Reading the Gospels Together The Storyline of John’s Gospel – Part 1 We have come to the last of our gospels, the gospel of John. As we begin I want to remind you that it is my conviction that the gospel of John is independent of all the other gospels. That is, John did not use and likely was not aware of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It is also likely that none of those gospels used the gospel of John or were aware of John’s gospel – although we have noted that Luke has some connections which we will need to think about later. The point here is to emphasize that the gospel of John is an independent story of Jesus. There are a few special challenges that we will need to consider as we work with the gospel of John. First of all, John uses much more theological language as he writes his gospel. In fact, at times the gospel of John seems to abandon the story-mode and become more like a theological treatise. For example, in the third chapter of John Jesus is in conversation with Nicodemus but soon the conversation seems to evaporate and John begins to discuss in theological language the purpose of Jesus’ coming and the reason why human beings accept or reject Jesus. When John writes his most famous verse – John 3:16 – it is no longer Jesus speaking, but John theologizing about how God so loves the world that he gave his only son and that people who reject Jesus love the darkness rather than the light. To be sure each of the other writers is a theologian too, but they are more covert in their theology. John is straightforward in often presenting his theology. Related to this is the fact that John uses far more symbolic language than the others. In the example above darkness has little to do with physical darkness but is a symbolic term. John presents many of these symbolic references. Theology and Symbolism present John’s readers with a challenge. A second challenge readers of John’s gospel encounter is that there are several places in John’s gospel where the “seams” are still showing as John “sews” together his narrative. The best example is in the story of Jesus at the last supper. Chapters 13 and 14 are about that experience; and then, at the end of chapter 14, Jesus tells his disciples to “rise and leave” but the story continues for three more chapters in the same setting of the supper. Another example is that the gospel of John has two distinct endings – one at the end of chapter 20 and a second at the end of chapter 21. All of these “seams” indicate that the gospel of John is in some way a compilation of different writers – or perhaps one writer who “hammered together” a variety of pieces to make a whole. It is likely that the gospel of John is a gospel that grew over time through the work of more than one writer until the final product as we have it was produced. This challenge of the “seams” is related to a third challenge and that is that John is the only gospel that makes the claim that at least some part of it, if not the whole, comes from the hand of an eyewitness who was one of Jesus closest disciples. John tells his readers of a follower of Jesus he calls “the beloved disciple” or sometimes just “the other disciple” who bears witness to events in the story. We have noticed that Mark, Matthew, and Luke tell their story as an omniscient narrator who is outside of the story and yet knows everything that is going on in their story and even in the minds of the characters in their story. John shares this same reality; however, in the presence of the “beloved disciple” the narrator becomes at least to a limited extent a character in the story too. It is my conviction that the “beloved disciple” is a real person and that he does indeed stand at the foundation of John’s gospel – though it is also my conviction that the gospel of John as we have it today was not written by this disciple but by his followers. Just who the “beloved disciple” was is impossible to determine. We can do better to eliminate who he likely was not than to establish who he was. Tradition has said that John, the son of Zebedee, was the beloved disciple, but that is almost certainly not true. John has deliberately left the identity of the beloved disciple to be anonymous. We need to respect that, but the reality of a “beloved disciple” as an eyewitness participant who stands behind the community who has given us the gospel of John is important. And it does present us with a challenge. One further challenge that presents itself is that we do not have only the gospel of John but we have three letters of John that surely come from the same community and belong together. So, perhaps more than a challenge, the existence of the letters of John presents us with an opportunity. They help us to get a better perspective about the time in which John was written. As with each of the other writers I will attempt to give some indication about the circumstances and possible time in which the gospel of John was written. Since I have already said that this gospel likely is the product of more than one hand, written over time, these comments will pertain to the final version of the gospel of John as we have it. Likely there is much material in John’s gospel that comes from an earlier time. It is simply impossible for us to determine which parts and when those parts were written. We can only deal with the final product anyway so there is where my focus will rest. As one reads the gospel of John something that becomes apparent is that a bitter and painful split has occurred between Jewish followers of Jesus and Jews who reject Jesus. The followers of Jesus have been “cast out of the synagogue” and are no longer welcome or even recognized as a possible expression of Judaism. If we pay attention to Luke’s story and especially to the book of Acts, the picture that emerges at first is of Jewish believers in Jesus and those Jews who do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah living at least in some toleration of one another. By the time we get to John’s gospel that toleration has evaporated – and both sides shares in the split. In some ways, the gospel of John reveals a reality when Christianity has emerged as a distinct religious belief apart from its parent, Judaism. We need to remember Luke’s conviction that Jewish Christians represented an expression of Judaism still within the family of Judaism. By the time of John’s gospel it would be better to speak of Christians and Jews. So, the crisis that lies behind the gospel of John as we have it today is this bitter and painful split. Such a split likely became reality in the last decade or so of the first century of even the beginning of the second century. It is likely that the final form of John’s gospel as we have it today came from the 90’s or perhaps a bit later. Again, it is important to remember that there is likely material in John that was written much earlier than that.