Paleojudaica led me to Harry Maier's review of some antiTrump boomer. The two dispute the Samaritan woman account in John 4.
There exists (now) a feminist reading of the anecdote inasmuch as many commentaries assume that the woman was a sinner, which John himself... didn't. Further vide Davidson (pdf). I'll disclose that I concede the point to the feminists. I'll further defend my sex and raise Chaucer as a fellow man who also didn't read this character as a sinner; the Widow Of Bath had run through her own five husbands. With the admission that too-few male exegetes in my language have brought Chaucer to the story. Either-way my post here is not focused on that hermeneutic. Nor on the boomer's general political stance.
Maier suggests that the account is a post-resurrection account in origin. That intrigues me, for this post's focus.
It is Mark, not John, who has taken the hit in classical Tradition for misplacing events in the Gospel narrative. In our context, the Transfiguration is usually considered a Christophany misplaced. Recall that Mark doesn't do postResurrection in what we have (the Catholics' "Longer Ending" probably comes from some harmony or homily elsewhere). But if one evangelist could shuffle events, why not others, since we have at least four of these books, plus an apostolic tradition. Indeed Matthew and Luke don't dispute Mark's placement of the Transfiguration.
John doesn't have the Transfiguration. John's got straight-up postResurrection accounts. Also I cannot find where Meier argues for John 4 as a reshuffle. So I must speculate. What would lead Meier to think it is?
Jesus, here at Sychar by Gerizim, is doing his usual Johannine thing of babbling streams of theology, as the other canon Gospels (and Tradition) wouldn't. That's more the habit of "gnostic" books like the Apocryphon of James. The preachings are done and now is time for the teachings; the SCIENCE, we'd say. Said gnosis is secret, divulged to apostles like Paul in visions. John's revolution was to backdate his own lore into Jesus' mouth before the Cross - at least implicitly.
Now: John isn't all backdated gnosticism. The Cross itself came in real time, that of Pilate. And John offers miracles in parallel with the Synoptics also difficult to claim as postResurrection.
Against that: in John 4's case Christ's miracle isn't upon this physical world. For instance Jesus isn't bringing any of this woman's husbands back; surely she must have retained affection for at least one of them, like the Bath widow did. As to Sychar's landscape its well isn't dry as (say) Luke 4:25 was noting of the days of Elijah. John 4 offers a story like Emmaus where someone shows up and eventually the audience realises they're talking to Christ. Christ's presence is the miracle. It is just that then immanu-mashiach, as it were; which means at Sychar unlike Emmaus it's not so miraculous.
StackExchange, basically nerd Reddit, brings Matthew 10:5-7. Matthew's Christ had told his disciples to avoid the Samaria. In John 4, Jerusalem is about to lose its primacy even for Jews (v. 21). The Cross would be a drastic marker of Jerusalem's abandoned status. Perhaps John's pool of tradition postdates Matthew's. That might suggest a Samaritan composer bringing the Gospel, at last, to her own people; Christ has lifted the embargo, and by this story He has done it in person. All this, John will chuck into his Tardis. I guess?
John 4:31 "meanwhile" - that is, as a sidenote - has the disciples note that the Master isn't eating. The concern with whether the Lord eats is that of the Docetism controversy, such as Ignatius confronts - which trends postResurrection. However vv. 31-8 doesn't need to belong to this particular anecdote, which concerns water and not food (nor wine!). If we're shuffling one story, we can hardly resist shuffles of pericopae within the story. It remains suggestive that John, at least, associated these two anecdotes.
I suppose my readers will just have to ask Maier.
