Ny Johanneskommentar

This review-article presents and discusses a new Danish commentary on the Gospel of John written by Helge Kjær Nielsen. The present commentary is the fourth volume in a rather unique Danish series on the New Testament: Dansk Kommentar til det Nye Testamente (= DKNT), edited by Sigfred Pedersen. The present review pays credit to the commentary’s careful and thorough way of introducing the reader to the Gospel of John, in general, and, in particular, to the symbolic world of ideas and terms to be found in the text and composition of the Fourth Gospel. Mainly the prologue and the farewell discourse are considered to belong to the more successful exegetical parts of the commentary. Although, however, the introductory section of the commentary promises to read and discuss the text of John mainly from the perspective of theological literature, the text-orientated analysis from a communicative point of view tends to be overshadowed by a detail-exegetical discussion concerning grammatical, syntactic and semantic questions. Furthermore, the commentary seems to consider some of the miracles and other supernatural notions in John, besides their function as literary-theological markers in the text, to be historical facts.