Clough John Lesson 1

Introduction to the Gospels

Tonight we are beginning a study on one of the Gospels. We’ve been a long time getting here because we built over the years, hopefully, a background in the Old Testament sufficient so that you can now appreciate reading these Gospels. Those of you who have been here for some time understand that I have no respect for what I call the New Testament Christians, people who go around with their little pocket Testaments and that’s all. A pocket Testament is all right, it’s just that it’s a very slim diet if that’s all you read. The Holy Spirit made sure that two out of every three books He preserved were out of the Old Testament, and He did this for a reason, that when we come to these books there’ll be no mistake about what we’re reading. We can’t race through them hurriedly and when we do read them we’ll read them with insight and understanding.

The Gospel of John, personally, was one of the books that I, after becoming a Christian, acquainted me with the problems of the Old Testament because I was determined that I was going to study this book for myself; I took three years, from about 1962-64 to work on this book, verse by verse, while I was in the service, and I spent some of my time studying enough Greek so I could master at least the elements of the book, and then having gone through the book that time very thoroughly and going through it again several times since, this book is one that I feel pretty confident in teaching and one that I hope will be as great a blessing for you as it has been for me in my personal spiritual life.

I’d like to introduce John with remarks about the Gospels in general and John in particular and we probably will get into the first verse. The Gospels are, at least the ones in the canon, are four but we must remember that there’s no such thing as “Gospels.” There is only one gospel and it’s singular. Nowhere in the Bible do you read about gospels, there’s only one, and it’s always a singular noun, everywhere it occurs. The Gospels are views of the gospel. In the King James the title is The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke or Saint John; it’s always “the gospel,” and it’s always one man’s view of the gospel, inspired by the Holy Spirit, inerrant, absolutely authoritative yes, but viewed from one person’s perspective. And so the Gospel of John, obviously is one man’s view of Jesus Christ’s life. The word “gospel” means good news, the good news of Christ.

But we are so prone in the 20^th century of just casually opening the Bible and we see The Gospel of Saint John, we always think that this gospel existed. To most of us it would seem strange if we were believers and we didn’t have the Gospels in front of us. I want to dispel that misconception right away. There have been hundreds and thousands of believers who have lived their lives and have died without ever having once seen the printed page. There have been believers down through history who have been illiterate and therefore could not read; there have been believers who grew up under times and places in church history when it was forbidden for the individual to read the Word of God for himself because the doctrine of the individual priesthood of the believer had not yet been appreciated. There are believers today in this world who lack the Word of God and this is why the Wycliffe Translators are busy trying to put the Word of God into the language of the tribes. They are the only major agency in the world today who are putting the Word of God into the languages of these small groups of people. So always believers have not had the Word, but there are a particular class of believers that we want to examine for a moment, the believers who existed in the Church before the Gospels were written.

Can you imagine what life would have been like before the New Testament was written? And not only did these believers seem never to be affected by the lack of the written page, it seems that that generation of believers in contrast to this generation of believers were fantastically well educated. It was that generation of believers who never had the written Gospels who knew the Old Testament cold. It was that generation of believers who didn’t have the Gospel of John to whom the epistle of Hebrews was written to, and we’ve just studied the few words of the author of Hebrews, taking two or three years to do it because this man who gave the sermon of the epistle to the Hebrews in approximately an hour covered so intense it has taken us approximately 150 hours to explain and to teach. Such an audience, such a congregation who would have retained that sixty minute, a sermon so concentrated it takes us in the 20^th century 150 times as long to understand and then probably not as well as they understood it. Those people are not to be sneered at and laughed at. They had something going for them. What was it? And what did they have going for them that didn’t bother them in the least that they didn’t have the New Testament written.

In fact the Gospels were the last part of the New Testament written except the book of Revelation. All four Gospels were written very late. Romans was written before, Hebrews was written before, Corinthians was written before, all the epistles that you’re so familiar with were written decades before the Gospels were ever even outlined. Why is this? Why is it that the early believers never felt any need for a written Gospel? There are three basic reasons.

First, the early believer had a preference for oral tradition, not written tradition. Obviously if you could talk to someone who had talked to Jesus, wouldn’t you a lot rather talk to that person than read his writing? Of course. It’s not hard to understand. Irenaeus, the Bishop in Phrygia, who may have studied under John, wrote in 150 AD a book that we have lost, but we have sections of it preserved, called The Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord. And in this he gives his own personal testimony as to why he studied the way he studied.

Irenaeus says this: “I did not suppose that things from books would aid me as much as the living and continuing voice.” I’ll read that again because this is the mental attitude of the early believers. “I did not suppose that things from books would aid me as much as the living and continuing voice,” that is the voice of the apostles. They can go ask John; imagine what it would be like if we had John. Would you rather talk to John or would you rather read his Gospel? Obviously you’d rather talk to John himself. So while the apostles were living the Gospels were not written; they were only written as the apostles got older and older and they were dying off. Then the Church said well, we’ve got to preserve this while these men are alive, there are no more apostles, with all due respect to Joseph Smith and a few other imposters, the apostles died off and the Church recognized this, and so hurriedly they put pressure on these men to write the Gospels.

So the first reason was a preference for all tradition. A second reason for the lateness of the Gospel is because they were Jews and the customary method of the teaching of the rabbis was by rote memory. A rabbi would gather a small group of students around him and he’d memorize and memorize and memorize and memorize and memorize. Remember when Arnold Fruchtenbaum was here and he said his father or his grandfather, one of the two, was a member of the Hasidim in Poland and how to pass the test his father had to memorize all of the Hebrew Old Testament so they could drive a nail through from one end of the other and he could tell where the nail intercepted the page on every page. This is the kind of memory that seems super human to us but the human mind is capable of memory. We just live in a day when we have weak memories because we have paper and we are literate, but in the ages when men are not literate and they have no paper to write, and their society is oral and it’s based on memory, the memories are indeed phenomenal. Nelson Glick in his archeological expeditions would sit around night fires with these Arab Bedouins and they’d trade stories. And Glick would sit there and he’d watch these Arabs talk and as he’d listen he was amazed that these Arabs were really telling the stories of their lives, their father’s lives and their grandfather’s lives back as far as forty generations. The Arab Bedouin today can give his family history and he can give details of each member of his family tree, and every father proudly teaches his own son the family tradition. And his son memorizes those traditions and is able to recite those traditions. So the Jewish background advocated memory teaching and we find this shows up in the Gospels themselves.

Another factor in the Jewish background is that they were very, very reluctant to open a closed canon. Remember the Old Testament had been closed for four hundred years. For them to have the audacity to reopen the canon that was so sacred would demand much courage. So the second factor of the lateness of the Gospels is the Jewish background.

A third reason for the lateness of the Gospel is the nature of the early Christian hope of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ. Since, they thought, Jesus’ return was very imminent, as you can read between the lines of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, because they thought Jesus rapture would be imminent they said why write, why leave a corpus of literature when it’s so much easier to just do it verbally, on an oral basis. We need not write, Jesus is coming tomorrow, so they thought.

So for these reasons the Gospels were not written until the apostles began to die. Now a word about the accuracy of the Gospels. Today, in most courses on religion in the classroom, higher skepticism prevails, grounded in German rationalism, this higher skepticism wants to teach all students everywhere the Gospels give you a picture of the early Church’s view of Jesus Christ; that what you read in the Gospels can’t be truly historical; what you read in the Gospels is only the Church’s developed opinion, sort of like Buddha, who as time went on was progressively deified by his followers. And so Jesus was a mere human prophet who later on was deified and thus the Gospels give us a late view of Jesus through the eyes of the Church.

But what happens, let’s have some facts that we can use to question this view that prevails today in the classrooms, on the media, and most recently in Time Magazine. There are two basic sources of the Gospels; two sources that were used by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and to some degree Paul. One source of data was the sayings of Jesus; we don’t know what this looked like, we don’t know whether it was written or oral, but we know there was a body of teaching called the sayings of Jesus that were passed down. We know this because it’s referred to in 1 Corinthians 7:10, this explains a passage which may have troubled you other places. Every once in a while we have believers who get fouled up on this passage taught by someone who obviously didn’t study too far into the background. In 1 Corinthians 7:10 we have a phrase, “And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, let not the wife depart from her husband.” Verse 12, “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord,” and people, that is amateurs who haven’t studied, are so fond of taking verses 10 and 12 and saying doesn’t this show degrees of authority? Doesn’t this say that verse 10 is Jesus’ authority and surely verse 10 is number one priority, but verse 12 is only Paul’s uninspired opinion and verse 12 doesn’t have the authority of verse 10. But such people who have not studied are unaware of the fact that this is not talking about degrees of authority, it’s talking about sources of information. Verse 10 is talking about the sayings of Jesus; Paul is saying I do not say this but the sayings of Jesus, the evidence we have from His earthly ministry says this. And then verse 12, I speak as an apostle. It does not have to do with authority, both are of equal authority but the sayings of Jesus were used.

In 1 Corinthians 11:23 we have a similar situation. “For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you,” Paul says, what is it that he received from the Lord? The teaching of communion, and so we have the sayings of Jesus. This is a title for all the data that was passed down that was not added to by added revelation through the apostles, the sayings of Jesus.

We also have, in addition to the sayings of Jesus, we have all traditions that were handed down in the Church. 2 Thessalonians 2:15 speaks of the oral traditions. These oral traditions had disappeared, though Roman Catholicism loves to prate them as the authority, equal and above the written tradition of Scripture. Paul speaks of both or oral and written tradition. He says in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught,” and then he adds, “whether by word or our epistle.” That is, whether by oral or written tradition. So during the early days of the Church you had oral tradition and you had written tradition.

Now one of the evidences that we have of the accuracy of the Gospels is the peculiar fact that the Gospels were written after the epistles, but they remain strangely ignorant of the epistles. The epistles, written say between 30 and 60 AD, the Gospels written say from 60 on through to 90 AD; now let’s pretend the liberal is right for the sake of argument. Let’s say yes, Mr. Liberal, the Gospels do give us the portrait of Jesus seen through the eyes of the early church. Let’s just grant that for the sake of discussion. If that were the case, wouldn’t you think that since the epistles do represent the mind of the early church that the Gospels would surely color the life of Jesus through the doctrines given in the epistles. Wouldn’t you think that if the Gospels were a reflection of the Church’s idea of Jesus, the Gospels would emphasize His deity a lot more clearly than they do?

Wouldn’t you think that the Gospels, if they were written afterward and are just the picture of what the Church thought about Jesus, that the Gospels would emphasize the fact that gospel is for all men, like the epistles do. But what do we read in the Gospels? Do we read that Jesus preached to all men everywhere? No, we read strange passages where Jesus said I have come not to the Gentiles but only to the Jews, the Gentiles reap the crumbs off the Jews table. Passages that are very, very strange to back up a Gospel intended to be for all men. Why did the early Church weaken its case so much by writing these Gospel accounts that seemingly go against the great commission so much? Our answer is the liberals are wrong and the fact is the Gospels are an accurate portrayal of what literally happened, that’s why they’re written this way, for if the Church had just written them as an opinion they weakened their position; the Church ought to have written these Gospels so they’d fit the epistles a lot better. And one of the points is the universalism of the gospel; it is not emphasized in the Gospel accounts but it is in the epistles.

Another point in this same concept of the Gospels being written late, why is it that the epistles all emphasize Jesus’ deity, but when we come to the Gospels, which the liberals tell us is just opinion, why is it Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of man, a strange term, the epistles never mention by the Son of man. Why do they use these archaic expressions for this later written literature? Well, the conservative orthodox scholars have always argued well it’s obvious; because they are reflecting what actually happened in Jesus’ life. In Jesus’ life the epistles and the refined theology hadn’t yet occurred. That’s why you see such primitive terminology in the Gospels, because the Gospels are valid, they are accurately reporting the life of Christ.

A third area where we notice this, and this is a very, very obvious one, but a very powerful argument. Of all the four men who wrote the Gospel narratives, which one was a very intimate associate of all of the New Testament epistles, or most of them? It was Luke. Luke was Paul’s traveling companion. Luke slept, ate, taught, went to jail with Paul, he had hours and hours of exposure to Paul. Wouldn’t you think if the Gospels were just men’s opinions that when Luke would write his Gospel he’d write it through Pauline ideas, through Pauline terminology, with Pauline theology. Wouldn’t you think that Luke’s Gospel would surely show an awareness of Paul’s teaching. Doesn’t it ever strike you as strange when you read the Gospel of Luke there’s not one Pauline truth there; not one of the great theological themes, justification by faith, all the great themes that Paul is so well known for, that Luke heard hour after hour after hour in his association with Paul and when Luke goes back to write his Gospel he leaves all of it out. Why do you suppose he did that?

Turn to Luke 1:1, here’s why Luke left out all of Paul’s teaching, because Luke had not been commissioned to give us Paul’s view of Jesus. Luke was not trying to give us the Church’s view of Jesus; Luke was trying to give us the real picture of Jesus the best he could with the historic sources available. And thus he says in Luke 1:1-4, “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, [2] Even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses,” and surely Paul is included in verse 2, “and ministers of the word; [3] It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilius, [4] That thou might know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.”

A little footnote here for those of you from religious backgrounds who’ve been taught you just believe on a surface of thin ice, on nothing, do you notice verse 4 carefully, that the apostles of the first century required you to understand before you dare call yourself a Christian. You know something before you identify yourself with Christ. There are not idiots in the Christian camp. So Luke said I have researched this, I have discussed this with the people, I have traveled all over the Mediterranean to gather data for my book on the life of Jesus Christ and when in the dedication to his book in these four verses he makes it clear that he accurately reflects the life of Christ. He’s not an idiot. He’s not saying I got this through the Church’s later view of Jesus. I went back to the original sources, Luke says, and I did it deliberately so that generations who would never have access to the material I have access to could believe in Christ with their minds and not with just their titillating emotions. Luke wanted your faith grounded on fact, not on some skimpy feeling.

This is very important; very important. This is what gives you confidence in life, this is what turns you into a witnessing believer, not because you know a few gimmicks, you know kind of a canned approach. What gives you confidence as a Christian is when you can look someone in the eye, knowing it is true and knowing that no man, no matter how many doctorates he has after his name, can ever come up with an argument to refute your position; that no facts will ever be uncovered in archeology or any other field that will refute Christianity. When you have that confidence you won’t fear any man in a face to face confrontation about Jesus Christ. Luke was concerned that you get this certainty and these Gospels were written to give you data that you could digest, you could think about, you could evaluate so that your faith would be solid. And you wouldn’t be like half the Christians, or 90% of the Christians that freak out every time they see a letter to the editor, oh, this refuted the faith kind of concept.

Luke gives us a reason, then, and this is a strange thing, that Luke in his Gospel is not very Pauline, yet he was a traveling companion of Paul. And there are other truths, missing in the Gospels but present in the epistles. Positional truth, the concept of being “in Christ” is not in the Gospels. How come? If the Gospels reflect a later view of Jesus, wouldn’t the later theology be present. Why, and how, can you explain the Gospels a late writing with such an early primitive theology. There is only one answer, the answer that the orthodox believers have given for twenty centuries: it is because the Gospels are what they claim to be, documents reporting what actually transpired, not what later generations of Christians thought transpired. These record what did in fact transpire.

Now we have the problem of the four Gospels; so much for the introduction of the Gospels as such. Now we have a second part of the introduction that deals with the so-called synoptic problem. That’s the title that you will read of, men that write will talk about the synoptic problem; what is the synoptic problem. The synoptic problem is that we seem to have three Gospels in close agreement with a fourth not in close agreement. That is, not that there are contradictions but they just cover different material. The statistical compilation of the quantity of literature in each Gospel compared with each other, I’ll go through it. On the left side we have the listings of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The center column gives the peculiar passages, that is passages that are unique to that Gospel only, passages that are not found in any other Gospel. And the column on the right shows passages in that Gospel that are repeated in at least one other Gospel; peculiarities or similarities and agreements. The peculiarities are the quantity of material that is unique with that document, and the right most column gives the quantities of material that are shared with one of the other Gospels.

Now you don’t have to be a statistician to see that there’s something peculiar about John, for if we look at Matthew we find the Gospel is 42% new material, 58% of the material is covered elsewhere. In Mark, only 7% of Mark is new material; 93% of the Gospel of Mark is covered elsewhere, which, by the way, is one of the indicators that possibly Mark was the first of the three synoptics written. Luke, 59% new material; that’s to be expected because Luke came later, Luke may have even been a Gentile, we don’t know, but he approached it from a later source. Luke was a doctor, he was a physician, and when Luke went about to write his Gospel he did some interviewing work. Luke shows he’s a physician in many ways. Luke is the only one that tells us how Mary felt when she was pregnant. Luke, apparently as a physician, was very, very much concerned with this virgin birth thing, so it’s his Gospel where you to get the details of Mary, how she felt, what she kept on her heart, what happened at the time she got pregnant. All these were carefully investigated by Luke, rather than Matthew and Mark. Why? Luke was a doctor, this would immediately strike his interest, what happened here, parthenogenesis, what was going on here, and he investigated this.

So we come to John, now what happens. 92% of the material of this Gospel is not recorded in the other Gospels. 93% of this Gospel is new material, not recorded in the other, and only 8% of the material is shared with the other Gospels. So obviously we’ve got to come up with some sort of an explanation. What is going on? What has John done?

That introduces us to the third section of our introduction. The third problem is the Gospel of John itself. Now we’re going to make some statements about John that are going to carry over in all of our exegesis; certain passages I’m going interpret certain ways based on this material. So therefore this material, obviously, is quite important.

Some observations about the Gospel of John first. One of the things that every Greek student blesses John’s soul for is that it’s simple, and when you first learn Greek and you’re anxious to get that Greek down and start using it to benefit from spiritually, where do you go first? The Gospel of John; that’s the place where the good stuff is because that’s the place where you don’t have to go through all of Paul’s hairy sentence structure, figure out Paul, what did you do this to me for, you can go to John and it’s written almost like a first and second grade reader. Jack and Jill went up the hill, this kind of thing; that’s the sentence structure, very, very simple. And so Greek students applaud the Gospel of John. And those of you studying Greek, this will be very good for you. In fact, if you’ve had even four or five months of Greek you ought to close your English text and discipline yourself in the evening service to just look at the Greek text; force yourself to know that Greek. It’s not that hard, we’re only going to cover a few verses each time, read it through before, and then stick with that section when we work on that particular portion of the Word.

The reason that John is so simple is that apparently it was originally in Aramaic, and Aramaic is very simple and when it was translated in the Greek it came out very simple. For those of you have asked me, is Hebrew harder than Greek, here’s your answer. The Hebrew syntax is just like the syntax in the Gospel of John, very simple. The thing that throws you with Hebrew is that it sounds strange and has weird looking letters, but once you master the Hebrew alphabet the Hebrew syntactically is not half as difficult as Greek.

Another observation about John which we’re interested in besides its simplicity is that archeology has discovered a papyri of John. You know, the liberals always refute their own case; they used to argue in the 19^th century, oh, this had to be written very, very late, you see, John was a Gnostic and John had to have written in 150 AD at least, maybe even 200 AD, very, very late. Unfortunately there was discovered a papyri dating 150 AD, in Egypt, papyri 52, that’s a fragment of John 18. Unfortunately for the liberals they had to revise their theory because the papyri was circulating in Egypt by 125 AD, indicating obviously it must have been written a decade or two before and therefore could not have been written as late as 200 AD.

Another observation, after 1948 when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, a sect, something like the Essenes, but not quite, obviously inhabited these caves and threw all these manuscripts in the caves, and they started looking at these manuscripts; a lot of them were Old Testament texts, but a lot of them had the interpretations of the Old Testament by the strange unknown sect, and there was one document called the Manuel of Discipline in this sect, and it spoke over and over of the children of light and the children of darkness. And it used those who walk in the light and those who walk in the darkness, and as they began to unroll these scrolls they said huh, this sounds strangely similar to the Gospel of John; John speaks of walking in the light and walking in the darkness. Now the Dead Sea Scrolls were found right about here; the first scene in the Gospel of John happened right here, and if you’ll turn to John 1:35 you’ll see something happened that day that Jesus showed up very near those caves at Qumran. “Again the next day John stood, and two of his disciples,” John here is not the apostle, be careful, in verse 35 the John is John the Baptist, not John the apostle. “The next day after, John the Baptist stood, and two of his disciples. [36] And, looking upon Jesus as he walked, he says, Behold the Lamb of God! [37] And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus.” And here is where John the apostle came from. John the apostle was a disciple of John the Baptist, and he first was acquainted with Jesus within fifteen miles of the caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. And John writes a Gospel that speaks of walking in light and walking in darkness, and the Dead Sea scrolls speak of the children of light and the children of darkness. It’s a very interesting connection.

Another observation about this Gospel is that John follows a different calendar than all the other Gospels. The other three Gospels are united as to when Jesus died; John differs by 24 hours. Is this a conflict? No, there were two calendars in existence at the time and John deliberately selects one of the calendars so that Jesus died on Passover, according to one calendar, and He celebrates the Passover, the Last Supper, on the day of Passover according to the other calendar. John is interested that this typology show regardless of the calendar system.

Another observation about this Gospel concerning its date. There is a passage in John that sounds strangely like communion; John 6, where Jesus feeds the multitudes and after He feeds them He says, He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood is he that loves Me. Only John brings this up and the strange thing is that would have been the ideal passage to speak of communion, and John refuses; John is the only Gospel writer who has nothing on communion. Why? Why does John omit communion? Why does John not speak or raise the question once of communion; only gently hints at it once in the 6^th chapter. We don’t know why, or we’re going to find out why later on but strange as it may seem, there was a Christian woman who died in Rome within a century of this Gospel. Her name was Priscilla. And her husband upon her grave in the catacomb inscribed a drawing, as many of the Christian husbands who lost their wives would do, or the wife who lost her husband, and they’d draw out the drawings on the cave by the grave, and this man, we don’t know his name, all we know is his wife’s name is Priscilla, he drew a symbol of the Eucharist over loaves and fishes. That story is only found in John 6, so it indicates that by the first century the people in Rome had read this Gospel and were using the pictures in this Gospel to propagate the faith. Also in John, in one of the catacombs is a picture of Lazarus raising from the dead; that’s only recorded in the Gospel of John. So again it shows that by the middle of the second century you have John being read as far away as Rome.

A few more observations about John; this is to kind of whet your appetite, make you think about this man. I’m trying to break you out of the habit of just plow right in and start reading. What I’m trying to do tonight is to help you see that a human being wrote this epistle. The Holy Spirit inspired him but it was a human being. He was a man who had his own vocabulary, he had his own life, he had his own reason, he could sit down in a chair in this congregation and share with us why he wrote his Gospel the way he did, and why he made it so different from all the other Gospels. That’s the picture we want to see and as we look at these observations think; think if you can get to know to know the author of this Gospel. It’ll help you understand passages.

Another peculiar observation of this Gospel is that it’s Jerusalem centered; it’s always centering on Jerusalem, not Galilee; the other Gospels have lots of stuff going on in Galilee and a little bit in Jerusalem. Why does John insist on narrating everything around Jerusalem. It seems like the whole Gospel is around Jerusalem? There’s a reason; because he’s going to say Messiah is accepted or rejected not in Galilee, it doesn’t make any difference, it’s whether Messiah is accepted or rejected in Jerusalem that becomes the issue. And so John narrates Jesus’ live around Jerusalem because that’s where the Messiah is going to be accepted.

Another particular and peculiar thing which goes back to this lack of mention of communion is the lack of mention of the Mount of Transfiguration experience, and John was there on the Mount of Transfiguration; he was there with Peter. Why doesn’t John, who had this fantastic experience of watching Moses and Elijah talk with Jesus and they were all in glory on the top of the mountain, why does he omit it from his Gospel narrative? Why this omission here? The omission appears to be, and we’ll develop it as we go on, because in John 1 he says, “We beheld His glory, gory as of the only begotten One, full of grace and truth,” and when John uses the word “glory” he has something different in mind. To John, Jesus’ glory was constant every day, not just at the Mount of Transfiguration, so John deliberately plays down all those spectacular occurrences in the life of Christ. He says I know, you’ve heard about those from the other men, but John would tell us I’ve come to show you the life of Jesus on the most intimate scale of all the other men and I want to show you that His glory showed through every day, not just on the Mount of Transfiguration. John knew about the Mount of Transfiguration but he chose to ignore it, it had already been covered in the other Gospels.

Why is Jesus’ teaching different; and this is one final accord, and by the way, with communion it follows also; the reason apparently John does not mention communion is because John is more concerned with Jesus than he is with the memory of Jesus. And so John necessarily avoids the secondary; John wants to get back to the most intimate picture of Jesus possible.

And then we come to the last observation we want to make and it’s one of the most interesting to me, to me it always meant to me as I’ve studied this Gospel, one of the motivations to read this with great care, and that is John’s vocabulary. In John 3, for example, Jesus begins to talk and I challenge you to figure out in John 3 where Jesus stops talking and John starts talking because by the time you get to the end of chapter 3 it’s John talking. You can’t see where the transition is; Jesus begins the chapter, John ends it, but you can’t tell what happened in between. Why is there this smooth sliding over from Jesus to John? The only conclusion that you can come to is that both Jesus and John spoke the same way. Why is this?

Why is it that the disciples that wrote the other Gospels don’t speak the same way? It goes back to the idea of a rabbi; remember Jesus was a rabbi, He was a teacher, and as a rabbi He had kind of two lives. He had His public life and His private life and in His public life Jesus would narrate stories over and over and over again; we know the Sermon on the Mount was given at least two times, possibly three because it’s given in different places. And yet it has the same outline. You could argue, if you wanted to promote the canned approach idea that Jesus used it. Yes He did, but He had content. And Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount several times in the same format. That was His public teaching. And the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke narrate those parables. Jesus would teach them and He would teach them and He would teach them and He would teach them over and over and over and over and over and over, and nobody was there to take notes. Hold it Lord, I’ve got to get notes! Nobody did that because they didn’t have paper. Paper was kind of expensive in those days, and Jesus would require, as a good Jewish rabbi would, His followers to memorize, so His disciples memorized the Sermon on the Mount, and He’d go over it and over it and over it and over it and over it until they had memorized it. That was Jesus public…and that explains this synoptic problem, at least a little bit. It doesn’t solve all the problems but it does explain why those three Gospels are so much the same, because all three of those men went back to Jesus public teaching, what’d He say? Well, here’s one thing that He told us over and over again, the parable of the sower and the seed, and they would recite the sower and the seed, so the sower and the seed appears in our Gospels. And then as Luke would investigate it, hey, tell me something else that Jesus taught all the time. Well, we heard Him say a lot about the Sermon on the Mount, and then they’d recite that to Him. And so that’s how those things got in those three Gospels.

Then we come to John, how come John looks at Jesus differently? The Gospel of John tells us that John was the one who leaned on Jesus’ breast; and John never mentions His name. In the Gospel of John, John is never mentioned; in the other Gospels he is, but he never mentions his own name here; he always refers to himself as “the disciple that Jesus loved,” or “the disciple that leaned on Jesus’ breast.” In other words John is saying I am going to give you, not the public teaching of our rabbi but I am going to give you His every day conversation among us. And so John gives us a portrait on the most intimate level of Jesus Christ. He narrates what the rabbi said at lunchtime in John 4. A good pupil of the rabbi, if he were thinking about what the rabbi said would not narrate what was said over a hamburger; he would recite what was said in a public occasion; that to him would be important, but for John to narrate Jesus sitting there while they’re all chewing their hamburgers, and of all things, who is Jesus talking to but a Samaritan woman. That is not quite the scene for a rabbi in his dignity to be sitting on the well with a woman who had been married several times and had shacked up a number of other times, coming down to the well and all of them sitting eating hamburgers; it’s not the dignified scene. Now John gives us that scene.

Why do you suppose John gives us that scene? Because he wants you to see the person of Jesus on a close friendship scale. See, John is the only one that records what Jesus said, and all the other disciples heard this too, but it rang a bell with John, when Jesus got up in the upper room discourse and He said “from henceforth I call you My friends.” “My friends,” that was what John was listening for because he was a friend of Jesus.

And then how do we explain John’s vocabulary coalescing so well with Jesus vocabulary? John was probably, because he lived the longest, the youngest boy who became an apostle; he probably, we can’t be dogmatic but he probably was one of the youngest of all the disciples. He probably was a disciple of John the Baptist in his early teenage years; he became an apostle in his early 20s and at that time a young man is very impressionable; he’s searching for a hero, and as many young men do, they mold their vocabulary and their actions and their habit patterns after their hero. John was chosen by the sovereignty of God as the one man who would be the young man, who would be the impressionable young man, to be molded in his early years so that he could reflect to the world what Jesus looked like, what He talked like, how He acted. So John’s vocabulary coalesces with Jesus in this way.

Now those are some observations about John in our introduction to John, there are several other points that we must understand before we head into the first verse, and that is B. F. Westcott’s concentric proof of the authorship of John. B. F. Westcott was an Angelical bishop, a very great scholar of the New Testament in the 19^th century and he had a five step proof why John wrote John. Some of you who have never been exposed to Biblical criticism, this is boring to you and that’s too bad but there are a number of us who do live in the real world where there are skeptics and we like to know how to defend our faith, and for those of us who live in the real world we’re interested in this material. Westcott was familiar with all the arguments that are being raised in the 20^th century against this Gospel. Every once in a while you read about we in the 20^th century, of course, we can’t possibly accept the Johannine authorship of this document. And if you ask them what is it in the 20^th century that you know that compels you not to accept the Johannine authorship of this document you’ll get one of three or four different arguments. All of these Westcott knew, and in the face of all of them he advanced this five step proof.

The concentric proof means that he starts with a general thing and then he moves in; his general statement is: the author was a Jew; we know the author was a Jew because he quotes the Old Testament from the Hebrew, not the Greek, as is customary in the other Gospel accounts. The popular translation of the day was the Septuagint and most of the disciples, including Jesus Himself, quoted most of the time from the Septuagint; this author does something different; he researched the thing in the original Hebrew. Moreover he knew the meaning as well as the schedule of the Jewish feasts. So this man was a Jew, very, very knowledgeable of the Jewish culture. Second, he was a Jew who lived in Palestine; we now this because he gives details of geography that could only have been given by somebody who was familiar with Palestine, such as in John 5 the healing at Bethesda, the pool at Bethesda. The pool of Bethesda wasn’t even known; it’s not mentioned in the other Gospels, this is the only place it’s mentioned. And archeologists said oh pooh-pooh, until today you can go to Jerusalem and see the pool of Bethesda, they’ve uncovered it. And until the 20^th century it had been lost. John faithfully recorded it, he knew, he was in Jerusalem. The author was a Jew of Palestine.

Third, the author was an eyewitness of the things he spoke of. For a very, very poignant proof of the eyewitness authorship of this document, turn to John 1:39, again try to familiarize yourself with the author before we get working with the details of the text. Our third point of Westcott’s concentric proof is that the author was an eyewitness. In verse 39 he remembers back the first day he met Jesus Christ. And there’s a little detail given here that only an eyewitness would have bothered to give. “He said unto them, Come and see. They came and saw where He dwelt, and He abode with them that day; for it was about the tenth hour.” Some have suggested that was so traumatic, a life-changing for this man he never forgot, the tenth hour of that day I came into the place where Jesus was staying. So he writes “the tenth hour” I saw Jesus. It would have meant a lot to him because this is the first time he ever saw Jesus before, he’s heard about him, his former teacher, John the Baptist, always said the Messiah is coming, the Messiah is coming, the Messiah is coming, and today he meets him and it’s at the tenth hour. Like some of you can remember the very hour you trusted in Jesus Christ; that hour is a moment of importance in your life and you can think back to that hour what you were doing and where you were and who it was that led you to Christ and you can recall that hour. So John recalls the very hour that he met Jesus.

So not only was he a Jew, not only was he a Jew of Palestine, he was a Jew of Palestine who was an eyewitness to the event. We could cite other verses, I’m just going through some of the representative ones.

The fourth point in Westcott’s concentric proof is that this man was intimate to the apostle and therefore was an apostle. He is Jew, he is a Jew of Palestine, he is a Jew was an eyewitness, and he is a Jew who was in Palestine who was an eyewitness who is an apostle. How do we know this author was an apostle. John 2:11, all through this Gospel account John gives us the stumbling and the bumbling of the apostle’s thinking. He tells us, you know, we didn’t believe it back then, now we do. Or, when we saw that, we didn’t think much of it then but now we believe it. Now how could he know that unless he were in the private ring; he’s recording men’s thought. Look what he says in John 2:11, “This beginning of miracles, he was at the wedding and he watched the miracle happen, “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana, of Galilee, and manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on Him.” How would he have known that? John 2:17, he’s at the temple in Jerusalem and Jesus beats up people, please notice, one of the scenes that’s frequently overlooked in Christian art; Jesus took a stick and he hit people with it, He was nasty at times because these were a bunch of crooks and He had to kick them out. Verse 17, “His disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house has eaten me up.” How would this author have known the disciples remembered that? Maybe because he was one. John 2:22, “And when he was risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.” How would he have known that, because he says Jesus [21] “spoke of the temple of his body,” and he’s saying you know, when I first heard that I didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, but then after the resurrection, then it dawned on me, yeah, I can remember back then when Jesus said that; now I know what He was saying. So he records the intimate development of the apostle’s own thinking.

So the fourth step of Westcott’s concentric proof is that he was a Jew living in Palestine, he was an eyewitness, and an apostle. Finally, it was John, the apostle. How do we know that. Turn to John 21:20. Here’s how he always refers to himself, peculiar, he never mentions John. Now we have to ask ourselves why in all the Gospel writing, when we read this Gospel, isn’t the Apostle John mentioned directly; Peter, James and John, they were the three top boys in the whole deal. How come Peter and James are mentioned in this Gospel and not John. Why is John so conspicuous by his apparent absence, and we have this other, kind of cryptic meaning, in verse 20. “Then Peter, turning about, sees the disciple whom Jesus loved, following; who also leaned on His breast at supper, and said, Lord, who is he that betrays Thee.” Peter looked at that man, the man who said those things, and did those things. And that’s always the way he refers to himself in this epistle, and that was John.

Furthermore, it’s not too difficult, if you turn back to John 19:25 to show something else; against substantiating opposition that the reason why this Gospel is so different is because John is giving us the private life of Jesus Christ. Of all the apostles, as Jesus hung on the cross dying for your sins and mine, of all the apostles, who does He trust to take care of His mother? Wouldn’t it be His closest friend among the apostles? And who is it but John. “There stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. [26] When Jesus, therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, He says unto His mother, Behold thy Son!. [27] Then He said to the disciple, Behold, thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her into his own house.” The early Christians wouldn’t have had any mistaken notion as to where Jesus’ mother went, they knew where Jesus mother went, and therefore this authorship has never been questioned until German rationalism appeared on the scene, because the early Christians knew exactly who it was who was the caretaker of the, by this time, old lady Mary. Mary was being taken care of by Jesus most personable friend, his most intimate friend, John.

So here again we have just a touch of the flavor of this author. Now we have other extra-Biblical evidences of his authorship. We have Irenaeus who may have studied under John, he says: “The disciple of the Lord who reclined on His breast, he himself issued the Gospel from Ephesus.” We have from the Muratorian fragment written in 150 AD that reports this: “John was the virtual author of the book. John took a three day fast that he should out what he wished to be said so that the document should have his stamp of approval.” So it that John wrote this entire thing, or had it written in three days; he sat down and he worked intensively with a group of his followers to write this document. He himself didn’t write the actual document but he dictated it and then he reread to make sure this document pictured what he said.

Where was it written? Early tradition says it was written in Ephesus; some say Antioch, but why we think it’s Ephesus is because you remember where John originally showed up in history, the apostle? Didn’t he show up near the Dead Sea, and what was going on at the Dead Sea? We had that strange Qumran community, we had another man called John the Baptist. Turn to Acts 19. What does Paul find when he first comes to Ephesus? Paul comes to Ephesus and he found certain disciples and [Acts 19:2] “He said unto them, have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? And they said unto him, We didn’t even hear there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit. [3] And he said unto them, “Unto whom, then, were you baptized? And they said, Unto John’s baptism. [4] Then said Paul, John truly baptized…” and goes on to explain, but that was John’s Baptism. John who? Not John the Apostle but John the Baptist, the same man who was John the Apostle’s early teacher. Apparently there was a colon at Ephesus of followers of John the Baptist. Now doesn’t it strike us as very interesting that Church tradition says that’s exactly where John retired in his later days, in Ephesus. What attracted John to move all the way up into Asia Minor? Apparently he followed the followers of his earlier teacher, John the Baptist, and trying to win them to Christ. And so he would naturally trek to Ephesus, that was the center of the displaced disciples of John the Baptist. Of course, he spent the rest of his days on Patmos after the Caesars got through with him.

What is the theme of the Gospel? Turn to John 20. You have to understand the author before you understand the author’s work. To understand this often cited portion of the Gospel of John look at John 20:29, just to look at the context, John was there after the resurrection and he saw this strange scene happen with Thomas, Thomas the one who doubted, origin of the phrase “doubting Thomas.” And He said to him after he saw the empirical evidence, He said okay Thomas, reach here and feel My side. And Thomas saw it, and then [28]“Thomas answered and said, “My KurioS, and my QeoS,” “my Lord and my God. Then Jesus remarked to Thomas, and John was standing there in the room when Jesus said this, and he closes out this scene with these last words of Jesus, [29] “Jesus says unto him, Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.” Now that’s the last scene, now John stops the scene and he injects a remark; John 20:30-31 he tells us why he wrote. “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. [31] But these are written, that you might believe,” do you see the connection between verse 31 and verse 29?

Don’t you see how he’s putting it right there I the scene; he says I can remember that day when Jesus said to Thomas, Thomas, blessed are they who have never seen Me and who believed. To John that was a challenge; John says I want to be a part of winning men to Christ; I know these men will never see Jesus, I’ve had the privilege of seeing Him but these other people I’m going to win to Christ have not had the personal privilege of seeing Jesus in the flesh, so I’m going to write my gospel. And that’s why these things are written, “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ.” You haven’t seen him, John says, but don’t let that bother you, I have given you the picture, a picture as accurate as can be, a picture with enough content, enough data, so you don’t have to believe with your emotions, you can believe with your mind as well as your emotions. And so [31] “these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name.”

That’s why I wrote the Gospel, he says; this Gospel, in other words, is an evangelistic Gospel; that’s why this Gospel is good in evangelistic work. The reason this Gospel is always attracted to believers and the reason why this is a good place, if you win someone to Jesus, to get them started in the Christian life; get them to read the Gospel of John; it’s very simple, it’s got a minimum of difficulty in it, they can read it through, almost in one sitting with a good modern translation, and get tremendous content. You can even ask them to outline it section by section to get them digesting the Word.

Let’s turn in conclusion to the last part of the Gospel, John 21:24-25; John’s purpose was to win men to Christ, not to present comprehensive knowledge of Jesus. John was not going to present comprehensive knowledge and so he warns us in the last two verses of his doctrine, “This is the disciple who testifies of these things,” he doesn’t mention himself again, he leaves himself out of the picture, “and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true.” The “we” are the group of people that wrote it at his feet. [25] “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

So John again was selective and when we begin to study this document verse by verse remember verse 25. John says I have not told you everything that He did; I’ve only told you those things you need to know in order to become a believer. I’ve only referenced those portions of Jesus life to enable you to have life eternal.