Johannine Anagnorisis: Current Scholarship and Future Perspectives

This article re-examines scenes of anagnorisis (recognition) in the Fourth Gospel by expanding upon established literary and semiotic models. While existing scholarship successfully identifies these scenes as formal tools mapping Jesus’ identity, it leaves crucial textual variations and the underlying cognitive mechanisms unresolved. To address these gaps, this study proposes a revised theoretical framework based on three integrated criteria: narrative criticism, hierarchy of compositional models, and interpretive semiotics. This threefold approach is applied to the representative analysis of John 1:19–34 and 20:1–10. The study demonstrates that textual variations from the standard type scene are deliberate adaptations driven by Johannine theological and narrative demands. Furthermore, this paper argues that Johannine anagnorisis is not of a simplistic or material kind in response to a sign. Instead, it is a profoundly relational event and a moment of mutual self-disclosure between the revealing God and the receptive interpreter.