03/06/2023 – The Gospel of John – Introduction – Compare and Contrast the Gospel of John vs. the other synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke
This post may very well be ongoing until our 1st reading, Chapter One on March 17th. If I note: “In progress – more to come” at the end, you can expect more until I remove it. For this Introduction post into the Book, I may not go beyond my use of William Barclay’s “The Gospel of John – Volume 1” (ISBN reference # 0-664-24104-2).
Let’s get started with an excerpt on page #1, “The Gospel of the Eagle’s Eye”:
“For many Christian people in the Gospel according to St. John is the most precious book in the New Testament. It is the book on which above all they feed their minds and nourish their hearts, and in which they rest their souls. Very often stained glass windows and the like the gospel writers are represented in symbol by the figures of the four beasts whom the write of 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 Matthew, 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 stands 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.”
Now, from page #20, I will share excerpts from: “The Production of the Church”:
“In our search for the truth we begin by noting one of the outstanding and unique features of the Fourth Gospel. The most remarkable thing about it is the long speeches of Jesus. Often they are whole chapters long, and are entirely unlike the way in which Jesus is portrayed as speaking in the other three gospels. The Fourth Gospel, as we have seen, was written about the year A.D. 100, that is, about seventy years after the crucifixion. It is possible after these seventy years to look on these speeches as word for word reports of what Jesus said? Or can we explain them in some way that is perhaps even greater than that? We must begin by holding in our minds the fact of the speeches and the question which they inevitably raise.
And we have something to add to that. It so happens that in the writings of the early church we have a whole series of accounts of the way in which the Fourth Gospel came to be written. The earliest is that of Irenaeus who was bishop of Lyons about A.D. 177; and Irenaeus was himself a bishop of Lyons about A.D. 177; and Irenaeus who was bishop of Lyons about A.D. 177; and Irenaeus was himself a pupil of Polycarp, who in turn had actually been a pupil of John. There is therefore a direct link between Irenaeus and John. Irenaeus writes:
‘John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leant upon his breast, himself also published the gospel in Ephesus, when he was living in Asia.’
The suggestive thing there is that Irenaeus does not merely say that John wrote the gospel; he says that John published (exekoke) it in Ephesus. The word that Irenaeus uses makes it sound, not like the private publication of some personal memoir, but like the public issue of some almost official document.
The next account is that of Clement, who was head of the great school of Alexandria about A.D. 230. He writes:
‘Last of all, John perceiving that the bodily facts had been made plain in the gospel, being urged by his friends, composed a spiritual gospel.’
… On the same lines, a tenth century manuscript called the Codex Toltanus, which prefaces the New Testament books with short descriptions prefaces the Fourth Gospel thus: ‘The apostle John, whom the Lord Jesus loved most, last of all wrote this gospel, at the request of the bishops of Asia, against Corinth’s and other heretics.’
Again we have the idea that behind the Fourth Gospel there is the authority of a group and of a church.
We now turn to a very important document, known as the Moratoria Canon. It is so called after a scholar Muratori who discovered it. It is so called after a scholar Muratori who discovered it. It is the first list of New Testament books which the church ever issued and was compiled in Rome about A.D. 170. Not only does it list the New Testament books, it also gives short accounts of the origin and nature and contents of each of them. Its account of the way in which Fourth Gospel came to written is extremely important and illuminating.
‘At the request of his fellow-disciples and of his bishops, John, one of the disciples said: ‘Fast with me for three days from this time and whatsoever shall be revealed to each of us, whether it be favorable to my writing or not, let us relate to one another.’ On the same night it was revealed to Andrew that John should relate all things, aided by the revision of all.’
We cannot accept all that statement, because it is not possible that Andrew, the apostle, was in Ephesus in A.D. 100; but the point is that it is stated as clearly as possible that, while the authority and the mind and the memory behind the Fourth Gospel are that of John , it is clearly and definitely the product of one man, but of a group and a community.
In other words this group was not only writing down what Jesus said; that would have been a mere feat of memory. They were writing down what Jesus meant; that was the guidance of the Holy Spirit. John had thought about every word that Jesus had said; and he had thought under the guidance of the Holy Spirit who was so real to him. W.M. Macgregor has a sermon entitled: “What Jesus becomes to a man who has known him long.’ That is a perfect description of Jesus of the Fourth Gospel. A. H. N. Green Armytage puts the thing perfectly in his book John who saw. Mark, he says, suits the missionary with his clear-cut account of the facts of Jesus’ life; Matthew suits the teacher with his sympathetic account of the teaching of Jesus; Luke suits the parish minister or priest with his wide sympathy and his picture of Jesus as the friend of all; but John is the gospel of the contemplative.
… Behind this gospel is the whole church at Ephesus, the whole company of the saints, the last of the apostles, the Holy Spirit the Risen Christ himself.”
Given that John wrote as much as 50 years or so before the other gospels, what changing circumstances can we draw: 50 A.D. vs. 100 A.D. Here is more excerpts starting with: “The Circumstances in Which John Wrote” on page #6:
“… By that time two special features had emerged in the situation of the Christian church. First , Christianity had gone out into the Gentile world. By that time, the Christian church was no longer predominately jewish; it was in fact overwhelming gentile. The vast majority of its members now came, not from a Jewish, but an Hellenistic background. That being so, Christianity had to be restated. it was not the truth of Christianity had changed; but the terms and the categories in which it found expression had to be changed…”
(elaboration example: A Greek delves into St. Matthews Gospel, in which he is up front faced with a long Jewish genealogy. How does he or she relate?…)
Look at how the Gospel of John brought the two together in one presentation, without deviating from His Truth, the infallible Word of God. I pick up my excerpts from the bottom of page #7:
“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 this world; he saw a magnificent and dependable order… What produced this order? The Greek answered unhesitantly, The Logos, the mind of God, is responsible for the majestic 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 though of Jesus. He said to the Greeks, ‘All your lives you have been fascinated by this great, guiding, controlling mind of God. The mind of God has come to earth in the man Jesus. Look at him and you see what the mind and thought of God are like.’ John had discovered a new category in which Jesus was presented as nothing less than God acting in the form of a man.”
(Jimmy insert – Note how this is a natural stumbling block for the Jew. Recall the Old Testament scripture where Moses had to look through the cleft of the rock as God passed by, for if you saw the face of God, you would immediately die, as in vaporized. So, think how difficult it is then to crossover to an Incarnate God, God and man, two natures in one human body.)
(b). They had the conception of two worlds. The Greek always conceived of two worlds. The one was the world in which we live. It was a wonderful world in its way but a world of shadows and copies and unrealities. The other was the real world, in which the great realities, of which our earthly things are only poor, pale copies, stand for ever. To the Greek the unseen world was the real one; the seen world was only a shadowy unreality.
Plato systematized this way of thinking in his doctrine of forms or ideas. He held that in the unseen world there was the perfect pattern of everything, and the things of this world were shadowy copies of these eternal patterns. To put it simply, Plato held that somewhere there was a perfect pattern of a table of which all earthly tables are inadequate copies; somewhere there was the perfect pattern of the good and the beautiful of which all earthly goodness and earthly beauty are imperfect copies. And the great reality, the supreme idea, the pattern of all patterns and the form of all forms was God. The great problem was how to get into this world of reality, how to get out of our shadows into the eternal truths.
John declares that that is what Jesus enables us to do. He is reality come to earth. The Greek word for real in this sense is alethinos; it is very closely connected with the word alethes, which means our, and Althea, which means the truth. The Authorized and Revised Standard Versions translate althinos true; they would be far better to translate it real. Jesus is the real light (1:9); Jesus is the real bread (6:32); Jesus is the real vine (15:1); to Jesus belongs the real judgment (8:16). Jesus alone has reality in our world of shadows and imperfections.”
From pg 10 – “… To John the miracles were not simply single events in time; they were insights into what God is always doing and what Jesus always is; they were windows into the reality of God… The Christianity which had once been clothed in Jewish categories had taken to itself the greatness of the thought of Greeks.”
We should remember that the Apostle Paul was the most prolific world traveling evangelist to the Greeks, preceding the completion of the Gospel of John by 30+ years. Paul, a Pharisee was taught by Gamaliel, a rabbi and a member of the Sanhedrin, but also one of the most renowned teachers in the ancient world. So, I would submit that Paul was perhaps the first leader in the Christian church that was familiar with Greek Philosophy. Acts 17 tells of his preaching in Athens synagogues to Jews and God-fearing Greeks.
It is not about the messenger but who was John, the son of Zebedee. I pick it up in Barclay’s commentary on the bottom of page 15:
“He was the younger son of Zebedee, who possessed a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee and was well enough off to be able to employ hired servants to help him with his work (Mark 1:19,20). His mother was Salome, and it seems likely that she was the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus (Matthew 27:56; Mark 16: 1). With his brother James he obeyed the call of Jesus (Mark 1:20). It would seem that James and John were in partnership with Peter in the fishing trade (Luke 5: 8-10). He was one of the inner circle of the disciples, for the lists of the disciples always begin with the names of Peter, James and John, and there were certain great occasions when Jesus took these three specially with him (Mark 3:17; 5:37; 9:2; 14:33).
In character he was clearly a turbulent and ambitious man. Jesus gave to him and to his brother the name Boanerges,which the gospel writers take to mean Sons of Thunder. John and his brother James were completely exclusive and intolerant (Mark 9:38; Luke 9:49). So violent was their temper that they were prepared to blast a Samaritan village out of existence because it would not give them hospitality when they were on their journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:54). Either they or their mother Salome had the ambition that when Jesus came into his kingdom, they might be his principal ministers of state (Mark 10:35; Matthew 20:20). In the other three gospels John appears as a leader of the apostolic band, one of the inner circle, and yet a turbulent ambitious and intolerant character… John was a strange mixture. He was one of the leaders of the Twelve; he was one of the inner circle Jesus’ closest friends; at the same time he was a man of temper and ambition and intolerance, and yet of courage.”
The Humanity of Jesus
starting on pg. 14:
“The fact John is out to correct both these Gnostic tendencies explains a paradoxical double emphasis in this gospel. On the the other hand, there is no gospel which so uncompromisingly stresses the real humanity of Jesus. Jesus was angry with those who bought and sold in the Temple courts (2:15); he was physically tired as he sat by the well which was near Sychar in Samaria (4:6); his disciples offered him food in the way in which they would offer it to any hungry man (4:31); he had sympathy with those who were hungry and with those who were afraid (6; 5,20); he knew grief and wept tears as any mourner might do (11:33, 35, 38); in the agony of the Fourth Gospel shows us a Jesus who was no shadowy, docetic figure; it shows us one who knew the weariness of an exhausted body and the wounds of a distressed mind and heart. It is the truly human Jesus whom the Fourth Gospel sets before us. “
The Deity of Jesus
“On the other hand, there is no gospel which sets before us such a view of the deity of Jesus.
(a) John stresses the pre-existence of Jesus. ‘Before Abraham was,’ said Jesus, ‘I am’ (8:58). He talks of the glory which he had with the Father before the world was made (17:5). Again and again he speaks of his coming down from heaven (6: 33-38). John saw in Jesus one who had always been, even before the world began.
(b). The Fourth Gospel stresses more than any of the others the omniscience Jesus. It is John’s view that apparently miraculously Jesus knew the past record of the woman of Samaria (4: 16, 17); apparently without anyone telling him he knew how long the man beside the healing pool had been ill (5:6); before he asked it, he knew the answer to the question he put to Philip (6:6)j; he knew that Judas would betray him (6: 61-64); he knew of the death of Lazarus before anyone told him of it (121:14). John saw in Jesus one who had a special and miraculous knowledge independent of anything which any man might tell him. He needed to ask no questions because he knew all the answers.
(c) The Fourth Gospel stresses the fact, as John saw it, that Jesus always acted entirely on his own initiative and uninfluenced by anyone else. It was not his own initiative and uninfluenced by anyone else. It was not his mother’s request which moved him to the miracle at Cana of Galilee; it was his own personal decision (2:4); the urging of his brothers had nothing to do with the visit he paid to Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles (7:10); no man took his life from him – no man could; he laid it down purely voluntarily (10:18; 19:11). As John saw it, Jesus had a divine independence from all human influence. He was self-determined.
To meet the Gnostics and their strange beliefs John presents us with a Jesus who was undeniably human and who yet was undeniably divine.”
In progress – more to come (last update: 03/07/2023)…
Soli Deo Gloria