02/01/2022 – Intro. to Gospel of John – Halley’s BIble Handbook / Barclay Bible Series // Our February study
Let’s get started with an introduction of the Gospel of John to give us some perspective. First, I am going to try to watch the 2003 epic film: “Gospel of John”, directed by Phillip Saville and joint produced by Garth Drabinsky and Chris Chrisafis. It should be available free on you tube. This motion picture is a word-for-word adaptation of the American Bible Society’s Good News Bible. The narrator as I recall is Christopher Plummer, of Sound of Music fame, who covers all the Biblical text not spoken by Jesus or another character.
I am using two of my longtime Biblical commentary sources that will be designated under quotes by:
(*A): Halley’s Bible Handbook – 23rd edition dated 1962 / 24th edition – 1965, original copyright in 1927.
(*B): William Barclay’s “The Gospel of John – Volume 1 – Revised Edition” – Revised Edition 1975 / (First Edition – 1955) Funny note – I still remember all the color coded books that took up one entire shelf in our entry way. The Gospels are in blue.
So, let’s get started!:
The Gospel That is Different
“Very often on stained glass window and the like the gospel writers are represented in symbol by the figures of the four beasts whom the write of the Revelation saw around the throne (Revelation 4:7). The emblems are variously distributed among the gospel writers , but a common allocation is that the man stands for Mark, which is the plainest, the most straightforward and the most human of the gospels; the lion stands for Mattthew, for he specially saw Jesus as the Messiah and the Lion of the tribe of Judah; the ox stands for Luke, because it is the animal of service and sacrifice, and Luke saw Jesus as the great servant of men and the universal sacrifice for all mankind; the eagle stand for John , because it alone of all living creatures can look straight into the sun and not be dazzled, and John has the most penetrating gaze of all the New Testament writers into the eternal mysteries and the eternal truths and the very mind of God. Many people find themselves closer to God and to Jesus Christ in John than in any other book in the world.” (*B – pg. 1)
- “But we have only to read the Fourth Gospel in the most cursory way to see that it is quite different from the other three. It omits so many things that they include. The Fourth Gospel has no account of the Birth of Jesu, of his baptism, of his temptations; it tells us nothing of the Last Supper, nothing of Gethsemane, and nothing of the Ascension. It has no word of the healing of any people possessed by devils and evil spirits,. And perhaps most surprising of all, it has none of the parable stories Jesus told which are so priceless a part of the other three gospels. In these other three gospels Jesus speaks either in these wonderful stories or in short, epigrammatic, vivid sentences which stick in the memory. But in the Fourth Gospel the speeches of Jesus are often a whole chapter long; and are often involved, argumentative pronouncements quite unlike the pithy, unforgettable sayings of the other three.” (*B – pgs 1 -2)
- “The date of his Gospel is usually assigned to about A.D. 90.” (*A – pg 528) The other three gospels have been in the hands of the early Christian community for quite some time at this point, including John. So at least in some respects John is filling in gaps so to speak. “The Gospel according to John contains the first acts of Christ, while the others give an account of the latter part of his life. (Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History 5:24″ – about A.D. 300.)” (*B)
- Note – Barclay dates this gospel around A.D. 100, written in Ephesus.
- Barclay notes that if the Greek picked up the Gospel according to St. Matthew, from the start he was presented a genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Abraham. “As E.J. Goospeed phrased it: ‘Was there no way which we might be introduced directly to the values of Christian salvation without being for ever routed, we might even say, detoured, through Judaism?’ … John faced the problem fairly and squarely. … The Greeks had two great conceptions. (a) They had the conception of the Logos. In Greek, logos means two things – it means word and it means reason. The Jew was entirely familiar with the all-powerful word of God. God said, ‘Let there be light; and there was light.’ (Genesis 1:3) The Greek was entirely familiar with the thought of reason. He looked at the world; he saw a magnificent and dependable order. Night and day came with unfailing regularity; the year kept its seasons in unvarying course; the stars and the planets moved in their unaltering path; nature had her unvarying laws. What produced the order? The Greek answered unhesitantly, order of the world. He went on, What is it that gives man power to think, to reason and to know? Again he answered unhesitantly, The Logos, the mind of God, dwelling within a man makes him a thinking rational being. John seized on this. It was in this way that he thought of Jesus. He said to the Greeks, ‘All your lives you have been fascinated by the great guiding , controlling mind of God. The mind of god has come to earth in the man of Jesus. Look at him and you see what the mind and though of God are like.’ (b) They had the conception of two worlds… To the Greek the unseen world was the real one; the seen world was only shadowy unreality. (see Plato: doctrine of forms and ideas)” (*B)
- “In the Fourth Gospel (John) we miss the note of compassion which is in the miracle stories of the others… Often the miracles of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are accompanied by a long discourse… To John a miracles was never an isolated act; it was alwasy a window into the reality of what Jesus always was and alwasy is and always did and always does.” (*B)
- Further study – Barclay covers how the Gospel of John puts to rest the heresies that had already reared its ugly head in the early church. (see pg. 11 – 14)
- Here is a funny story about John told by Cassian: “One day he was found playing with a tame partridge. A narrower and more rigid brother rebuked him for thus wasting his time, and John answered: ‘The bow that is always bent will soon cease to shoot straight.’ ” (*B – pg 18)
- “We might say that John lit Mark’s pages by the lantern of a lifetime’s meditation. Wordsworth defined poetry as ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’. That is a perfect description of the Four Gospel. That is why John is unquestionably the greatest of all the gospels. It’s aim is, not to give us what Jesus said like a newspaper report, but to us what Jesus meant. In it the Risen Christ still speaks. John is not so much The Gospel according to St. John; it is rather The Gospel according to the Holy Spirit. It was not John of Ephesus who wrote the Fourth Gospel; it was the Holy Spirit who wrote it through John.” (*B – pgs 22-23) // (Jimmy insert: I would submit this is true not only of the other Gospels, but the entirety of the Bible, the infallible word of God.)
About John:
- His father’s name was Zebedee (Matthew 4:21) His mother’s name seems to be Salome. (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40), who by comparing John 19:25, seems to have been a sister of Mary the Mother of Jesus. If so, John was a cousin of Jesus, and being about the same age, much have know him from childhood. John was a business man of some means. He was one of five partners in a fishing business that employed ‘hired servants (Mark 1: 16-20). Besides his fishing business in Capernaum, he had a house in Jerusalem (John 19:27), and was a personal acquitance of the high-priest. (John 18: 15,16). He was a disciple of John the Baptist (John 1:35, 40). If he was a cousin of Jesus, as seems implied in passages above cited, then he was kin to John the Baptist (Luke 1:36), and must have know of the Angelic announcements about John and Jesus. (Luke 1:17, 32). So, when John the Baptist appeared , crying out that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, John the son of Zebedee was ready to take his stand with him… He was one of three inner circle disciples. And was recognized as the one closest to Jesus. Five times he is spoken of as the disciple ‘Whom Jesus Loved’ (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21;7, 20).” (*A – pgs 527 – 528)” (Jimmy insert: Note: All of these within the Book of John I might add. haha)
- I didn’t see mention of it from either source, but James, the Apostle, was John’s brother and a fellow son of Zebedee. (noting there were two apostles with the name of James)
From here, with prayer, we will immerse ourselves and be further transformed in His image on our sanctification journey to His glory!
Soli Deo Gloria!