Father Stephen De Young: So tonight we’re getting started in the Gospel of John. And as I’ve mentioned with the other Gospels on the podcast, technically we think of the title as being Just “John”, just the name of the author or “The Gospel of John” in a more general sense. But really the title is “The Gospel According to John”. So it’s the Gospel According to St. John, strictly speaking.

And the reason that’s important is that we talk about the four Gospels all the time. What the actual title emphasizes is that there’s really only one Gospel. There’s really only one Gospel of Jesus Christ. But we have four different accounts from four different perspectives of that one Gospel, that one set of events, the one life of the one Christ.

The word Gospel, the Greek word evangelion, is actually a word that was used for things other than biblical literature. But in Greco Roman literature, it’s only found in the plural evangelia. And the way it was used in the Roman world was, before Caesar or one of his generals or a senator and another important Roman official would come into a city, a herald would be sent into the city first to read the evangelia of the emperor or the general. And it was a series of accounts of their military victories and their achievements. So they would come in and they would say, “Hail Caesar, conqueror of Gaul, destroyer of the Germanic tribes, savior of the world,” run through their whole list of accomplishments.

So, when the New Testament writers pick up that word and put it into singular and talk about the evangelion of Jesus Christ, they’re talking about not just a story about Jesus or a set of stories about Jesus, but they’re talking about the story of the great victory, the great accomplishment that Jesus has accomplished.

Interlocutor: It’s the accomplishment

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so it’s not just any story, but it’s a particular type of story. This is the story of what Christ has accomplished for us, the victory he’s won. And then that story then has consequences for how we receive Him, because again, this was announced before that important person came into the city. And so the announcement of the Gospel contains within it the idea that Christ is going to return. And so, this is the announcement of who Christ is and what he’s done so that we can prepare ourselves now for his coming. So there’s a lot wrapped up in that little title.

And so, the Gospel According to St. John is the fourth of these accounts that we have. It is fourth in our usual order. Now, a lot of the manuscripts of the Bible we have, it comes first. And the reason it comes first in a lot of the manuscripts is the same reason that it comes first in the Gospel book that we have on the altar, and that’s that the first reading in the Gospel book is the reading for Pascha, the reading for the feast of the resurrection of Christ. And the Gospel reading for the feast of the resurrection of Christ is John 1:1-18. So it’s on Pascha that we begin reading the Gospel of John. So while it is the fourth Gospel in our Bibles, and sometimes referred to as the fourth Gospel, it’s first in that sense, in the sense of its prominence in the church year and how we structure our worship and the reading of the Gospels and worship.

The reason it’s fourth in most of our Bibles is that it was the last Gospel that was written in order. St. John was very young at the time he became a follower of Christ. You’ll notice in most of the depictions of him in icons, he and St. Thomas are the only ones without beards; that’s to indicate their youthfulness.

So, St. John wrote the gospel. The Gospel is the first thing that he wrote. He then wrote his three epistles and then wrote Revelation last. But he wrote all of those toward the end of the first century when he had become an elderly man.

Even scholars now agree he had access to the other three Gospels. The other three had not only already been written, but he was aware of them. And we’ll see as we go through the Gospel of John, when you compare Gospel According to St John to the other three Gospels, you’ll see that in a lot of places, St. John will fill in blanks. He’ll sort of explain things where if you didn’t have the other three Gospels, you wouldn’t know why it needed to be explained. But so he’s sort of filling in a gap.

A good example of that is in the other three Gospels, we have Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and everyone’s sort of excited to see him and cheering for him, but we’re never really told why. In St John’s Gospel, he tells us that he came into Jerusalem right after he raised Lazarus from the dead. And so, it was the excitement of the crowd having him seen raise a man from the dead after being four days in the grave. This is what caused them to identify him as the Messiah and sort of sweep him into Jerusalem. So he sort of explains… there’s a number of other examples we’ll see, sort of explains things that were because obviously you couldn’t write everything Jesus ever said or anything he ever did. You have to pick and choose. St. John will fill in some of those gaps from the other Gospels. Yes?

Interlocutor: Are there any other Gospels around that John would have been aware of? I know there were a lot eventually.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s the subject of some debate. There are no Gospels that we have now like the Gnostic, of the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter. Those are all from the second century, so those are all later. But St. Luke does say at the beginning of his Gospel that many people had set out to record the events of the life of Jesus. Well, we know of two of those, St. Matthew and St. Mark, but he says many and two isn’t many. There were probably others. We don’t know if those were full-fledged Gospels, if those were just individual stories or pieces of stories, sayings. And that those then sort of got picked up and brought into the gospels we have. So, yeah, there were written documents, but the only ones we have from the first century to go back to the first century for certain are the four that are canonical now.

St. John’s probably writing this around, most people agree around 90 AD. As he’s an older man. He’s writing it from Ephesus, the city of Ephesus to which St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians and also the Book of Acts. The Church of Ephesus was actually a very early center of Christianity. The Church there grew very quickly and St. Paul used it as sort of a base for his missionary journeys. He would go on a journey and then come back to Ephesus. And other saints were there as well. The Theotokos was there for a period of time with St. John. St. Mary Magdalene went to Ephesus and the Fathers say that some of the information we’ll see later on in the Gospel According to St. John, another place where it’s sort of filled in, the other three gospels have these very brief accounts of St. Mary’s Magdalene going to the tomb and not finding Jesus there. Whereas in St. John’s Gospel we hear the whole story of her going and encountering Jesus and that whole story. The fathers say that many of those details St. John got from St. Mary Magdalene because she was also there in Ephesus. Contra The Da Vinci Code, she did not go to France.

Interlocutor: You could just say that everything we are going to say is contra The Da Vinci Code.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but just as a brief aside, the real nail in the coffin of The DaVinci Code, if anyone ever asks you, is in the 7th century, the Bishop of Paris in France, Dionysius, wrote a letter to one of his fellow bishops talking about how wonderful his pilgrimage to Ephesus was because he saw the relics of St. Mary Magdalene there. And since he was a bishop in France, he would probably know if she had been in France and wouldn’t have gone on a pilgrimage. So, she went to Ephesus, and was there as well. So, there are many important figures, and this is why we have a large degree of confidence now that St. John’s Gospel contains this firsthand, not only his own firsthand testimony to what he witnessed as one of Christ’s disciples, but also St. Mary Magdalene, Christ’s mother, these other important people who are also witnesses are included in this account.

I say now, most people agree because for a long time, scholars, especially German scholars, were want to sort of try to push the Gospel of John away from the first century. Part of this is because, as we’ll talk about in a minute, St. John is known as St. John the Theologian because his Gospel is considered to be particularly deep and rich theologically, sort of a luxury he has because the other three Gospels were already written and have given us sort of, “Well, here’s the story, here’s the narrative,” so he can kind of take his time.

St. John’s Gospel, as we’ll see, as we go through, doesn’t tell us a lot of stories, but the stories he tells are very… he’ll have an entire chapter that’s 50 or 60 verses and it’s just one conversation between Jesus and one other person which you don’t find in the other three. The other three are sort of all action. “Then Jesus went here, then he went there, then he did this, then he did that”. St. John sort of luxuriates. But so because of that theological depth, they say, well, that can’t be from the first century because of course, they believe that Christianity evolved. It started out simple and then got more complex. And so since what St John is saying it’s so complex since he so clearly teaches it. As we’ll see, he very clearly teaches that Jesus is God. They don’t want the early Christians to believe that either. They want to say, oh, that’s something that developed later. They wanted to push St. John’s Gospel of the second century.

As proof that God has a sense of humor about scholars: several years ago, we found the oldest manuscript we have of any book of the New Testament, the oldest piece of any book. It’s from around 120 AD. And it’s a piece of the Gospel of John. And they found it in Egypt. So since St. John’s gospel was written in Ephesus in what’s now Turkey, and they found this copy in Egypt, it takes a few years to be copied and make its way to Egypt, meaning it was written a long time before 120. And so now even the sort of the skeptical say, “Evidently, okay, well, it’s from the end of the first century.”

Many of them still do not want to admit that St. John, the son of Zebedee, the disciple of Jesus, wrote it. But when they do their analysis, it’s again kind of funny, when you read one of these scholarly commentaries in the Gospel of John, they say, “Well, of course it wasn’t written by St. John, but it was written by a Palestinian Jew who was then living in what’s now Turkey.” They basically describe St John exactly. But it can’t have been him, because again, they don’t want to admit that this is written by an eyewitness. Because if you have an eyewitness to Jesus, someone who knew him, now coming, and a Jewish person who is a strong monotheist now saying that Jesus is God, that’s pretty powerful testimony. So we have to try and kind of disarm that somehow if we don’t want to believe it.

Interlocutor: There’s a recent book called How Jesus Became God. I haven’t read it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Bart Ehrman.

Interlocutor: I assume that it is the story of how simple Galilean peasant got transformed in people’s imaginations.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Bart Ehrman, who wrote that has a theory, basically, again, still holds this evolutionary theory. The Christianity started out as a sort of folk religion, just sort of Jesus said some wise things and people followed them, and then over time, he got turned into God, and this and that. But the problem is that sort of the weight of the text and the age of the text is against him and his hypotheses. And so basically his theory makes sense if you accept his presuppositions, which is that none of it’s true, none of it was written by eyewitnesses. One of the things he’ll say, he frequently says, just as a fact, is he’ll say the four Gospels, there’s no evidence they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John because they circulated anonymously. They didn’t have the names at the top originally. And that sounds like it might be true, but another Biblical scholar, Richard Bauckham, pointed out to him, well, if you have four of them, you have to have some way of identifying them. Right? You have to at least number them “one”, “two”, “three” and “four”. So you know which one you were talking about. And he said, we don’t have any evidence that they were ever called anything other than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So how could they have circulated anonymously? They have to have some way of… so it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But again, if you are trying to find grounds to reject them, you have to work at it.

So, as I mentioned, St John is one of three saints in the Orthodox Church who’s known as “The Theologian”. There’s St. John the Theologian, the disciple. There’s St. Gregory the Theologian, who is St. Gregory of Nazianzus in the late fourth century and St. Symeon the New Theologian. And this tells you everything you need to know about the Orthodox faith. The New Theologian lived in the 11th century, and he’s the new one. But so those are the three saints who are called “The Theologian”.

So this is an appellation. That means that someone had sort of unique spiritual insight, unique insight into who God is. And so, St John is the first one of those and the only one of the disciples to have that title. Because of this, you’ll often see the eagle used as a symbol for St. John and for his Gospel. Beginning with St. Irenaeus in the second century a number of the church fathers took the four living creatures in Daniel the one that had the head of the man, one with the head of a lion, one with the head of an ox and one with the head of an eagle and they said, “Well those represent the four Gospels” and they portioned them out and the eagle was considered to be symbolic of St. John’s Gospel because it sort of soars above as a spiritual gospel; it is sort of lofty and soars above the others and that is because of, as I mentioned that the time he takes, the depth he goes into.

But we’ll also see toward the latter half of his gospel the other three gospels that are usually called the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke tend to follow the same structure where about the last third is the story of Christ’s death and resurrection and then the first two thirds are sort of leading up to that. They’re sort of long prologues to Christ’s death and resurrection. St. John’s Gospel isn’t quite that clear cut in having sort of an arrow. He not only takes his time, but once you get to the last third of his gospel his account of Christ’s death is very short compared to the other three and then he spends more time on Christ’s resurrection appearances and he spends more time on Christ’s prayers and teaching to the disciples right before his death. There are several chapters there. On Holy Thursday night in Holy Week, that first Gospel reading that’s so long? That’s a huge chunk, several chapters of the Gospel of John, of Christ’s prayer and in there you get the passages that are really the building blocks for things like the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ and some of these very important theological principles are sort of laid out for the first time in the New Testament here in St. John’s Gospel.

And when we get to those passages we’re going to take our time going through St. John too because of this St. John’s Gospel because of that is a little more chewy than some of the others. You could certainly chew on a parable, take a parable and think about it. But say John’s Gospel and some of these discussions Jesus has each line you could sit and chew on for days, sort of process it. We’re not going to go quite that slowly but it is a little slower than some of the others.

Also in terms of the structure of St. John’s Gospel it’s different than the other three in that the other three gospels are written with sort of this through-line as if they take place over one year. It’s never explicitly said it’s one year, but there’s sort of this journey where Christ begins his ministry in Galilee he journeys down to Judea, down to Jerusalem, there he has his encounter with the Pharisees and the chief priests, He’s crucified and he rises again sort of in this straight arrow. St. John’s Gospel sort of moves in these cycles. He lays it out over three years. And it’s from St. John’s Gospel that we get the idea that Jesus’ ministry was three years long. So there are three cycles of the Jewish feasts, there are three times that Jesus goes to Jerusalem, not just one. And so it’s structured a little differently.

Most scholars in the past assumed that, well, this is just because St. John’s Gospel was written much later and is ahistorical, the other three are giving us the real history, and St. John’s Gospel is just sort of theological ramblings from later on.

But in actuality, the evidence is more the other way. One of the earliest church fathers to write about the New Testament books was a church father named Papias. We have to be a little careful when we quote Papias because we don’t actually have any of Papias’s works, we just have other people quoting Papias, other church fathers, but he lived at the end of the first century. Papias was a rough contemporary of St. Ignatius of Antioch and some of the other apostolic Fathers. And Papias tells us about the Gospel according to St. Mark, that St. Mark wrote down the life of Christ as it was taught to him by St. Peter, but not in order. So according to Papias, who’s our earliest witness, it’s the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that aren’t strictly following the chronological order. And it’s St. John who is giving us the actual chronology, who’s trying to lay out the chronology for us.

It’s also interesting to note that in addition to the idea of Jesus having a three-year ministry coming from St. John’s Gospel, the way we celebrate Holy Week is structured around St. John’s account. For example, we have Lazarus Saturday, the story of the raising of Lazarus is only in St. John’s Gospel that leads into Palm Sunday, which as I mentioned before, that’s part of how St. John sets it up. And then as the events unfold through Holy Week, it’s following the timeline that St. John sets up. And our way of celebrating Holy Week goes back to at the very least the fourth century. Because in the fourth century we have a diary of a woman named Egeria who took a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth century during Holy Week. And she talks about all the services. So we know they were doing that at least back to the fourth century, and probably earlier than that because it’s fairly complex. So usually, complex don’t just pop up. They’re probably doing it for some time before that, much earlier even than that.

So those are two very early witnesses to the idea that St. John’s Gospel is really historical and one of the things he’s trying to do in filling out the accounts of the other three is to give us a better idea of the actual historical chronology, the order of that these things happened and some of that cause and effect.

Interlocutor: Would you say that the Church generally goes with John when it has a choice?

Fr. Stephen: It definitely has an exalted place. I mean, the fact that it’s in the Pascha season that you read St. John’s Gospel, that gives it a sort of pride of place. So, yes, it definitely does have an elevated place because of, I think, the depth of the theology and the clarity of it. When I went through Bible studies in St. Luke’s Gospel, I tried to show that I think it’s very clear in St. Luke’s Gospel, for example, that St. Luke is trying to show us that Jesus is both God and man. But his strategy is to show rather than tell. So rather than saying Jesus is God and then telling us Jesus is man, he will show Jesus doing things that only God can do, like calming the storm, raising the dead, and then he’ll show us Jesus doing human things like sleeping, like sweating in the garden of Gethsemane. So, he doesn’t tell us, he shows us.

St. John will just come out and tell us. He just comes out and says he reports Jesus saying “before Abraham was, I am”. Well, that’s pretty clearly Jesus saying that he’s God flat out, no mistaking it. So, yeah, there’s a clarity there too, to the theology where you don’t have to do as much interpretation to know what John is saying. That’s true of any number of things. With Judas, as we’ll see St. John from the first time, he mentions Judas, has nothing good to say about Judas. There’s no suspense about who it is, who’s going to betray Jesus. It’s right off the jump. This guy is the devil, he’s going to betray Jesus right from the get-go. So St. John is very clear in those things. So at the same time that there’s depth, there’s also clarity and a fair amount of precision. And that precision is why so many scholars have balked at it being early. That the church would have had that precise an understanding of who Christ is that early is a testimony to its truth. And so if you’re not agreeing with the truth of it, you have to get rid of that, you have to get rid of it.

Another thing that has changed in terms of interpretation of St. John’s Gospel is for a long time, part of trying to push it later was a lot of people tried to take a very Greek reading of St. John’s Gospel in the sense of Greek philosophy. So they tried to… there’s this depth, there’s this theological depth and precision. So another way to try to get around that was to try and say, “Oh, well, see, this is just Greek philosophy intruding into the Bible.” They tried to sort of spin things into Greek philosophical notions.

That really changed in the 1940s when we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, because a lot of the imagery that you see, like light and darkness and this kind of imagery that St. John uses a lot that they were saying was Greek philosophical was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was very common in the Jewish sects of the day. So now things have come full circle and now people are arguing that St. John’s Gospel is actually the most Jewish of any of the four. St. Luke’s was sort of aimed at… he, as a companion of St. Paul aimed his at everybody. So he was writing this to a church that included a lot of Gentiles already. So you’ll find St. Luke, if he uses a term or something from Judaism, he will sort of explain what it means. That is the Passover, that is the feast of unleavened bread that is… he’ll break it all down, whereas St. John will just refer to these things very offhandedly and sometimes just sort of allude to things.

So, for example, it’s in St. John’s Gospel that Jesus says, “As the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, so the Son of Man will be lifted up,” and St. John doesn’t stop and explain, “Well, this is referring to in the Book of Numbers when Moses lifted up…” He just expects you to know what he’s talking about. Which suggests he’s writing to an audience that’s very familiar with the Old Testament scriptures.

And we’ll see, we’ll probably get to it tonight in a few minutes here when we get into John 1:1, he begins his Gospel with the same words that begin the Book of Genesis. So he’s trying to make these connections almost immediately to the Old Testament to show that the revelation that’s now coming through Jesus Christ is the fulfillment, is the accomplishment of that, not something different, not something new and unique, but that it’s part and parcel of that.

So, as I mentioned very briefly in the beginning in passing, the St. John who wrote this is St. John, the son of Zebedee, whose brother was St. James. St. James was the first of the disciples who was martyred in the Book of Acts. He was killed by Herod very early in the Christian movement. St John, his brother, is the only one of the disciples who was not martyred. He suffered greatly for the faith. He ended his life and wrote the Book of Revelation from exile on the island of Patmos. And when we hear “exile on an island”, we may think of Robinson Crusoe or something like he’s left adrift. That’s not really accurate. The island of Patmos in the Roman period was a salt mine. So being exiled to Patmos meant he was convicted to hard labor as an elderly man in a salt mine. So he did suffer greatly for the faith, but he was not actually executed. All the other disciples were at various points down the line. But he lived into old age to write his Gospel.

Other things, other themes and things I’ll sort of mention as we get to them. That probably suffices for an introduction, unless anybody has any questions before we get into….

Interlocutor: Who was the saint who helped him write it?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, St Prochorus? Yes. St Prochorus. You’ll sometimes see, like, if you see the icons of the four evangelists writing their Gospels, you’ll see St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke writing. And then when you get to St. John’s Gospel, you’ll see an elderly man, and then you’ll see a young man sitting with him writing. And the young man sitting with him writing is St Prochorus. It was very common at this time in history for writers not to be the one to physically sit down and write. They would dictate… there’s sort of a process. St. Paul did this too. In fact, one of my favorite Bible trivia trick questions is who wrote the Book of Romans? And people say St. Paul. Well, if you flip to the last chapter of the Book of Romans, it says, “I Tertius, write this to you” because Tertius was the scribe who wrote it for St. Paul. And those scribes were called in Greek, amanuensis is a fancy word, basically the secretary. And the way it would work is that the person writing the work, the letter, would dictate it verbally. The scribe or secretary would write it down, and then it would be given back to the original author who would go through and make changes and corrections as they saw fit. Those corrections would then be made by the secretary, and it would be sent, and when I say sent, of course, they didn’t have a post office, so it would usually be the secretary who would actually take the letter and bring it to wherever it was going.

So, when St. Paul writes to the church at Ephesus, the scribe who wrote it down would have taken it to the church at Ephesus and read it to them and would have been expected to answer questions from them if there was something they didn’t understand. Because, of course, he was there with St. Paul and would have an idea of where he was going and what he was doing if it was unclear.

Interlocutor: Do we know anything else about St Prochorus?

Fr. Stephen: This is about it. Yeah, but he’s the one who worked with St. John in the writing of these things.

St. Paul at one point even says, and of course, since we don’t have the original, we can’t see what it actually looked like. But he says, “Look, I’m writing this with my own hand,” where he sort of signed it to indicate that, “Look, this is really from me. I’m writing this myself. That’s how important this is.” But this was the common practice. But it creates an interesting sort of dilemma when you talk about who “wrote” this book.

Later on, when we get to some of the other books. St. Paul’s epistles, when we come to the book of Hebrews, one of the big things about the book of Hebrews is we of course, still call it in the church, we read it the epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews. Well, everyone now pretty much agrees that St. Paul, quote-unquote, didn’t write it. Even most of the church fathers say they don’t think St. Paul wrote it. But he didn’t really write in the sense of sitting down and writing any of his other epistles either. And some of his epistles say from St. Paul, from Paul and Timothy. So St. Timothy wasn’t on those just acting as a secretary, he was part of the writing process. So what you have with St. Paul’s epistles, for example, is you have this sort of spectrum. You have some things where it’s basically him giving dictation. You have things he’s writing with a co-author. You have things like Hebrews which reflect his thought and his preaching more indirectly and then are written down by someone else. But they’re sort of all under this banner of “written by St. Paul”, coming from St. Paul.

And as I mentioned with Papias, St. Mark’s Gospel is an example of that too. Papias is very clear that it’s really St. Peter’s testimony that St. Mark is writing down by St. Peter’s authority, and St. Peter’s the eyewitness who stands behind it. But we all call it the Gospel according to St. Mark because St. Mark is the one who actually wrote it down. There’s sort of an interesting series of relationships there with the New Testament books in terms of who wrote them. Saint Prochorus was involved, how involved he was in the grammar. And it’s up to debate, everything we have that St. John wrote the Gospel, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, John and Revelation are all very consistent in their style and their writing and everything. So even the people who want to say that St. John didn’t write all of them or they were written by different people will say, “Well, whoever wrote the later ones was copying the earlier one because they’re so similar. They’re so similar in that regard.”