The Word of God
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction:
To begin our study of this special witness among the four gospel accounts concerning the life and work of Jesus, the Christ, we will first start with what makes John’s Gospel unique. We will then discuss what a Gospel is, and finally the date and occasion of the writing, as well as the author of this Gospel account. After this short introduction, we will be ready dive in to the first nineteen verses which many consider a prologue of what is to be recounted in John’s Gospel.
The Uniqueness of John’s Account
John’s Gospel is unique in that it is the only account of the life and work of Jesus in which the writer claims to be a direct witness of the events that he writes about. This is not to say that the other Gospel accounts are less reliable, or authoritative, or that they do not provide eyewitness testimony, it is only that John alone claims to have personally witnessed the things about which he writes.
John 21:24 (ESV)
This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.
This fact alone makes this Gospel account unique.
John’s Gospel is also unique in that he omits events and stories which the other Gospel writers consider important. Some of these events are Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as well as the episode of the transfiguration witnessed by his closest associates, Peter, James, and his brother, John. Additionally, absent from John’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry are the parables found in the synoptic Gospels, nor is the institution of what has become known as The Lord’s Supper present.
What do we mean when we call this work a gospel?
To begin with, while the Greek word, euangelion, meaning “gospel” does not appear in John’s Gospel, the concept of the gospel is a very prominent them in the book. Euangelion is a compound word, combining the Greek prefix, eu, meaning “good,” with the Greek word angelos, from which we get the word “angel” and “messanger.” Combined these words mean “the message or proclamation of good news.” Gerald Borchert, in the New American Commentary, says the following about the concept of messengers and the messages they carried:
John 1–11 (1) The Term “Gospel”
The noun form in its origin carried the expectation that the messenger would receive a reward for the delivery of a good message such as the joyous report of a victory in battle. Thus, messengers happily carried such announcements of victory and good news to expectant receivers like kings. But dispatched messengers charged with announcing defeat frequently failed to arrive at their destinations, or if they were forced to arrive, they would probably present a garbled form of the message to ensure their own self-preservation. Message and messengers were as a result generally linked inextricably in the minds of the ancients. Because of the tendency to self-preservation and self-aggrandizement in the Hellenistic world, however, messengers were sometimes regarded with suspicion.
Truthfulness of the messenger was, thus, an important goal. Would the messenger actually be willing to stake his life on his message?
We know from other accounts, both in the New Testament, as well as throughout church history, that the apostles and other followers of Jesus did often proclaim their message at the risk of suffering unprecedented persecution. In fact, they did believe in the truthfulness of the claims being made that they willing faced death, not only in the proclamation of the message, but in the embracing of its truthfulness
If we were to establish a genre for the Gospels, where would they fall in a literary framework? What type of literature are they?
First, we notice that John’s Gospel, like the synoptic Gospels, is written in a narrative style, laying out events in a story form. However, while we have referred to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as synoptic, which, according to the Oxford Language Dictionary, means “of or forming a general summary or synopsis,” the Gospel of John is unique in that it is much more of a theological treatise defining just who we are witnessing when we read about the God-man, Jesus, the Christ.
Jonathan Pennington, in his book, Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction, states “To what genre or type of literature do these narratives belong? Are they more like biographies, histories, news reports, documentaries, or virtue stories? Are they comparable to modern biographies or ancient ones, folk tales or novels, closed-circuit television or eyewitness accounts? Or are they a new and unique genre of their own?”
As we will discover, prior to the Gospel accounts being written down in the forms we have today, the “good new” of Jesus had been proclaimed since the time the followers of Jesus believed that he had risen from the dead. An example of this is found in Romans 2:16, where Paul states that he fully expects that
on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
In Acts 8:25, we read the following concerning the apostles and the proclamation of the gospel message throughout Israel in the early years of the church after the resurrection of Jesus.
Now when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans.
These examples of the “gospel,” or the content of the the message proclaimed by early believers in Jesus, established an expectation of what a written account concerning the life and death of Jesus would entail. The disadvantage the modern reader faces in understanding these ancient accounts is compounded not only by centuries, in fact millennia, of separation but also a cultural river distinct from the one we live in. While scripture in general, and the Gospel accounts in particular, contain many types of literary forms (i.e. apocalyptic writings, narrative stories, parables, etc.), the Gospels have generally been viewed as ancient biographies. This has not been without detractors in the form of form criticism, which is an “analysis of [scripture] by tracing the history of its content.” One of the challenges scripture, and especially the Gospel accounts, have faced from modern scholarship is the an expectation that is built on modern assumptions of what a biography should include. Jonathan Pennington, again states, “With increasing examples of ancient biographies being analyzed and sophisticated classifications of different types of ancient biographies, several scholars began to turn the tide toward seeing the Gospels not as unique per se nor as unliterary, but as a version or subgenre of the Greco-Roman biography. Today, these arguments have prompted a trend toward describing the Gospels as bioi, or “biographies,” acknowledging that these were not the same thing as modern biographies and that they also have much in common with ancient “histories” (historia) and other forms of writing.”
The date and occasion of the writing of John’s Gospel.
The Author: Like other Gospel narratives, John’s Gospel does not provide internal evidence regarding its authorship. Many names have been suggested for the authorship of the Gospel of John, from Lazarus to John Mark, the missionary who accompanied Paul and Barnabas in the book of Acts. The author refers to himself as the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” in six different passages within the gospel: 13:23, 19:26-27, 20:2-10, 21:7, 20, & 24. Tradition has held that John, the Son of Zebedee, was the author of this Gospel. John is clearly spoken of as an eyewitness of Jesus in the other Gospel accounts and was part of Jesus’ inner circle. John’s authorship is further supported by the writings and testimony of the patristic fathers: church fathers who lived in the immediate centuries following the death of the original apostles. Some of them were said to be acquainted with apostles or had been themselves disciples of the apostles. Their testimony gives increased support to the tradition of the beloved apostle John as the author of this book, increasing, exponentially, our confidence in the reliability and trustworthiness of this important Gospel account.
The date: Based on external archeological and textual evidence, we do not believe that John could have written his Gospel account after A.D. 110. There is a consensus of scholarly opinion, based on historical evidence of the expulsion of Jewish believers from Jerusalem, as recorded by John in 9:22, 12:42, and 16:2, that John probably wrote his gospel somewhere between A.D. 80 and 100. While this range of dates still provides us confidence that this account is the work of an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, an earlier date may be substantiated. There is evidence that suggests John may have been familiar with the synoptic writings, but more important than this is the fact that John appears to be familiar with the geopolitical conditions in Israel at the time of the synoptics, so rather than borrow from their separate accounts, John simply provides his own perspective as their contemporary, placing the writing of this book closer to A.D. 70, or 40 years removed from the actual events. This should not discourage us because a rich oral history of the Gospel stories most certainly circulated prior to John placing pen to parchment.
The Divine Communication
The Divine Communication
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
