The Fourth Gospel asserts that Jesus is king and Messiah and underscores the royal status of Jesus especially in the passion narrative. There is a recent tendency in Johannine scholarship to divorce Jesus' kingship from his messiahship, on account of the dearth of explicit Davidic references in this Gospel. Against the currents of this scholarly tendency, the present study holds together the notions of Jesus' kingship and messiahship in a scrutiny of the literary-theological contribution of Jesus' death to the Johannine assertion that the crucified Jesus is Israel's Messiah-King. In probing the complex interplay of Jesus' messianic kingship and his death (the kingship-cross interplay), this study seeks to gain insights into the significance and function of the cross in the Johannine construction of a crucified Messiah-King. While there is much literature on the individual topic of Jesus' death or (messianic) kingship, discussion of the interrelation of these two motifs is largely limited to the materials in the trial and crucifixion accounts. This dissertation expands the scope of investigation in order to comprehensively scrutinize the entailments of the kingship-cross link in the entire Fourth Gospel. Textual examination concentrates on these Gospel passages that contain a kingship-cross interaction—the Nathanael account in 1:43–51, the temple account in 2:13–22, the Nicodemus account in 3:1–21, the shepherd discourse in 10:1–21, the account of Jesus' entry in Jerusalem in 12:12–19, and the passion narrative in 18:28–42.

While analyzing the cross motif's interplay with the royal-messianic themes in these passages, the present study pays close attention to the biblical backgrounds of these themes and the extra-biblical Jewish traditions that hold potential to illuminating the royal-messianic subject under scrutiny. This study argues that the Johannine articulation of Jesus' death constitutes a corroboration to authenticate the royal-messianic identity of the crucified Jesus. More specifically, this articulation validates the crucified Jesus' royal messiahship by correlating the ramifications of Jesus' death with certain Jewish royal-messianic expectations and by identifying him as the kingly Messiah promised in the Scripture.