Once upon a kingdom.

People tell stories because they believe that truths underlie the drama. Stage personas, while imagined, are nonetheless representations of real life, even as words are sound symbols for experienced realities. The story- teller experiences a reality and sets its dynamics into the elements of a story, then shapes the telling to the context.

How does a story teller imagine a power greater than the greatest power known to humans? King George II was said to have stood in respect to the singing of "King of kings, and Lord of lords" in Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. The symbolic gesture of the king's rising acknowledges the truth of the story, that human kingship is not ultimate, despite everyday experience.

The underlying truth implicit in any story becomes the object of its telling even though clouded in a veil of artifice. Story tellers communicate encoded messages, decipherable only by tradents and interpreters who can render them meaningful for their intended audiences.

In Rethinking John's Social Setting: Hidden Transcript, Anti-language and the Negotiation of the Empire, David Reed challenges the theory that John's Gospel responds to the ordeal of reciting the birkat ha-minim, a kind of litmus test that separated followers of Jesus from orthodox Judeans. The Gospel is a story that corresponds to a real life situation obscured from present-day readers by the fog of remoteness. Reed proposes and argues for an alternate scenario in which claims to Jesus' kingship stand as an alternative regime to Caesar's. The followers of Jesus would bring down the wrath of a jealous Rome upon the entire synagogue community that sheltered such traitors to the imperial hegemony. This important article helps readers today to better understand the relative roles of the Judean elite and the Roman authorities in the death of Jesus.

Jerome H. Neyrey deftly decodes the language of worship in Worship in the Fourth Gospel: A Cultural Interpretation of John 14-17. Neyrey argues that a contextual understanding of worship in John is essential for interpreting the Gospel's text. Part 1 of the article (Part 2 will appear in BTB 36:4) examines the transmission of the Jesus tradition through models for speaking and listening to God. Neyrey provides masterful insights into the working of the Gospel of John within the context of communication media of its day.

In Performance Criticism: An Emerging Methodology in Second Testament Studies, David Rhoads helps present-day biblical readers realize that today's written texts are a latter-day artificial cover for a more dynamic performance tradition. Stories are meant for performance, adapted to the setting of their delivery. Thus, the communal audience, the physical location, and socio-historical circumstance all shape the story-teller's communication. Rhoads proposes a critical method for examining these key features of the performance art and its dynamic mode for communicating the meanings of their author.

Taken together, these articles share the task of delving into the biblical message by examining the medium of the transmission. Since readers today place so much weight upon the message, what better way to let the story reflect the tellers' living reality.