01 Introduction to the Gospel of John

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we are starting a new series on the Gospel of John, and I will introduce you to the book and its author. Glad to have you along. Whenever you start studying a new book of Scripture, one of the first questions to ask is who wrote it and when was it written? And that's where we're going to start today. The Gospel of John is one of four books that record the life of Jesus. The others are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Apostle John is the author of this gospel. There's not really a whole lot of debate about that. Early church tradition strongly and consistently identifies the Apostle John as the author of this book. Now John does not identify himself as the author of the Gospel in the book. Interestingly, he doesn't identify himself by name at all in this gospel. Instead, he prefers to identify himself as the apostle whom Jesus loved. Since the author carefully mentions the names of the others involved in the stories, if the author had been someone other than John the Apostle, he would have mentioned John's name too. John had a closer relationship with Jesus than any of the other disciples. Jesus and John were essentially best friends, and at his death, Jesus entrusted John with the care of his mother. John wrote his gospel late in his life, probably between eighty to eighty-five AD. It was the last of the Gospels written. Matthew, Mark, and Luke had already finished their gospels by the time John wrote his account. John was certainly aware of the other gospels and chose not to repeat much of the material that is in them. As we'll see, John had a different purpose for writing his gospel. He includes a lot of material the other gospel writers omitted, and we'll be talking about that as we'll go along. First, let's talk a little bit more about the author. There are several Johns in the New Testament, and we don't want to confuse them. Most notably, there's John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a cousin of Jesus. He was a prophet, and he was not one of the twelve disciples. There's also John Mark, who is the author of one of the other Gospels. John Mark accompanied Paul on his early missionary journeys, and later he became a disciple of Peter. In Scripture, he's usually referred to as Mark or John Mark, but he is called John a couple of times in Acts. The Apostle Peter, who is also called Simon or Cephas, is sometimes referred to as the son of John, and again, Peter's father is a different person from our author. Acts 4, 6 mentions a John who was a member of the high priestly family. Again, that is not our author. The John who is our author was one of the twelve apostles. He also wrote three letters in the New Testament, 1, 2nd, and 3 John, and the book of Revelation. John and his brother James were fishermen, like their father Zebedee. James is thought to be older because his name often comes first. James, the brother of John, was martyred early in church history, and his death is recorded in Acts 12.2. John's mother, Salome, appears to have been a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, making the apostle John a cousin of Jesus. Jesus gave John and his brother James a nickname. He called them the sons of thunder. Mark 3.17 is the only place in Scripture that mentions this nickname, and Mark does not explain why Jesus gave them this name. I think a couple of stories give us a hint, though. In Luke 9, Jesus and his disciples were traveling through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem when they ran into trouble. Jesus sent messengers ahead to arrange accommodations for the night, but the people in the village refused to offer them lodging. Luke 9.54 reads, When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them? It's kind of a thunderous response. Jesus rebuked the brothers and they went to another village. Later in Matthew's Gospel, this is in chapter 20, the mother of James and John asks Jesus to grant her two sons the places at his right and his left hand. Essentially she's asking Jesus to give her sons the next highest places of authority in his kingdom. Jesus rebukes her saying, You don't know what you're asking. The other ten apostles become indignant when they learn about the request, and it seems likely that John and James put their mother up to asking, or at least they were accomplices in the plot. Again, that indicates something about their personality which might have earned them this nickname. John and James lived in Beth Seda and they worked on the Sea of Galilee as fishermen in partnership with another pair of brothers, Peter and Andrew, who also became part of the twelve apostles. Now let's talk for a minute about what it means to be an apostle. Matthew introduces the apostles like this, this is Matthew 10 1. Speaking of Jesus, he says, and he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease and every affliction. Mark gives us a bit more detail in his gospel. This is from chapter three, verses thirteen through fifteen, again speaking of Jesus, and he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him, and he appointed twelve whom he also named apostles, so that they might be with him, and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons. The apostles were not just the twelve men closest to Jesus, they were the ones to whom Jesus gave authority. He gave them the authority to preach the gospel message, and he gave them the power to perform certain miracles as a witness to verify their authority. The apostles were a unique group in that authority. We might think of them as ambassadors. They have the authority to speak for Jesus when Jesus is not present. They were specifically called to be disciples of Christ. They lived and worked with Jesus during his public life and ministry. They heard him teach publicly, they heard him teach privately, they witnessed his miracles and his sufferings, and they saw him after the resurrection. Jesus personally called each one of them and gave them his authority, and he commissions them to preach the gospel after his death, resurrection, and ascension. In the same way that the Old Testament prophets were given a unique authority to speak for God and say, Thus says the Lord, the apostles were given unique authority to speak for and about Jesus. In Ephesians 2.20, it says the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ being the chief cornerstone. So the apostles were specifically called and personally commissioned by Jesus Himself. They're the foundation of the church because they laid the doctrinal foundation. They had the authority to speak for Jesus. They received a direct revelation from Jesus, and they gave that revelation to us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Finally, they were able to confirm their teaching was true by performing certain signs and miracles. If Peter came to town for a Saturday seminar, how would you know he was teaching the truth? How would you know he represented God? Because God performed miracles through him to testify to his authority. And if you stop and think about it, the apostles taught some pretty radical ideas in their day. They taught that the Gentiles would be part of the kingdom of God. That was a new thought. They taught that keeping the law was not possible and salvation would come through faith in Christ. Well, that was radically new. They taught that the long-awaited Messiah had come and gone and would come again. Well, that was also strange and wonderful news. There might be ten teachers in town teaching ten different things. How do you know who's right? Suppose they all claimed to have a message from Jesus, how would you know who was preaching the truth? Well, today we would compare their teaching to the words of Scripture to see if their teaching contradicted or coincided with the Bible. But in New Testament times, how would you know? Especially if you were a Gentile who didn't know the Old Testament? Well, you would know the true apostles because God gave them the power to do certain supernatural miracles. God granted them these signs and wonders to heal and cast out demons and so forth to attest to the validity of their teaching. Our author John, along with James, Peter, and Andrew, were disciples of John the Baptist before they became followers of Jesus. We read this in John 1, 35 through 37. The next day, John the Baptist was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, Behold the Lamb of God. The two disciples heard him say this and they followed Jesus. Later, the text identifies one of those two as Andrew, Peter's brother, and then tells us that Andrew found Peter and says, Hey Peter, we found the Messiah. It's likely that the other one was John or perhaps James, because those four worked together and tended to stay together. Later in Matthew, we read this, this is Matthew 4, 18 through 22. While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he, that's Jesus, saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets and followed him, and going on from there he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat, with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. Now if you read these stories in isolation, you might think that Peter, Andrew, James, and John all followed Jesus the moment they laid eyes on him. But if you read the scriptures, you'll see there's more to the story. When you put all the clues together from the New Testament, a different picture emerges. Peter, Andrew, James, and John were disciples of John the Baptist first. After following John the Baptist for a while, they encountered Jesus and followed him for a while. And then they went back to their jobs as fishermen. That's when we get the story in Matthew 4 where Jesus officially calls them and they stop working to follow Jesus full time. When the text says immediately they left their nets and followed him, immediately has the idea that the next significant event is they followed him. It's not in a rush, it's and next, the next important thing that happened. But they had known him before this calling. Peter, James, and John formed an inner circle of disciples who were particularly close with Jesus. They alone out of the twelve witnessed the raising of Jairus' daughter. They witnessed Jesus' transfiguration, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and along with Andrew, they heard Jesus speak of the signs of the coming destruction of Jerusalem. John tells us that he was present at the crucifixion and that Jesus entrusted the care of his mother to John. John was also one of the first to reach the empty tomb. After the resurrection, when you read through Acts, you see that Peter and John were clearly two of the leading apostles. John and Peter were among the first Christian leaders to show publicly that God accepted Gentiles into the church. And along with James, the brother of Jesus, they support the mission of Paul and Barnabas going to the Gentiles. According to tradition, John lived to a very old age, as Jesus predicted he would. He stayed in Jerusalem after the ascension. In his later years, he moved to Ephesus, where he wrote his gospel and the three letters that bear his name. At the end of his life, he was imprisoned on Patmos, an island off the coast from Ephesus, where he wrote the book of Revelation. Tradition tells us that he was the youngest of the apostles. One historian records that John died at Ephesus in the third year of the Roman Emperor Trajan at the age of ninety-four and was buried near that city. The third year of Trajan would be a hundred AD. That's the author. Now let's talk a little bit about John's Gospel. If you read the four Gospels, you'll quickly notice that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are very much alike, but John's Gospel is different. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often called the Synoptic Gospels. The first three are called Synoptic because they see together with a common view. The word synoptic literally means together sight. Matthew, Mark, and Luke cover many of the same events in Jesus' life, most of them from Jesus' ministry in Galilee, and they cover the events in much the same order. Nearly 90% of Mark's content is found in Matthew, and about 50% of Mark also appears in Luke. All of the parables of Christ are found in the Synoptic Gospels. John's Gospel contains very little of what is in the other Gospels. He wrote his gospel after the other three had been in circulation for a while, and he did not feel the need to repeat their content. He had a different purpose, and he chose to include material that they had left out. There are many differences between John and the other Gospels, and we'll be talking about them as we go along, but there's one difference I want to highlight, and that is how these books present the relationship between Jesus and the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the capital city of ancient Israel. It was the center of Jewish worship and was located in the region of Judea. During the time of Jesus, the temple of God was located in Jerusalem. The central government was in Jerusalem, so Jerusalem was the center of both political and religious life, and every year the people of Israel flocked to Jerusalem for the major festivals. Jesus did not live in Jerusalem, nor did he grow up there. He didn't even live in the region of Judea. He lived in Galilee. If you look at a map of Israel at the time of Christ, you'll see that Judea is in the south with the capital city of Jerusalem in it. Above Judea is the region of Samaria, and above the region of Samaria was the region of Galilee. The distance from Jesus' hometown in Galilee to Jerusalem was about ninety miles if you walked through Samaria, or about 120 miles if you walked around Samaria. Jews from Jerusalem did not think very highly of Jews from Galilee. Yes, they were fellow Jews, but those in the south thought Galilean Jews were too influenced by Gentile Greek culture, as there were a lot of Gentile towns around them. So they thought the Galilean Jews weren't pious enough. The two regions had separate governments. Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipos, and Judea was ruled by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Galilean Jews had a different accent from their southern brothers. One place you can see that is in the account of the arrest of Jesus, one person recognizes Peter as a Galilean because of the way he talks, just like we would recognize someone from Alabama today by their accent. If Jerusalem was the center of Jewish life, then Galilee was out on the fringes or the edges, and the fact that Jesus came from Galilee is a strike against him. To us, those are just names and places in biblical history, but there was a cultural tension between the regions. The Judean Jews looked down on Jesus the way, say, a New Yorker might look down on a person from Mississippi. To them, he came from a culturally inferior place and he speaks with a funny accent. How could the Messiah be from Galilee? The Jews in Jerusalem would have thought, no way, that's just not possible. The fact that Jesus did not live in or near Jerusalem, but in Galilee is an important part of his story for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I want to look briefly at how the other three Gospels portray Jesus' relationship to Jerusalem, and then we'll look at how John portrays the same relationship. In the three synoptic gospels, each of them set the first half of their book in Galilee and its surrounding regions. Jesus teaches in Galilee, he does miracles in Galilee, and he pretty much stays in Galilee in the north. Toward the end of his Galilean ministry, each of the three Gospels has the same dramatic turning point in the story. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. The apostle Peter answers, You are the Christ, and after this event, Jesus begins teaching them that he must go to Jerusalem and be executed and rise again. And you'll see this phrase, he set his eyes toward Jerusalem. The second half then of each of the synoptic gospels is about Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, culminating in his triumphal entry, his execution, resurrection, and ascension. That structure is most clear in Mark and Matthew. It's a little less clear in Luke, but it's still there. So the other three Gospels use this two-part structure. First, they focus on the work Jesus did in Galilee, and then they follow that by his journey to Jerusalem. Now, let's look at how John portrays Jesus' relationship to Jerusalem. Starting in John 2, Jesus travels to Jerusalem for the Passover. While he's there, he goes into the temple and he throws out the merchants and he makes a lot of important people mad at him. In chapter 3, he talks to a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who seems very interested in what Jesus is saying. And then in chapter 4, he travels north through Samaria and back to Galilee. In chapter 5, Jesus returns to Jerusalem for another festival. This time he heals a man on the Sabbath, and the Jewish leaders get so outraged that they seek to kill him. Knowing this, he returns to Galilee again in John 6, and then we read in John 7.1, after this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem for a while because he knows the leaders in Jerusalem are seeking his life. But then in John 7.10, he somewhat secretly and quietly returns to Jerusalem again for another festival, the feast of booths. There is great turmoil. People are looking for him, some because they think he's great, others because they think he's a fraud. About halfway through the feast, he begins teaching in the temple. The Pharisees send officers to arrest him, but the officers get so interested in his teaching they fail to take Jesus into custody. He keeps teaching, and the Jews get so agitated they pick up rocks to stone him twice, but he escapes. That's in John 8 through 10. In John 11, Jesus leaves Jerusalem, but then he hears his friend Lazarus is sick, so he returns to Bethany, about two miles from Jerusalem. Lazarus is dead by this time, and Jesus raises him from the dead. Now that really upsets the Jerusalem leadership. They have a big meeting and resolve they're going to kill Jesus. Jesus withdraws again, but stays nearby because Passover is drawing near, and when Passover arrives, Jesus makes his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and that will eventually lead to his arrest and execution and resurrection. As John portrays the story, Jesus makes a number of visits into Jerusalem. Each time he visits, he stirs up trouble, and then he leaves only to return again and cause more trouble. There were three major Jewish festivals each year, and it's likely Jesus went for each festival. Each time he encountered new people, made new disciples, and at the same time his actions provoked the leadership and increased their desire to kill him. Finally, the Jewish leadership has enough and they implement their plan. And that's how John portrays the relationship between Jesus and Jerusalem. The other three Gospels don't mention this back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem. They don't deny That Jesus made these trips, they just don't mention them. But John mentions them because he has a different purpose in writing, and these stories further the themes he's emphasizing. So to summarize, Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a different structure in their Gospels than John does. John uses this back and forth structure, noting each time Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for one of the feasts, and how each time tensions rise over what he's doing in his ministry. The other three Gospels use a two-part structure, focusing first on his work in Galilee, followed by his final journey to Jerusalem. Each of these authors is picking what he wants to tell for his own plan, his own purposes, and the audience he's writing for. The gospel authors shape the story and organize it to highlight the significance of the events for the particular audience they were writing to. Now, is that a problem? Should we be worried that John's gospel is so different and that he takes this different approach? No. I'm not saying the other gospel writers were mistaken, they weren't lying, they aren't misleading in any way, they never claim to be telling us every single solitary event in the life of Jesus in exact chronological order. Rather, each one wants to highlight certain aspects of the story to make certain points. One of my mentors explained it with this analogy. Suppose your favorite person from history is a farmer named Bill Smith. You read a number of biographies about him. Each of these books includes one particular event in his life. That event is at the time of a great drought where Bill faced a great crisis of faith. Each book also records that during this drought and during this great crisis of faith, Bill said something really funny. The first author you read presents everything as factually and accurately as he can according to the timeline. He marches chronologically through the events of Farmer Bill's life. He starts with Bill's childhood and progresses event by event straight through his life, so in his biography, the story of the drought occurs in Bill's early adulthood. The second biography tells the story out of chronological order. The second author has grouped similar stories together. When this second author tells the story of the drought, he puts it in along with a series of other events where Bill faced a crisis of faith. The author seems to be particularly interested in how Bill faced these tests of faith, so he takes them out of chronological order and puts them side by side so you can see how Bill struggled and how he grew through each of these challenges. For this author, the fact that Bill said something funny during the drought is interesting, but it's not really essential to the story. The third author is particularly interested in the role of humor in Farmer Bill's life. So the third biography groups the story of the drought with other events where Bill said something really clever and funny. The events are not chronological, they're grouped thematically, starting with small, almost unnoticeable attempts at humor and progressing to full-fledged irony and a razor-sharp wit. And the author invites you to see how Bill's sense of humor grew and developed over the course of his life. This third author is not particularly interested in the fact that some of these events were also tests of faith. His emphasis is on the role of humor in Bill's life, and in his telling, the funny comment during the drought is essential to the story of the drought. Now, none of these biographers sat down and explained what they were doing. Instead, they gave clues by the way they structured the story. They gave hints by what stories they put in and what stories they left out. And they invite you to compare and contrast the stories that appear side by side. We readers must weigh the patterns. We must weigh the way the stories are presented and how they are presented and judge how significant the patterns are. Did the biographers really intend something by the way they organize the material? Or could we readers be imposing something on the text that's not there because the biographers weren't really thinking about that at all? Well, that's the sort of question we face when we come to study the Gospels. And it's often the sort of question we forget to ask. We get so caught up highlighting, outlining, doing word studies, picking apart small passages of scripture that we forget to step back and look at the big picture and ask, how is all this material coming together? Gospels are not just biographies. The Gospels do not intend to record every detail of Jesus' life in chronological order like a biography. They are apologetic. They seek to persuade. They don't just record the teaching of Jesus and his thoughts, they defend that teaching, they explain the importance of his teaching and his thinking. They don't just record the events of his life, they explain why those events are significant. In that sense, they're historical theology. This study of John is going to be a different kind of study. If you've listened to much of my teaching, you know that I am a big fan of detailed micro exegetical studies. You know the kind where you start with a blank page of the text and you end up with it color-coded and marked up with lines and circles and notes everywhere. And that is an integral part of Bible study. There's something very satisfying about looking at a page that's all marked up. The problem is many of us Bible students stop there, but that's not the end of the study. An equally necessary part is going back and putting all those pieces together, taking everything we've learned, taking all the details, and putting it together into the big picture. You could liken it to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You could picture all the micro exegesis as the individual puzzle pieces. And you can spend a lot of time turning all the pieces face up, sorting them into colors, sorting them into patterns, grouping them into lights and darks, and so on. But you're not done until you put all those pieces together and see the picture that they form. The difference between Bible study and a puzzle is we don't have a box lid with a picture on it. We don't know what the puzzle is supposed to look like while we're working on the pieces, and we can't see the final picture until we're done with all the pieces. But as we're building those pieces and putting them together, periodically we want to step back and look at the big picture and ask, is this making sense? Do our pieces form a coherent whole? Have we put one section of the puzzle together in a way that destroys the larger picture being formed? Well, this study is going to focus on that big picture. When I start a new study, I typically read through the letter or the book a couple of times, watching for these big picture themes and repetitions. I start making notes on what that big picture is, and then periodically as I'm diving deep into the details, I look up and say, what picture is forming? Is it still making sense? Do I need to adjust or change something? Maybe I'm looking at the pieces the wrong way. To continue my jigsaw puzzle analogy, in this study, we're going to be turning all the pieces face up and finding the border. The border is the frame that holds everything together. It gives us a hint what the puzzle is going to look like, but it's not the final picture yet. So in this study, we're going to put the border together, sort the pieces, maybe put them in lights and darks, but we're not going to assemble them. We won't be going deep into the details like we did in my study of the Gospel of Matthew. In this study, we're going to focus more on the author's mind because, like all authors, John made choices about how he presented the material. He had goals which caused him to put the stories together in a certain way and to include certain details and omit other details. Our goal in this kind of study is to learn what he intended to communicate by those choices. Now, again, we wouldn't normally stop with this kind of study. We'd go on and do the detailed level deep dive. But in talking to some of my listeners, I realized modeling this kind of study is really rare. You don't usually see it in Sunday sermons because sermons are often by different speakers focused on individual passages of the text. And you often don't find it in commentaries because commentators tend not to do the big picture work. They prefer to give you notes and details on the individual verses. And often in community Bible studies, this kind of work is left for the video after you've done your own detailed analysis. They often give you the conclusions they reached without showing you how they reached them. So I'm going to attempt to show that aspect of Bible study. I'm going to try to focus on the big picture. We're going to seek John's mind and ask why he included each story, what are the points and themes he's driving at? The question's not always easy to answer. When we see patterns, when we see repeated ideas and phrases, we have to ask, are they really significant? Did the author include them on purpose? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Maybe I'm imposing them on the text rather than seeing something John put there. On the other hand, if I failed to notice a pattern, would I have missed something? Would I have missed a point he's trying to make? It's easy to mislead yourself in this kind of study and start seeing patterns that aren't there. It's this kind of dance where you have to keep checking yourself, checking the material, looking at the pieces, putting them together, asking if there's another way they can be put together, taking them apart, putting them back together in a slightly different way, taking them apart, putting them back again. In this kind of study, I tend to hold all my conclusions lightly until I have all the pieces in place, and then I step back to see if the picture makes sense. At this point, I've worked with the Gospel of John enough that I'm confident that these themes are there and that John intentionally highlighted certain aspects of the ministry of Jesus to make some specific points. I'm going to argue that he had specific themes in mind and he told the story the way he tells it to highlight those themes. So this study will be a great foundation for you if you want to go back at some point and dive deep into the individual stories. It will give you the framework to do that, but in the meantime, you'll have a really good grasp on what the Gospel of John is all about. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. The blog version of this episode is on the link below this podcast, or you can go to wednesdayintheword.com slash John 1. If you haven't visited my website, I encourage you to stop by rather than being covered with advertisements. My website contains a wealth of Bible study materials designed to help you improve your skills and understanding. It's all free. I don't take any advertising and I don't accept donations. If you want to thank me, please subscribe to the newsletter and the podcast. And if you can, leave a positive rating and review wherever you listen. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find his wonderful music on heartfeltmusic.org. All the episodes in this series are available on wednesdayintheword.com. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.