” with no faces and no particulars, the phrase lifts off its original context and settles onto any Jewish neighbour in any century. A Jesus-following community that was increasingly Gentile, with no memory of the intra-Jewish pain that produced the words, heard “the Jews” as an opposing outsider and did just that. In ordinary parish life a preacher had only to repeat the Gospel’s “the Jews” from the pulpit, and the abstract phrase became the actual Jews down the road, and often, by easy extension, whatever other outsider was near at hand. A generalised enemy is endlessly transferable.
So my book tries to refuse simply condemning or cancelling the text. Those same boundaries, drawn against “the Jews,” were probably what gave the first readers — a wounded group trying to survive — their shelter and their sense of who they were. But the boundary that shelters is the boundary that can also exclude, and that’s the danger. When we take up its victimising language and aim it towards deviant groups, we do not just misread John. We keep the wound turning by extending the very cycle of harm the text was caught in. My hope is that seeing this plainly makes us more nuanced, and slower to reach for a generalised group as the enemy, in John’s day or in ours.
JN: The idea that John’s gospel is written by someone who has experienced trauma is quite poignant, especially for those who view John as an inspired and sacred text. Do you see any particular theological significance in this?
EW: For those who read John as sacred and inspired, it means that inspiration does not come only in the voice of serene authority or from a place of comfort. Scripture can also speak through wounded words, through a writer working out his pain; the text does not bypass the injury but works through it.
That carries a kind of permission for hurt readers to confront their pain instead of dodging it. If even a Gospel can be the speech of a wounded people, then a reader who comes to it frightened, angry, or unable to tidy their grief and conflict is standing close to where the writer stood. John becomes a place where such a reader might find their own hurt spoken, and begin to work through their own trauma. The same caution applies here as everywhere else in this material. The pain that gave the first readers shelter is also what was later weaponised, and the two must be held together. Read with that awareness, a text so often used as a weapon might instead be met as a companion for the wounded.
JN: Edward, thank you so much for taking the time to share your research with us!
