50 MAARTEN J.J. MENKEN 4. John 16,32 At the end of his farewell discourse, the Johannine Jesus says to his disciples: “The hour is coming, and it has come, that you will be scattered (skorpisuhte), each one to his home, and you ˜ will leave me alone” (John 16,32). To my mind, we have here an allusion to Zech 13,7. It is true that the allusion is not very close to the biblical text; it is in any case closer to the Hebrew text than to the LXX, where “to be scattered” is missing. However, John’s wording resembles the marked quotation from Zech 13,7 in Mark 14,27 par., where we find diaskorpisuhsontai, “they [the sheep] ¥ will be scattered”. It is also relevant that the synoptic quotation and the Johannine allusion occur at approximately the same point in the gospel narrative and have the same function: to show that the near defection of the disciples had been foreseen in Scripture. Moreover, the word skorpisuhte creates within John’s Gospel an ˜ intratextual relationship with the shepherd discourse in John 10. The Johannine Jesus says there that the wolf “scatters” (skorpı- ¥ zei) the sheep in the absence of “the good shepherd” who “lays down his life for the sheep” (10,12, cf. v. 11). Through the intratex- tual relation the shepherd (Jesus) and the sheep (the disciples) of Zech 13,7 are indirectly present in John 16,32. So there are in John 16,32 “markers”, signs referring the reader or listener to another text 34 ; in this case, the other text is not so much Zechariah itself as the pre-Johannine Christian use of Zech 13,7 in the context of Jesus’ passion. Because Zech 13,7 is part of a prophecy that concerns the time of the end, the allusion helps to interpret Jesus’ death as an antici- pation of the eschaton. This aspect, implicitly present in Mark and Matthew, is made explicit in John by means of the words “the hour is coming, and it has come”, that introduce the allusion. That — as Mark and Matthew suggest — God strikes Jesus, is absent from John. The Johannine Jesus says, on the contrary: “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me” (16,32; cf. 8,16.29), and he is in complete control of the events (see 18,4-9; 19,11.28-30) 35. See Z. BEN-PORAT, “The Poetics of Literary Allusion”, PTL: A Journal 34 for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1 (1976) 105-128. See further A.T. HANSON, The Prophetic Gospel. A Study of John and 35 the Old Testament (Edinburgh 1991) 196-197; HÜBENTHAL, Transformation und Aktualisierung, 225-230, 237-240; A.J. KÖSTENBERGER, “John”, Com-