Galilean crowd and the Pharisees seek to initiate in 3:4, 6:30f, and 7:52, 8:13, 9:28f respectively.33 It was a style of argumentation typical of the rabbinic schools of the first century, in which a point of interpretation or religious practice would form a centre of debate between master and pupils. Martyn suggests that there is an ambivalent attitude to such “midrashic discussion” in John: on the one hand there are clear examples of it, as Borgen has shown, but on the other the whole atmosphere