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The Samaritan Woman Meets the Bridegroom Messiah: An Implied Christology

Updated: Mar 16, 2022

This blog looks to demonstrate that the conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4 is a betrothal scene which points to Jesus’s self-perception of his own deity, and that the Gospel writer was telling his readers such in his account of that meeting.




“The Old Testament imagery has a fairly large corpus of material devoted to it, but not so the New Testament imagery.”

In the Bible’s metaphoric marital imagery, we are asked to imagine that God is the husband of Israel, and that Jesus is the bridegroom of his church. The Old Testament imagery has a fairly large corpus of material devoted to it, but not so the New Testament imagery—before the 2015 publication of my PhD study there appears to have been only two published explorations of the imagery as a whole, one in 1940 and the other in 1971.

And Jocelyn McWhirter claims that before her own 2006 published PhD study there had been no comprehensive analysis of the allusions to marital imagery in John’s gospel; even though she, like Phillip Long (2013), and Brant Pitre (2014), see that the Gospel writers portray Jesus as self-consciously adopting the role of a bridegroom to his people. What is more, even though much of the corpus of literature that is devoted to Old Testament metaphoric marital imagery engages, albeit in a limited way, with metaphor theory, none of these New Testament scholars attempt such an analysis.




Find the full academic paper on this to download below.


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About Me

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I am a Christian believer with a high view of Scripture and have spent most of my church life in the Reformed tradition. 

 

I started my theology studies late in my career, gaining an MTh from the University of Wales in 2010 and a PhD on the Bible’s Marital Imagery from the University of Chester in 2015.   

 

During these years I have been greatly encouraged to get to know many biblical theologians with a similar high view of Scripture who in their studies are revealing ever deeper truths in God’s word.  

 

I hope on this website to share some of the insights of the academy. And in the process engage with others who, while respecting our Christian heritage, recognise that we have not yet exhausted all that Scripture can teach us.   

 

In other words, the ethos will be to reflect the outlook of the original Reformers. They challenged the status quo of their day by going directly to the text of Scripture and tried, with all the tools at their disposal, to seek the meaning of any Scripture text by exploring its original in context.  

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