In a chapter written in 1995, 'Water and Blood: Birthing Images in John's Gospel', Words Remembered, Texts Renewed.Essays in Honour of John F.A. Sawyer, J. Davies, G. Harvey and W. Watson (eds), Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, pp.300-309. Sawyer began to explore the imagery of water and blood in the Johannine account of the crucifixion. She looked particularly at the patristic and medieval traditions of interpreting the scene in terms of an image of the birth of the new Christian community.She was approached by Amy-Jill Levine, who at the time was editing the Feminist Companion Series, and asked to re-visit this piece of research. Levine had a number of questions about it, and through conversation with her Sawyer revised both the content and the conclusion, particularly in the light of further analysis of texts from the Pauline epistles and Philo of Alexandria's ideas on Genesis. Further analysis of the text in this context, first century diaspora Judaism, allowed her to conclude that creation imagery, rather than birthing, appeared to be a much more convincing way of interpeting this Johannine scene. RAE_import_type : Chapter in book RAE_uoa_type : Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies