The Fourth Gospel According to an Analysis of Narrative Time

Abstract

Time is one of the fundamental categories of all narration.
If by an absurdity we imagined that the evangelical representation had been plastic - an oil painting, for example - it would not cease to be a description of an action; but it would not have a proper time, since plastic art is characterized by simultaneity and multidimensionality. Instead, a story - chosen by the authors of the gospels - uses verbal articulation to represent actions, necessarily arranged in linearity: one action is counted after another, with one phrase after another. In other words, this linearity necessary for the representation of actions makes time an essential dimension in a narrative. Not in vain has it been indicated that the narration was nothing other than a "represented temporality", that is, an ordering of events in a temporal sequence. As P. Ricoeur argued, time is in some way the referent of the story, while its function is to articulate time to give it the form of a human experience. Narrativity determines, articulates and clarifies the temporal perception of events. We propose in this study to review the bibliography on the analysis of the narrative time of the fourth gospel, and offer a possible analysis to have an important element to understand the inner workings of the complete narration of this gospel as a whole.