John Ashton

In this fully revised new edition of a pioneering study of John's gospel, John Ashton explores fresh topics and takes account of the latest scholarly debates. Ashton argues first that the thought-world of the gospel is Jewish, not Greek, and secondly that the text is many-layered, not simple, and composed over an extended period as the evangelist responded to the changing situation of the community he was addressing. Ashton seeks to provide new and coherent answers to what Rudolf Bultmann called the two great riddles of the gospel: its position in the development of Christian thought and its central or governing idea. In arguing that the first of these should be concerned rather with Jewish thought Ashton offers a partial answer to the most important and fascinating of all the questions confronted by New Testament scholarship: how did Christianity emerge from Judaism? Bultmann's second riddle is exegetical, and concerns the message of the book. Ashton's answer highlights a generally neglected feature of the gospel's concept of revelation: its debt to Jewish apocalyptic.

Policing in Britain has undergone considerable change since the 1960s and the last 20 years in particular have seen the growth of a more professional and managerial style of policing. This change has been prompted in part by technology, in part by changes in society at large, a growth of public expectations from the criminal justice system, changes in government policy and in part from within the police service itself. At the same time, debate about police conduct and ethics has been fuelled by revelations about police misconduct, miscarriages of justice, and a number of well-publicized cases of racial and sexual discrimination effecting serving officers and the way in which the country is policed. This text is intended to bridge the gap between media exaggeration and academic dryness.

Is historical criticism of the New Testament dead? In this telling collection of eight new studies on John's Gospel, John Ashton argues that this is very far from the case. Challenging the assumptions of methodologies which ignore the historical context in which the Gospel was composed, the author offers a spirited defence of historical criticism and provides practical demonstration of the many new insights which it has still to yield. The first two chapters treat in greater depth two key themes (the Prologue of John and the Jews) which appeared in the author's Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Clarendon Paperbacks, 1993). A third chapter is intended to supplement and correct this larger work. The rest of the book explores further facets of the Gospel, and at the same time exposes some of the serious theoretical weaknesses in much recent writing on the Gospel.