Belief in the Fourth Gospel: A Swinburnian Approach to John 2

Abstract

This article proposes a philosophical approach to address the hermeneutical problem of the polysemy of the verb ‘to believe’ in the Gospel of John. After outlining the centrality of belief within the Johannine text, Chapter 2 of this Gospel is contextualised and examined, demonstrating its paradigmatic nature due to the occurrence of a threefold attestation of the verb ‘to believe’, each understood in distinctly different senses. Having analysed its problematic aspects, the article then proposes to investigate the issue using tools borrowed from analytic philosophy. To this end, it considers the work of Richard Swinburne, a prominent analytic philosopher of religion, and his contribution to the epistemic analysis of rational belief.
Contribution: Subsequently, Swinburne’s scale of rational justification for belief is applied to the three episodes described in the chapter under examination, aiming to provide a coherent interpretation.