John

John 1:1-18 does something no other gospel attempts. Matthew begins the story with Abraham, Luke with a priest in the temple, Mark with a prophet in a desert. John begins before there is anything to begin with. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The gospel opens with the same two Greek words that open the Greek Old Testament at Genesis 1:1, en arche, in the beginning, and then diverges: Genesis continues with God created, John with was the Word. The reader is told by the first syllable which book to have in mind.

Logos is a word with two long histories, and the prologue appears to be using both. In Greek philosophy, particularly Stoic, the logos is the rational principle ordering the cosmos, the reason that makes the world intelligible; Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish thinker writing in Greek in the decades before the gospels, used logos extensively as an intermediary between the transcendent God and the world. In the Hebrew scriptures the word of the LORD is what creates in Genesis 1, comes to the prophets, and does not return empty in Isaiah 55:11, and the closely related figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is present with God at creation and delights in the human race. A reader from either background is met at the door.

Then verse 14 does what neither background prepares for. The Word became flesh. The Greek sarx is the blunt word, not a polite one for body; it is the word for meat. No Stoic logos becomes flesh, and Philo's does not. The verb the BSB translates made His dwelling is eskenosen, pitched a tent, which for a reader of the Torah puts the tabernacle of Exodus 40 in the room: the glory that filled the tent has moved into a human life. Everything distinctive about John's Christology is loaded into that one sentence, and the rest of the gospel unpacks it.

The prologue also plants nearly every image the gospel will use: life, light, darkness, witness, glory, receiving and not receiving, children of God, grace and truth. Read the prologue carefully and you have read the whole book in outline. Note as well the strange intrusions of John the Baptist at verses 6 to 8 and 15, breaking the rhythm of what otherwise reads like a hymn. Many scholars think an existing hymn has been adapted with prose insertions, partly to guard against an overvaluing of the Baptist; others think the whole is a single composition with deliberate interruptions. The prose insertions are noticeable either way, and you can hear them if you read it aloud.

John does not call Jesus' miracles mighty works. He calls them signs, semeia, and the difference is programmatic. A sign is not primarily a display of power; it is a pointer, and it fails if you stop at it. The first one, water into wine at Cana, closes with the statement that Jesus revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him. The sign is doing what the prologue said the incarnation does.

The usual list runs to seven: the wine at Cana in chapter 2, the healing of the official's son in 4, the paralysed man at the pool in 5, the feeding of the five thousand in 6, the walking on the sea in 6, the man born blind in 9, and the raising of Lazarus in 11. Be honest with students that seven is a scholarly tidy-up rather than a Johannine label. John numbers only the first two, as the first sign and the second sign, and then stops counting. Lists differ over whether the walking on the sea counts, since it is not public and has no discourse attached, and some would include the catch of fish in chapter 21 or the resurrection itself. The number seven is attractive and may well be intended, but the text does not state it.

What the text does do, repeatedly, is attach a discourse to a sign so that the sign is explained by the words and the words are grounded in the sign. He feeds five thousand and then says I am the bread of life. He heals a man born blind and then the argument runs for a whole chapter about who is really blind. He raises Lazarus after saying I am the resurrection and the life. The structure teaches a method: the act without the word is a wonder, and the word without the act is a theory.

Chapter 6 shows how demanding this is. The crowd, having been fed, comes looking for more bread, and Jesus tells them in 6:26 that they seek him not because they saw signs but because they ate the loaves and had their fill. He then gives a discourse so hard that in 6:66 many of his disciples turn back and no longer walk with him. In John, the signs do not compel faith; they divide. That is the consistent pattern of the book, and it is why chapter 12 can end with a quotation from Isaiah 6 about eyes that do not see, the same passage the synoptics attach to the parables.

The stated purpose in 20:30-31 sums it up: Jesus performed many other signs not written in this book, and these are written so that you may believe. There is a well-known textual variant in that verse, between an aorist and a present subjunctive, which would mean roughly that you may come to believe or that you may go on believing. The manuscripts are divided, the difference bears on whether the gospel is aimed at outsiders or at a church, and it cannot be settled from the evidence we have.

Seven times in John, Jesus says I am and adds a predicate: the bread of life in 6:35, the light of the world in 8:12, the gate in 10:7 and 9 (the Greek thyra, which many older translations render door), the good shepherd in 10:11 and 14, the resurrection and the life in 11:25, the way and the truth and the life in 14:6, and the true vine in 15:1. Every one of them is an image drawn from Israel's scriptures rather than from general religion. Bread from heaven is the manna. Light is the pillar of fire and the servant who is a light to the nations. The shepherd is God in Psalm 23 and Ezekiel 34, where God promises to shepherd the flock himself because the appointed shepherds have failed. The vine is Israel in Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80. In each case Jesus takes something Israel said of God or of itself and applies it to himself, without argument, as though it needed none.

Separate from those are the absolute uses, where ego eimi stands with no predicate at all and the Greek has nothing to complete the phrase. The clearest is 8:58, before Abraham was, I am (the BSB's footnote gives this literal form; its text reads before Abraham was born, I am!), after which they pick up stones. Others are at 8:24 and 8:28, at 13:19, and at 18:5-6, where the arresting party falls to the ground when he says it. Notice that the BSB prints I am He in every one of those places; the Greek has only ego eimi, I am, with no He, and the BSB gives no footnote to say so. The added He cuts both ways in English: it can be read as supplying a predicate (I am the one you are looking for), and it is also exactly how the BSB renders God's own words in Isaiah 43:10 and 25 (the Hebrew at 43:10 is ani hu, I am He, and at 43:25 anoki anoki hu; the Greek Old Testament has bare ego eimi). So the English hides the bare Greek without settling the question, and whether the missing predicate is to be supplied or left empty is the very thing under discussion here. Only at 8:58 does the BSB print a bare I am. The background is Exodus 3:14 and a string of passages in Isaiah 40 to 55 where God says in the Greek Old Testament I am he, notably Isaiah 43:10 and 25.

It is worth saying plainly where the caution lies. Not every occurrence of ego eimi in John is a divine claim; the phrase is ordinary Greek for it is I, and the man born blind uses it in 9:9 to say that he is the one. The argument turns on context, on the absence of a predicate where one is grammatically needed, and on the reaction of the hearers. In 8:58 the reaction settles it, because nobody stones a man for claiming to be old.

The wider question these sayings raise is the one every reader of John eventually asks. The synoptic Jesus speaks in short sayings, aphorisms and parables, and rarely discusses his own identity directly. The Johannine Jesus speaks in long, looping discourses in a vocabulary that is indistinguishable from the narrator's own; the words of Jesus in 3:16 and the following verses run on until it is genuinely unclear where the quotation stops, and the same is true of John the Baptist's speech at the end of chapter 3. If John were transcribing, you would expect his own prose and his sources' prose to differ. They do not.

There are three standard responses, and they are not mutually exclusive. That Jesus taught differently in different settings, briefly to Galilean crowds and at length in Judean disputes, which John reports and the synoptics do not. That John, after decades of preaching this material, has rendered it in his own voice, in the way an ancient historian rendered a speech, aiming at what was said rather than the exact words. And that the gospel presents itself as Spirit-guided interpretation, since 14:26 and 16:13 promise that the Spirit will teach and remind and guide into all truth, which is close to a statement of method. Which of these carries most weight is disputed. What no responsible reading can do is pretend the question does not arise.

Chapters 13 to 17 are one continuous scene, a fifth of the gospel, on the last night. There is no institution of the bread and cup in John; in its place there is a basin and a towel. Jesus washes the feet of the men who are about to fail him, including the one who will betray him, and then says he has given them an example. Anyone who wants to know John's ethics should start there rather than with the discourses, because the discourses interpret the action.

Farewell speeches were a known form in Jewish literature. Jacob blesses his sons in Genesis 49, Moses speaks at length in Deuteronomy before his death, Joshua gathers the tribes at Shechem, and the pattern recurs in second-temple works such as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The elements are standard: the imminent departure is announced, the successors are commissioned, the community is warned of coming trouble, and a final prayer or blessing is given. John 13 to 17 has every element, and chapter 17 is the prayer.

The distinctive content is the Paraclete. Five passages, at 14:16-17, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7-11 and 16:13-15, promise another Advocate (the BSB's word), parakletos, a word from the law court meaning one called alongside, an advocate. The Spirit here is not a force but is spoken of with personal pronouns, will teach and remind, will bear witness, will convict the world, will guide into all truth, and will glorify the Son rather than himself. This is the densest teaching on the Spirit in the gospels, and later Trinitarian formulation draws on it heavily.

The mood of the discourse is worth attending to. It alternates between distress and assurance in a way that is psychologically exact for a last night. Do not let your hearts be troubled sits alongside the warning that they will be put out of the synagogues and that whoever kills them will think he is offering service to God. That warning in 16:2 is one of the reasons many scholars locate the gospel's final form in a community that had experienced expulsion from synagogue life, a reconstruction associated above all with J. Louis Martyn's work in 1968. The reconstruction is influential and has been criticised for resting on the disputed dating of a synagogue benediction against heretics, so treat it as a proposal rather than a fact.

And note the seam. At the end of 14:31 Jesus says Get up! Let us go on from here, and then talks for three more chapters before anyone moves. Explanations include a later insertion of chapters 15 to 17, an unfinished revision by the author, a deliberate dramatic device, or the simple fact that people say let us go and then keep talking. Nothing forces a choice, and the honest thing is to notice the seam rather than to smooth it.

First, the scale of the difference. John has no parables in the synoptic sense, no exorcisms, no transfiguration, no temptation in the wilderness, no institution of the Lord's Supper, no Sermon on the Mount, no Gethsemane agony as the others tell it, and no apocalyptic discourse. He has the wedding at Cana, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the man at the pool, the man born blind, Lazarus, the footwashing and the farewell discourse, none of which appear in the other three. The ministry is largely in Judea rather than Galilee, runs across at least three Passovers, and the temple clearing stands at the beginning. Roughly ninety per cent of John's material has no synoptic parallel, the exceptions being the Baptist, the feeding and the walking on the sea in chapter 6, the anointing, the entry into Jerusalem, and the passion and resurrection.

Clement of Alexandria, reported by Eusebius, gives the oldest explanation: that John, last of all, seeing that the outward facts had been set out in the other gospels, was urged by his friends and inspired by the Spirit to compose a spiritual gospel. That view, which assumes John knew the others and set out to supplement them, was standard for most of church history. Percival Gardner-Smith's short book in 1938 argued that the apparent contacts are better explained by common oral tradition than by literary dependence, and C. H. Dodd's Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel in 1963 made the full case for John resting on an independent stream of tradition, some of it early and historically valuable. Independence became the dominant view for several decades. The pendulum has since swung back part of the way. Scholars including Richard Bauckham, Mark Goodacre and Wendy North have argued that John shows knowledge at least of Mark, pointing to shared details such as the three hundred denarii valuation of the ointment and the two hundred denarii of bread at the feeding, and to the way John's narrative seems at points to assume knowledge his readers must get elsewhere, for instance that Jesus was baptised, which John never narrates but which 1:32-34 presupposes. Others hold a middle position in which John knew one or more of the others at a distance, or knew them well but felt free to compose independently. There is no consensus. What is agreed is that John is not simply a fifth column in a synopsis, and that his differences are too systematic to be explained by carelessness.

Second, the author. The gospel never names him. It attributes itself, in 21:24, to the disciple whom Jesus loved, who testifies to these things and who has written them down, with an unidentified we affirming that his testimony is true. Irenaeus, around 180, says that John the disciple of the Lord, who leaned on his breast, published the gospel while living at Ephesus, and Irenaeus claims a personal link through Polycarp, who he says knew John. That is the traditional identification with John son of Zebedee, and it was essentially unchallenged until the modern period.

The alternatives, each held by serious people. Papias, again through Eusebius, distinguishes in a single confusing sentence between the apostles, including John, and a John the elder who was still alive in his day; Eusebius himself concluded there were two Johns at Ephesus, and Martin Hengel argued at length that the elder, not the son of Zebedee, is the author. Richard Bauckham holds a version of this while maintaining that the elder was an eyewitness. Raymond Brown proposed an anonymous beloved disciple whose testimony stands behind a community that produced the gospel in stages, with a final editor responsible for chapter 21 and for smoothing some of the seams. A minority have proposed Lazarus, noting that he is the one the sisters describe in 11:3 as the one You love, before the beloved disciple first appears in chapter 13. Against the traditional view, critics point to the absence of the sons of Zebedee from the gospel except in the appendix, to the beloved disciple's apparent acquaintance with the high priest in 18:15, which fits a Jerusalem figure better than a Galilean fisherman, and to the Judean concentration of the whole book. Against the alternatives, defenders of tradition point out that Irenaeus is our earliest witness, that his chain of transmission is short, and that reconstructions of anonymous communities are inferences from the text they are meant to explain.

For dating, the anchor is Papyrus 52, the Rylands fragment of John 18, found in Egypt and long dated on handwriting to around 125 to 150, which would put the gospel itself earlier. Brent Nongbri showed in 2005 that palaeographical dating of this kind carries a wider margin than is usually admitted, and that P52 could be later in the second century. Most still date the gospel to the last decade or two of the first century, but the confidence once placed in that single fragment was greater than it could bear. Here, as with the authorship, the discipline is to say what the evidence supports and stop there.