Visual Commentaries. All Podcasts. Bible Reader. Croatian Hrvatski. Dutch Nederlands. Finnish Suomi. German Deutsch. Hungarian Magyar. Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia. Italian Italiano. Norwegian Norsk. Polish Polski. Swahili Kiswahili. Swedish Svenska. Back to Blog. Strauss 4 years ago. Table of Contents. No one comes to the Father except through me. John John — Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, makes known the invisible God. You noticed correctly that John is different.
As an eagle, John rises above the horizon and flies high in the sky from which it drops unexpectedly to center on its prey, Jesus the Word of God, Jesus the pre-existent Son of God. There is not a hint of doubt or ambiguity. Jesus is divine from the very beginning. Why is that so? What is the motivation, as you put it, behind such a description? He is trying to make an apology, a convincing apology for his view of who Jesus was —and still is- for his community.
The apology was necessary because the public perception about who Jesus was had been influenced by the way Jesus died: executed by the Romans.
How do you change such a negative connotation, namely, that the leader of your movement was an outlaw who deserved, in the eyes of the Empire, death by crucifixion? Well, you make an as exalted as possible apology, a defense of who your leader really was, because in so doing you are making an apology of who you are.
You are actually defending yourself, and your group, against external accusations. The historical circumstances for the writing of John may have been the situation in Palestine that developed after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE by the Romans. This catastrophic event brought the Jewish communities into a deep theological crisis not too different from the one produced by the Babylonian exile in the 6 th.
Century BCE. What does that say about God and, conversely, what does that say about us? Is God still with us? And if so, how do we know it? Some Jewish communities answered this dilemma by turning to the study of the Law and to prayer as activities that came to replace the now-forever- gone temple and its sacrificial system.
Others turned to an event that had changed their lives: the words, deeds, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, who they believed to be the Jewish Messiah, the pre-existent Son of God. This belief came also to replace, for some Jewish people, the temple system. The differences with the other gospels reside on the fact that the community that produced the Gospel of John, because of its specific historical circumstances, used a set of traditions that best served their apologetic purpose.
Content was determined by context. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. Each of the gospels record when Jesus calls his disciples. Only in John, some of his disciples bring their friends and family to meet him, where they too are called to be disciples.
Thomas insisted that he needed to physically see the resurrected Jesus before he would believe. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. When Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for water in John 4, the encounter becomes a powerful lesson. The entire prologue , functions like an overture to an opera, as John touches on themes that will be developed later in the book.
John also connects the ministry of Jesus to the Jewish Calendar, with its various festivals, as Jesus is seen to visit Judea over a three-year period, in contrast to the one-time visit to Jerusalem as an adult Palm Sunday , described in the Synoptics. Jesus teaches in long discourses in John, but not using many parables. In addition to the events, there are saying of Jesus that are shared with the Synoptics.
A few examples are:. The early church concluded that we needed the four presentations of Jesus that we have in the New Testament.
Each author brings a unique perspective—stylistic as well as theological—to the story of Jesus. Sign up for a course coupon. Enter your email address to receive the latest N.
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