Background to John's Gospel

John's gospel starts with a bang!  Its first few verses are some of the most awe-inspiring in the Bible - up there with the beginning of Genesis.  In them, he lays out where his gospel is going to take us, in terms of understanding who Jesus is - his identity.  It's like an 'executive summary' at the start of a long report to Board members.  But it's so condensed, that any commentary needs to take time unpacking the concepts he is introducing.

So we will start by doing some spadework to lay a foundation for understanding.  Stay with me while we do so: it might feel like hard work, but it's important.   We need to investigate its cultural context, and key concepts.

John's gospel was written over two thousand years ago, by an author living in a totally different culture; and writing in what was for him, a second language - not his mother tongue.  So in order to ensure we are hearing him correctly, we first need to look at:
- Who wrote this book, and when?
- What do we know about the author?
- How is it distinctive from the other three gospels?
- What are its central themes?
- What were the author's aims, in writing it?

Once we've done that, we'll chew over some key words, to help us grasp John's thinking and the concepts behind them.

Authorship and date

All four gospels are anonymous, in the sense that they don’t name their authors.  However there is external evidence from the second century that this gospel was attributed to the Apostle John.  Irenaeus, a second-century bishop, says Polycarp (Bishop of Smyrna) told him that he had received it directly from the Apostle John.  This was possible because John lived into ripe old age, dying in AD98 or thereabouts.  John was bishop of Ephesus, and Smyrna was one of the churches he oversaw, prior to Polycarp's appointment.  

However, some question whether a Galilean fisherman could have written such excellent Greek, would have known the High Priest, or had such detailed and accurate knowledge of Jerusalem’s layout as the gospel contains. They therefore postulate a separate John, ‘John the Evangelist’, as the author.  Such views have been countered with arguments that (a) John may have dictated it to an amanuensis with good Greek, possibly a man called Papias who was one of his disciples, and (b) The High Priest is known to have had a regular supply of fish from Galilee, so perhaps John was his father Zebedee’s sales representative in Jerusalem for a time (?!)

In terms of internal evidence within the gospel itself, (a)  it refers to the author as ‘the beloved disciple’: someone who worked closely with Peter, and was present at the Last Supper, which means he must have been one of the Twelve (b) its author was an eye-witness of the events (19:35), and (c) his  account was certified as true by a community of believers (21:24).

As to the gospel’s date, we have manuscript evidence of its existence from early in the second century.  Opinion predominantly favours it having been written near the end of John’s life, around AD95.  Some however believe that it must have been written before Jerusalem was destroyed in AD70, since it refers to the Pool of Bethesda (5:2) in the present tense; and also because it frequently refers to ‘the Judaeans’ as an ethnic group distinct from the Jews in Galilee.  Lastly some believe that parts were written early, but the canonical version was only finalised later, perhaps by a separate author.

How one views the date it was written, heavily determines the spiritual context.  If it was prior to the Fall of Jerusalem, one might expect John to have distinguished between Pharisees and Sadducees, Scribes, Herodians and Zealots, as the other gospels do.  Instead he lumps them all together as 'hoi iudaioi', the Judaeans.  If on the other hand, it was written in ~AD95, then the context (for a Jew) would have been one of Hellenism, but within the Roman Empire.  Various heresies about Christ's true nature were beginning to be expressed, such as Docetism, and Gnosticism.

What do we know about the Apostle John?

John and his elder brother James were the sons of Zebedee, a Galilean man in the fishing industry there.  Tradition has their mother identified as a disciple called Salome, who some say was Mary’s sister.   Thus they may have been Jesus’s cousins.  She was evidently ambitious for her sons in that she asked Jesus to let them sit in the places of honour next to him, when His Messianic kingdom came into being.  Jesus nicknamed them ‘sons of thunder’, perhaps because in their zeal they proposed calling down lightning on an inhospitable Samaritan village!  James, John's brother, was the first Christian to be martyred, in AD44.

It seems that John had an especially close relationship with Jesus, being the one seated closest to Him at the Last Supper.  In the gospel he is described as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.  He was the only one of the Twelve who stood vigil throughout Jesus's six hours on the cross, the others having deserted.  And Jesus committed His mother into John's care thereafter, rather than trusting His own siblings to look after her.

At some stage in the early development of the church, John moved to Ephesus and became Bishop there, overseeing the Seven Churches listed in Revelation 1-3.  It seems that many of the early heresies about Christ’s nature started in the area we now call Turkey, and John wrote three circulars to these churches about how to discern between true and false teachers.

Somehow he died a natural death whereas all the other apostles were martyred.  Legend has it that he was thrown into a vat of boiling oil, but emerged unscathed.  He was subsequently imprisoned on the nearby prison-island of Patmos (think Alcatraz!).  Jesus appeared to him there and gave him a huge revelation about the End Times, which we now know as ‘The Book of Revelation’.

Distinctives

‘The Gospel’ when it was first published, usually consisted of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) written on leaves of parchment and bound together in book form - what archaeologists call a 'codex'.  But John’s gospel is very different from the Synoptics.  Though there is some overlap (e.g. the feeding of the five thousand, & the cross & resurrection of course), in general it is complementary rather than parallel - it covers different parts of Jesus’s ministry than the other three gospels:-

● It is largely focussed on Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem whereas the others focus on His ministry in Galilee and the Trans-Jordan.
● His account often mentions the Jewish feasts: for example, he mentions three separate Passovers, whereas the others mention only one.
● Whereas the Synoptic contain a lot of specific teaching about Christian ethics (for example, the Sermon on the Mount) John contains almost none.
(For him, all Christian ethics are subsumed in the one word translated ‘love’. In the Greek, this is a specific word not used of ordinary friendships,
or erotic love, or love of one’s country: agape, (άγαπη), but meaning the selfless love for others shown by Jesus.)
● He barely mentions Christ’s Second Coming, instead focussing on Jesus's Presence hear-and-now.  Whereas Matthew records Jesus teaching His disciples about the endgames and His return in glory, just before he goes to the Cross, John records Him teaching them about the Holy Spirit and the new spiritual life they will have after His resurrection.
● John calls this reality of knowing Christ, 'eternal life’, ('Zoe', ζοη).   again, this is a specific Greek word, distinct from the words used for mental or psychological life (psyche, or πσυχη) or bodily life (bios, βιος).  Theologians refer to John’s focus on ‘fellowship with the Father and with His Son’ (John 17:3) as ‘realised eschatology’.
● John often records the disciples’ incomprehension of Jesus’ sayings, before the Spirit came, and how they subsequently understood things - for example, Jesus statement ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it again’.
● John records Jesus using lots of symbolism (e.g. I am the Bread of Life) -  because, as Jesus says to Nicodemus, He is teaching heavenly (spiritual) truths rather than earthly ones.

Themes

Theologians in general tend to divide John into two halves, with a prologue and an epilogue.  The first half of the book focusses on six ‘signs’ (miracles which have a deeper meaning) which John selects because they reveal something of Jesus’s identity as the Messiah and Son of God.  The second half focusses on His glory, soon to be revealed in His death and resurrection.  Individual authors focus on particular themes such as

● Jesus's heavenly origin;
● His role as the living Temple;
● His superiority to the Jewish heroes such as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses;
● His self-revelation through the ‘I AM’ statements;
● the Judaeans' rejection of Him, & Jesus' analysis of the reasons for that;
● His relationship with His Father, etc.

The best overall summary of John’s theme is that He is writing about Jesus’s identity, and specifically, about the incarnation. In that sense, the prologue is an ‘executive summary’ of all that is to follow.  All Jesus’s arguments with the Jewish authorities have to do with His divinity, His sonship, His being sent from God in a way no other prophet was.  And all His final teaching to the disciples was about His one-ness with the Father and the Spirit. John’s subsequent first Letter then makes complete sense, in that he says that the ultimate test of any spirit is whether it acknowledges that’Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’ (1John 4:1-3).  [Its context was that Christian communities were being torn apart by false teachings that claimed that Jesus either was not really a man, or not really God.]

For John, belief in the incarnation was essential if the Cross was to have any redemptive meaning.

John’s purpose in writing the gospel

Many different theories have been propounded, as to John’s aims.  Some say the gospel is a collection of his sermons, each ‘sign’ representing a separate sermon illustrating a facet of Christ;s identity.  Some say it was written for evangelism amongst the Jews, since it majors on ‘signs’: where Greeks prized ‘wisdom’, Jews valued ‘signs’ more as corroborating a man’s ministry.  An opposing view is that his account adapts the gospel to a Hellenistic culture, using many spiritual terms they would have been familiar with such as ‘the Word’, ‘light’, ‘life’ etc.   Some see this gospel as written to fill in the blanks left un-covered by the Synoptics, or to give a more ‘spiritual' take on Jesus’s ministry.   Others see it as a polemic against the Jews; or as  a statement of the early church's relationship to the disciples of John the Baptist.

Fortunately we are not left scratching our heads, for John himself states clearly why he wrote it.  He wasn’t trying to give a comprehensive account of the facts of Jesus’ life, or His works.  Rather, he selected a few key episodes, with a very specific purpose.  “These are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name“ (20:31).   In other words, John was concerned with two things: his readers’ belief  that Jesus Christ came in the flesh - that He was God Incarnate, our anointed Saviour - and their experience of eternal life - their ‘fellowship with the Father and His Son’.  Thus His gospel is not only evangelistic, but also about our present-day, real-life spiritual experience.

THE MEANINGS OF SOME KEY WORDS JOHN USES

John's Gospel often uses words with a double meaning - 'double-entendres'.   He seems to do so deliberately.  Usually, they are words which in common usage carry a physical, real-world meaning, but can also convey symbolic or spiritual meanings.  So for example, in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, the word translated ‘again’ can also be translated 'from above’.   Nicodemus takes it as the former, whilst Jesus uses both meanings.  John's prologue is stuffed full of such words & phrases, so we'll start by exploring a few of them:

The Word
John calls Jesus “the Word” - which we tend to take to mean a spoken or written word.  But to the Jews, a word was “the expression of a hidden thought.”  E Stanley Jones says Jesus is “the hidden God, like the hidden thought, and we cannot know what God is like unless God communicates through a word…When you take hold of that Word, you do not take hold of something standing between you and God — that Word, Jesus, is God available… When you take hold of Jesus, you take hold of God.”
There are many examples in the Old Testament of God manifesting Himself to men as a Being called ‘the Angel of the LORD’.  Since the Jews were ultra-careful never to liken God to any earthly creature, even man, they often referred to these appearances as ‘The Word of the Lord’.  The Hebrew word for ‘word’ is ‘Memra’: the Jewish Encyclopaedia defines this as ‘"The Word," in the sense of the creative or directive word or speech of God manifesting His power in the world of matter or mind; a term used especially in the Targum as a substitute for "the Lord" when an anthropomorphic expression is to be avoided.’  Jesus reveals God to us in human form:  “No-one has seen God at any time. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (Jn 1:18).  He is the Memra!
Words are active and powerful. How often have you sent an email or a WhatsApp in a hurry, then regretted not being able to unsend it?  Or said something which you wish you hadn’t? The Jews considered words to be active, having a life of their own.  This was specially true of God's word: at Creation, Genesis repeatedly says, “And God said … and it was so.”  “My Word, that proceeds from My mouth, shall not return to Me void, but out shall accomplish what I please, and prosper in the thing for which I send it” (Isa 55:11). “The Word of God is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.” (Heb 4:12-13). Jesus is God’s last word, the ultimate expression of His character and Being.

Life

John uses three different words which are all translated into English as the single word, ‘life'. They are:-

● βιος (bios) - biological life:  The only time John uses this word for life, is when he talks about ‘the pride of life’ (1Jn 4:15,16).  Imagine a bodybuilding competition, with the contestants 'strutting their stuff'.  That's the sort of life that this word refers to.
● Ψυχή (psyche) - soul life (thought, emotional, & social life).  John says this kind of life can be loved (held onto) or hated (laid down) in this life (Jn 12:24-25).  When Jesus talks about laying down His life, this is the word He uses.  And it is what He means when He talks about us 'taking up our cross and following Him'.
● ζοη (Zoe) - spiritual life, present living reality of fellowship with the Father and the Son (Jn 17:3).  Jesus has this life within Himself, and gives it to all those who receive Him (Jn 5:26, 21).  This life starts now - it’s a present reality; and it continues beyond our bodily death into eternity (Jn 17:3).  John experienced this as a joyful, loving fellowship with the Father and the Son (1Jn 1:1-3)

Understanding the distinction between these different forms of life, makes sense of Jesus’s otherwise-enigmatic statements about laying down one’s life (psyche), in order to keep it for eternal life (zoe). It is exactly the same concept as St Paul saying that we must crucify the flesh, not fulfil its lusts, but rather, walk by the spirit.

Light

This word has multiple connotations.  In the physical world, light makes things visible. It exposes where we haven’t dusted! And in the same way, Jesus’s light exposes our darkness, as we read in Hebrews 4.  Light also brings life. Without sunlight there would be no vegetation, no life of any form.  Wherever there is light, there cannot be darkness. Light can destroy darkness, but darkness can never overcome light.  Jesus’s “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it” (Jn 1:5).
John says, “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1Jn 1:5). If we habitually live in darkness, or pretend to have no sin, no need of confession and cleansing, we are deceiving ourselves and others, but not God.  We cannot have that loving fellowship with God, which is what eternal life is, unless we ‘walk in the light’.  “ What fellowship has light with darkness? Or what fellowship has Christ with Belial?” (2Cor 6:14,15)

Star Wars refers to men having two natures, one of which is ‘the Dark Side’: one can fight for goodness and truth, or flip to the Dark Side.  But scripture never portrays man as having any light of his own. Jesus is the sole source of true light for mankind.  By nature, John says, “men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (3:19).  The darkness within us, hates the light of Christ, exposing our inner evil thoughts and hidden sins.  In our thinking, we often say, ‘That’s thrown light on the subject” - illumination.  Some theologians read John 1:9 to mean that man’s reason is a gift of God, given at birth.  But the ‘coming into the world’ refers to Jesus, not to our moment of birth.

Lastly, light symbolises utter purity.  When Covid was rampant, scientists discovered that a short exposure to UV-C, an invisible wavelength of light, could sterilise a whole room very quickly.  John says, ‘the life was the light of men’.  It is not just Jesus’ teaching, but His whole life, that radiates light.  Just after refusing to condemn her, Jesus says to. The woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more…I am the Light of the world, He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life.”  We see from the way He deals with her, that His light includes grace as well as truth, forgiveness as well as moral clarity.  “He who says he abides in Him, ought to walk just as He walked” (1Jn 2:6).  

Glory

In English use the word glory to mean honour or distinction e.g. “He didn’t cover himself with glory, did he?”.  Alternatively, it can be used as a verb to mean exultation: we ’glory in the Lord’.  But in Hebrew, the word ‘kabod’ means weight, weightiness, importance.  Paul talks about our light affliction working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’ (2Cor 4:17).  So when John says, ‘We beheld His glory’, we could loosely paraphrase that as ‘We saw how important Jesus is, how weighty His words are’.

Of course to a Jew it also meant the radiance of God’s Presence.  His Shekinah glory had hovered over the Israelites as they journeyed through the desert at night, and later filled the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and the Temple.  This was the glory that gave Moses a bad case of sunburn each time he spent time in the Tent of Meeting, so that his face became radiant!

This glory of God was hidden when Jesus came to earth: he ‘veiled it in flesh’, He ‘laid aside His majesty’, ‘did not count equality with God something to be held onto’ and humbled Himself to become man.  It was only once the Father had revealed to Peter that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, that they could then see Jesus for whom He truly was (Matt 17:1-9)).  John sees Jesus’s hidden glory being displayed in each of the seven miraculous ‘signs’ he selects, not just in that one private revelation at the Transfiguration.  So after recounting the turning of water into wine in Cana, John says, “This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him” (Jn 2:11).  The healing of the nobleman’s son, the lame man at the Pool pf Bethesda, the feeding of the five thousand, the healing of the man born blind, raising Lazarus from the dead, and lastly, His own resurrection - they all revealed Jesus’s hidden glory.

But there was a fuller revelation of His glory still to come: for as He walks to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays for His disciples, “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they my behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world” (Jn 17:24).  Just as Moses saw the glory of God, and John saw it, we too are to see it.  For Paul says, “We all, with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord” (2Cor 3:18).

My prayer for you, as you read these studies, is that John's experience my become yours too:
"We beheld His glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth"

The Jews

John frequently refers to opposition from ‘the Jews’ - for example when the Pharisees excommunicate the man-born-blind  (Jn 9:19-22, 29-34).  However this phrase ‘the Jews’ is a mistranslation of a Greek word for Judaeans (όι ίυδαιοι) as an ethnic group distinct from Samaritans or Galileans.  John knows that Jesus Himself is a Judaean (4:43-45) even though many Judaeans thought He was Galilean (7:40-42).  And he records Jesus having many friends amongst the Judaeans, such as Lazarus and his sisters.  So John, though Galilean, is not anti-Judaean per se; and he is certainly not anti-semitic, as some would have us believe.  Rather, he sees the Judaeans’ disbelief in Jesus’ incarnation as being driven by an antiChrist spirit, as he explains in a subsequent letter (1Jn 4:2-3).