Comparison of John’s Gospel and Euripides’ Play
By Neil Godfrey
This post continues from my earlier one that concluded with Mark W. G. Stibbe’s “very broad list of similarities” between Euripides’ Bacchae (a play about the god Dionysus) and the Gospel of John. Stibbe discusses these similarities in John As Storyteller: Narrative Criticism and the Fourth Gospel.
What Mark Stibbe is arguing
Stibbe makes it clear that he is not suggesting the evangelist
necessarily knew the Bacchae by heart and that he consciously set up a number of literary echoes with . . . that play (p. 137)
What he is suggesting is that
John unconsciously chose the mythos of tragedy when he set about rewriting his tradition about Jesus and that general echoes with Euripides’ story of Dionysus are therefore, in a sense, inevitable.
