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Passover imagery is central to the narrative structure and theological content of the Fourth Gospel. The imagery begins in the testimony of John the Baptist, declaring Jesus to be the “Lamb of God”. The narrator expands the paschal overtones of this title to incorporate other Old Testament insights associated particularly with temple and cult. The feast of Passover develops into its own metaphorical field, pushing the narrative towards the cross as the climatic moment of revelation. On the way, paschal imagery incorporates not only the lamb but also the shepherd who lays down and takes up his life on behalf of the sheep. Passover becomes a major symbol in the Fourth Gospel, capturing vital, christological aspects of John's understanding of the cross.

This article proposes that the understanding of icons within Eastern Orthodoxy provides a model for feminist hermeneu tics in developing a poetics of sacred reading. The two major periods of icon dispute within church history are briefly reviewed (the icon controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries and the Protestant Reformation) and iconoclasm and iconophilia are discussed as competing yet ultimately complementary dynamics in theology. Christian feminism can acknowledge the value of both in understanding the place of the Bible avoiding either fundamentalist or expulsive readings of the text Icon-veneration has an important place, alongside iconoclasm (as distinct from icono-phobia), in developing a feminist biblical poetics.

From a hermeneutical perspective, the method of examining the prominence and status of women and female characters in a given text is an important but partial way of dealing with biblical texts. Feminist theology needs to recover a sense of “biblical theology” (despite the problems associated with that term), a theology that is sensitive to women's experience and theological reflection. The Johannine notion of “abiding” provides an example of such biblical theology. It is focused on the centrality of relationship, intimacy, and reciprocity, challenging Enlightenment individualism and subject-object bifurcation.

This discussion of fatherhood in John's Gospel shows the importance of a hermeneutic of suspicion in reinterpreting the text within new hermeneutical frameworks. Suspicion, unlike alienation, is part of an ongoing dialogue between text and reader. It does not foreclose on future possibilities for affirmation in creative re-readings of the text. While it cannot of itself deliver new interpretations, its challenging questioning can open frontiers within the text, exposing horizons of meaning that only a creative hermeneutic of affirmation can grasp. In this sense, suspicion and affirmation belong together as two sides of the same interpretative coin. The same dynamic is operative in grasping the anti-patriarchal nature of fatherhood in the Fourth Gospel.

This article examines the literary role of women in the passion and resurrection narratives and the practice of the historical Jesus which lies behind the Gospels. Jesus probably included a wider group of disciples than the twelve at the Last Supper, among whom were a number of women. This is reflected in the uneven dynamic between female presence and absence in the Synoptics. Only in John is there the real possibility of women's presence at the Last Supper, although Mark uses the motif of presence/absence to contrast female fidelity with male infidelity.