83 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN process to either book. The reality is far more nuanced. If anything, it is Deuteronomy that explicitly stands as supplement and commentary on the preceding books, but not as their replacement. Indeed, tensions remain, e.g., as regards the rationale for the Sabbath (Exod 20,11 vs. Deut 5,15) and the reason for Moses’ inability to enter the Promised Land (Num 20,12 vs. Deut 1,37; 3,26; 4,21), but they remain unresolved and without warrant for supersession on the part of the final volume. Similarly, as noted above, the distinctiveness of John vis-à-vis the Synoptics has been obvious since the early church, as have the tensions between (and among) them. Yet far from leading either to an amalgam (à la the Diatessaron) or to a “canon within the canon”, the church produced the “fourfold Gospel”, as we have already observed 35. Otherwise put, even if one would extend Childs’s descriptor “hermeneutical key” to John as well as Deuteronomy, “key” does not mean “trump card”. In fact, the foregoing study leads us to a more modest proposal. What Deuteronomy and John share above all else, canonically speaking, is a Janus-like bidirectionality (if one may be excused a “pagan” simile in these circumstances): both are deeply concerned to relate the events of the past and their core meanings especially for the sake of future iterations of their faith communities. As to the past, we noted above the stress on the significance of remembrance of the past events that are related in the two books, not to the exclusion of what is told in the preceding works, but with special stress on the adequacy and completeness of what is related in these 35 D.M. SMITH, “Toward a Canonical Reading of the Fourth Gospel: Ca- nonical Readings from Clement of Alexandria through Abraham Lincoln to Rudolf Bultmann and C.H. Dodd”, The Fourth Gospel in Four Dimensions. Judaism and Jesus, the Gospels and Scripture (Columbia, SC 2008) 210-219, esp. 218; repr. from What is John? Readers and Readings of the Fourth Gos- pel (ed. F.F. SEGOVIA) (Atlanta, GA 1996) 169-182, argues cogently that it would be preferable for a canonical reading of the Gospels to be bi-directio- nal, viz., reading John in light of the Synoptics, as well as vice versa (see also his “Four Gospels and the Canonical Approach to Exegesis: Should Their Being Together in the New Testament Make a Difference in Their Interpre- tation?”, The Fourth Gospel, 194-209). At the same time, to be sure, Smith concedes that the balance is at least strongly tilted toward John as the inter- pretive lens in the historic practice of the community of faith that reads these books as Scripture.