Transcript
For the second week, a joy because you have a treat in store for you.
When I arrived here 13 months ago, apart from Jack Cooper, the first person I met was our
speaker.
I've seen him subsequently a number of times out on the back porch of the center of continuing
education, working on another of his splendid books on biblical teaching.
Now our speaker is not a professor to seminary, nor at a college or university, he's a pastor.
And I think my special joy is that Earl Palmer represents for many of us not only a kind of
exciting, scintillating, biblical teaching which you will hear, but the model of how teaching
takes place in the heart of the parish.
For he is the pastor of the first Presbyterian church in Berkeley, California.
His parish situated right at the heart of that great university.
There's a kind of special providence I think that Earl is there.
He was converted while a student at the University of California and is returned to be a pastor
of that church.
During his tenure, they had to redo, really build again the sanctuary.
If you visit there someday, it has a special feel I've had the privilege of sharing in
the service of worship.
There's a great glass that comes around the outside on purpose so that people from
the university as you're preaching, you'll see them walk up to the church and purine to
see what's going on, and better yet they'll open the door and walk in.
And if they come in, they will find on any given Sunday morning hundreds of students,
faculty, and staff from the university who have come to expect from Earl a thoughtful,
biblical message, a tremendous in touch with literature and drama and the currents of
modern culture.
Earl is a graduate of Princeton Seminary.
He's a trustee of this seminary.
He served at the University Presbyterian church in Seattle, Washington, where he had a
tremendous ministry with students.
He served as pastor of the Union Church in Manila, the Philippines, and now he is in Berkeley,
and now he is in Princeton. Earl, we welcome you.
It's my privilege to lead four studies during this week in the Gospel of John.
The Gospel of John begins with a song, verses 1 through 18, more an overture.
It's like an overture.
Almost as if John wrote the book of John beginning with verse 19 and following the narration
of that book, he then came back and wrote this overture.
I think that's the way most overtures are composed.
Learned and low, wrote my Fair Lady, composed all the songs, the whole sequences that come
together to make that musical, and then write the overture.
In the overture, they hint at songs that are later played in full detail, so that in
the overture you get the introduction and the suggestion of themes and of musical numbers
that are later fully developed.
This is exactly what we find in the overture that begins the Gospel of John.
Open up with me and we'll start right in.
I despise Bible studies and I despise commentaries that spend about 45 or 50 or 100 pages in
introduction and then finally the text.
I don't agree with too many things Rudolph Bultmann's commentary on John, but the one thing
I do like is that he is very first page of the commentary is John 1-1 and then he weaves
in the introduction as he starts, then I start disagreeing with him from then on.
But I like the fact that he starts John 1-1.
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 anything made that was made.
And he was life and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
We're meeting up with a lot of favorite Johanna in words.
This word life and light that are going to play such a big part in this Gospel.
The opening of the song of John 1 sounds very much like the book of Genesis.
In the beginning God created in the beginning God said let there be light.
Then comes the first of two interruptions in the prologue or in the opening song.
By the way this is also a Johanna in Mark.
John loves to interrupt himself with a size and this will be a feature you're going to
notice all the way through the Gospel of John.
The first of two interruptions.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
He came for testimony to bear witness to the light that all may be lead through him.
He was not the light but came to bear witness to the light.
And now John introduces and subsequently will discover he's introducing John the Baptist,
not himself.
Now back to the song.
The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.
He was in the world.
Notice this personal pronoun.
And the world was made through him.
You will see John loves to regather his argument.
He's regathering the song.
Gathering the great themes we already discovered that all things were made through him.
Now he repeats that again.
He was in the world.
The world was made through him.
Yet the world knew him not.
He came to his own home.
His own people received him not.
But the beginning of a whole series of surprises in the Gospel of John.
To all who received him.
Now we're getting the beginnings of John's faithful vocabulary and the word receive is
a part of his faithful vocabulary just as it is of Paul's.
But to all who received him who believed in his name.
Notice how he's defined the word pistis, faith, by the word receive.
He gave power to become children of God who were born not a blood nor of the will of a
flesh or of the will of God, of the will of man but of God.
Now the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Full of grace and truth.
Now we have a non-Johannine word.
This word grace will not appear in John's vocabulary except in this introduction.
It's interesting.
This word caress grace which is so heavy in Paul's vocabulary and this is probably one
argument in favor of dating the book of John after Paul.
Paul perhaps John picks up this word that Paul in effect coins and puts it into this
prologue.
But it's not his vocabulary.
He doesn't use it again.
He now introduces us that marvelous word, surprise gift love is reading the way Paul defines
grace, caress.
And now notice the way Paul, now notice the way John works for that word.
The word became flesh, dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
We have beheld his glory.
The glory is of the only son from the father.
Now the second interruption, John loves the sides.
Here we get another interruption.
Some bore witness to him.
In fact, notice the RSV can only handle this linguistically by putting a parenthesis in
the text.
There's no parenthesis as you know in Greek manuscripts.
But they're trying to show that here we have an interruption in the song.
John bore witness to him and cried.
This is he of whom I said he who comes after me ranks before me.
For he was before me.
Two interruptions in the song.
I think a form critic would make the observation and it's a good observation that this double
interruption of John's opening song shows that in the church at the time this gospel
is written, there is a problem.
Perhaps the problem over the status of John the Baptist.
We know there was a John the Baptist community and we see that in the book of Acts.
People who were followers of John the Baptist after his death.
And John, the writer of this gospel, interrupts his song twice and then you'll notice following
the song he then once again comes back to John the Baptist to make clear to us that
John the Baptist is not the Messiah.
John the Baptist is not the one who is to come which shows perhaps from a form critical
standpoint it shows how important a problem perhaps or issue that was in the early church.
Now back to the song, pick up with verse 14 again.
The word became flesh, dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
We have beheld his glory, glory is of the only son from the Father.
Now the aside, John bore witness to him and cried, this is he of whom I said, he who comes
after me ranks before me, for he was before me.
Now back to the song.
And from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.
I told you that John, the word grace is not one of his words that he uses throughout
his book.
Yet here he uses it and marvelously uses it.
Charis, it's actually 'charin anti-Charis'.
The little word 'anti' that's used here, A N T I in Greek, the way it would look in English,
this word usually means opposite or in place of.
But in the sense, linguistically, in the sense of that's used here in this passage,
what John is really saying is grace, over against grace.
It's the grace opposite grace.
In other words, wherever you look, John says, you'll find grace, wherever on one side or
the other side up or down, wherever you'll find grace here.
Now back to that song again with that in mind.
And from his fullness, we have all received grace from grace.
On all sides from Christ, we receive grace.
It's tremendous, sense of a wonder, an overflowing wonder that John wants to portray here with
the use of the word pleroma, fullness, and now grace, anti grace.
Grace, opposite grace, wherever you look, you see grace, the surprise, gift love of God.
For the law was given through Moses.
Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Now the name Jesus Christ finally appears.
This is going to be a Johannine mark.
In the book that he later writes called First John, he does the same thing.
He will hold back on the name of Christ up to the end of his prologue.
He's different than the Apostle Paul, at this point, Paul, but the time he's written three
sentences in his prologues to his books, has usually mentioned the name of Christ four,
five, six times.
But John's going to hold back on that name.
It gives a sense of drama.
As fine as he springs now, the name on us.
The name that means so much.
For the law was given through Moses, grace, and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God.
The only son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him know.
And then, verse 19, you'll notice the RSV gives us a white line after verse 18 to show
us that they see it as a prologue.
They see it as an overture.
As you know, in original Greek manuscripts, there are no white lines.
There are no paragraph divisions.
There are no sentence divisions.
It's all just a straight text.
But your translators have to make decisions to make sense of the text.
They give us a white line to show us a break here.
And now, verse 19, John begins his narrative with John the Baptist, the one he's interrupted
his song twice, to put him into focus, and let's just see how he then continues his text
as he starts off the narrative.
And this is the testimony of John.
When the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, who are you?
He confessed.
He did not deny, but he confessed that word homologia means he agreed.
I am not the Christ.
And when they asked him, what then?
Are you Elijah?
Remember the end of the book of the Old Testament in Malachi, there is this Messianic yearning
for a figure like Elijah.
It's very strongly Messianic echo coming out of the Old Testament.
Are you Elijah?
He said, I'm not.
Are you the prophet?
That's another phrase directly from Malachi?
He said, no.
Then they said to him, who are you?
And let us have an answer for those who sent us.
What do you say about yourself?
Notice that in this narrative, more strongly put than in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, we see
that there is this controversy over who John is, John the Baptist.
And now John the writer makes it clear.
He said, and now John speaking, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, makes
straight the way of the Lord as a prophet Isaiah said.
And also in agreement with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John the Baptist always features
himself in the light of that great Isaiah passage.
The Isaiah 40 passage makes straight the way of the Lord.
The Gospel of John begins with this tremendous song, this overture.
It begins with the word logos, word, in the beginning was the word, the word was with
God.
John in his translation of John 1 says, in the beginning was the speech.
He wants to emphasize, and Calvin in his commentary, emphasizes that the word here is used in
a very dynamic, Jewish sense.
In fact, when the word, this word, davar, which is the Hebrew word behind this, in John's
mind, because the book of John begins with this song that has very heavily rooted in
the Old Testament.
As out of flatter pointed out, the book of John is written in Greek, but it's got a
he break underpinning.
It's thought in Hebrew, written in Greek.
The Greek that John uses is a simple Greek, but very fluent.
One C.K. Barrett made the comment that John never seems to be at the loss of the right word.
He always says the right word to use.
He's very fluent, it's very idiomatic, it's idiomatically perfect, yet very simple.
Unlike Paul, whose Greek is elegant and complex, John's Greek, very simple.
Even the use of this word, Charis, grace, which he will later not use, is a more subtle,
more sophisticated word that's more Pauline.
The word, pleroma, again, the word that Gnostics later would love to use.
John uses it, but it's, again, Paul's the one who toys with that word more.
But John uses simple words like light, life, there's a he break feeling.
But even the word logos, which some thought was aw, that's a Greek word, because the Greeks
love the word logos, because when a Greek thought of the word logos, they thought of meaning
and of reason, it was a sign of the meanings behind everything, sort of the platonic use
of logos.
But John, even when he uses that word, has the Hebrew davar in his mind.
He proves it, by the way, he starts the prologue.
In the beginning was the word, the word is with God, and by the word all things were
made.
Well, that's John, that's Genesis 1.
In the beginning, God said, let there be light.
And that's why Calvin translates it, in the beginning was the speech.
For the Jew, when the Jew hears the word logos, he thinks of decision.
He thinks of a decision that God makes of a concrete, creative act, something God does,
not just something he thinks.
And so, I don't want to deny though the Greek side of logos also.
So I think John is wise enough, he knows the Greek language and thought, well enough
to know, that the word logos also carries this sense of meaning and reason, or reasons
that lie behind the deciding act of God.
But I think the best translation of this opening would be in the beginning was the speech,
was the, Karl Barth puts it this way, in the beginning was the decision that God made.
That's the way Barth likes to translate word.
In the beginning was the decision.
And the decision was with God.
And the decision was God.
And of course, that decision is Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the speech of God.
Jesus Christ is God, making Himself known.
We have now the beginnings of the trinitarian theology of the New Testament, now through
the standpoint, from John's standpoint.
In the beginning, and notice, in the beginning, in our K, it does not mean in the beginning
after creation, it's in the beginning before creation.
Before anything was made, in heaven and earth, God decided.
And out of that decision, which later we see as the decision of love, in the beginning
is God's love, in the beginning is God's life, in the beginning is God's life, in the
beginning is God's word, His decision.
And that decision is Jesus Christ.
We don't have Holy Spirit theology yet, presented that will come later.
But in the beginning, we have now this God who dwells in fellowship with Himself.
And out of that fellowship, He creates.
And we have John's portrayal of the goodness of creation by Jesus Christ, by God's decision.
That's that sort of Hebrew underpinning of the word Davar.
In the beginning, God said, and there was.
All things were made through Him.
This shows that John really has that in mind.
This is in no sense, a Gnostic poem.
Bultmann is wrong.
He says in his commentary that this opening song is a stoic or Gnostic poem.
It's not.
It's profoundly Jewish.
As A.M. Hunter says in his, in a very, I've got a good quotation from A.M. Hunter here
from his book, Recent Trends in Johannine Studies.
He says, the dualism which pervades the Gnostic writing, and especially in this prologue,
it's precisely the same kind as we discover in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It's not the kind we find in the Greek Gnostic.
The Gnostic would never have the word creating.
They want the creation to come from an inferior deity, and then redemption to come from a superior
deity.
But no, here we have the doctrine of creation united with the doctrine of redemption.
God creates by His word.
And then John goes on, in Him was life.
The life was a light of men, and now the dualism, and the light shines in the darkness.
This is just the way the dualism, it's a Jewish kind of dualism, not the Greek dualism.
And the darkness has not overcome it.
The word katalambano here, which is translated over come, the old King James translated
it comprehend, has not literally overcome or captured.
That's really the sense of the word katalambano.
It's not captured, this light.
All right, there we have the prologue.
What does the prologue affirm?
In this opening song, the themes that are briefly introduced here that will be later picked
up and carried throughout the Gospel of John, what are they?
What is it that John teaches in the prologue, which later in the Gospel of John will become
spelled out?
Well, let me just make four observations here as we seek to understand this tremendous
prologue.
First, and at the center of the prologue, and that which the thread that dominates the
prologue, is that Jesus Christ is the center as the speech and the decision of God.
In the beginning was the speech of God, and notice, we don't, I'm not going to take the
time right now to go through the 18 verses, but it's an interesting study to go through
the 18 verses, and just notice all the different ways that John has carefully defined who
Christ is, with words like life and light, and breaking into this world, and the words
son of God that comes at the end of course of this passage, and dwelling in the bosom
of the Father, all the ways grace and truth come through him, all the ways John has made
Christ the main thread of the prologue.
He is the center.
The second affirmation that John makes in the prologue is that all of the created order
derives its meaning from Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ who stands in the middle of history, which we'll see later in the Gospel,
and is also affirmed here in the prologue, the light breaks through in the midst of darkness,
and who stands at the end of history sums up with grace and truth the whole of history.
John also portrays that Jesus Christ stands at the beginning of history.
He has a good origin, and that good origin is affirmed twice in decisive ways in the prologue.
All things were made through him, without him was not anything made that was made.
He was in the world, the world was made through him.
Paul picks up the same thesis in Colossians 1, here it's presented for us by John.
The whole of created order receives its meaning from Christ.
The third affirmation that John makes is that evil is real, but it is boundaried by Christ's greater power.
John also, as A.M. Hunter points out, this is a dualistic passage.
It affirms the fact that there is a contest between good and evil, between the light and the darkness.
And notice how that contest has set up by John.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not captured it, overcome it.
He faces up to the reality of evil, in this prologue, he faces up to the reality of unbelief.
He came into his own, his own did not receive him, but as many as received him.
He faces up to the reality of evil, but evil is boundaried by a greater authority.
And so the authority of Jesus Christ is portrayed as greater than evil.
And then the fourth affirmation that John makes in this passage, and gives us a fourth thread through the prologue,
is that human life is granted a great promise in Jesus Christ.
And that, of course, is portrayed very movingly in this passage, too.
The true light that enlightens every man, now notice how individualistic, personal, John becomes, was coming into the world.
He came to his own, his own people received him not, but to those who received him.
He gave power 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.
This promise, the promise of God's transforming love in our lives in response to our faith, yet our faith is really in response to his grace.
That's portrayed also here in the prologue.
Now all these themes, John is going to have more to say, you might say the PS theme in the prologue are the two interruptions.
If the song maintains these four main affirmations, then there's a PS, or there's an aside, that persists in the prologue as well with the two interruptions about John the Baptist and his relationship to Christ.
All right, during these four mornings, we want to consider the gospel now that flows out of this overture.
Just at this point, I do want to say some introductory things.
I want to share the approach that I want to take in these four studies with you.
Each day, it's going to be my goal to, first of all, understand the gospel of John as a narrative, a simple narrative.
The narrative that it is, I want us to do, first of all, in this study, literary criticism.
I want us to, first of all, look at the text and see what it says.
I think that the gospel deserves that, first of all, that you listen to the text.
So obviously, in only four studies, we're only going to be able to do four, you might say, four searches through the gospel of John.
But I want us to look at the text.
Secondly, I want us to consider some of the critical and technical issues that pertain to the interpretation of the gospel of John.
So that we can understand how John this gospel has been interpreted by the Christian church through the centuries.
As you know, the gospel of John has gone through a curious cycle.
In the early church, throughout the whole history of the church, it was the most beloved book.
There is more textual evidence in the church's fathers to the gospel of John than any other book in the New Testament.
More, it's more quoted by the church's fathers than any other book in the New Testament.
We have the most massive evidence for this book.
It was the most beloved book in the ancient church and throughout the history of the church.
Even as late as Schleiermacher, the time of Schleiermacher, he looked at it as the most important book of the New Testament.
Then in the 19th century, the gospel of John went into a down cycle in the life of the church.
A writer Ernest Renan and then another interpreter of the life of Christ in a quest for the historical Jesus
began to write off the gospel of John.
They treated it more as a tract of faith by the early church rather than a narrative of the life of Christ.
This was picked up by form critics and the techniques of form criticism,
where the gospel of John was most of all seen by the 19th century interpretive sleuths
as a book that would give you a clue to what the church believed.
Albert Schweitzer even proposed the book was written around 300 AD.
Of course, this is totally unfounded when biblical textual criticism began to work on the text and realize that,
as I said earlier, the most massive evidence we have for any book comes the funneling effect,
of course, drove the dates far earlier than the 300.
But it shows you what happened in the studies of John and finding the gospel of John by the end of the 19th century
among many critics and in the 20th century was almost a discredited book.
It had been lost its grip on the church.
The interest of the church shifted to the synoptic gospels away from the gospel of John.
So this book that had always been the most beloved book.
Calvin said it was the most important book of the New Testament to get into the life of Christ.
He saw it as the window through which you read the synoptics and all this shifted by the beginning of the 20th century.
So that many pastors had the gospel of John taken out of their hands as a real preaching book.
Because basically, the gospel of John was just treated as the faith of the church,
but not as a serious narrative of the life of Christ.
Then a whole host of things happened and the gospel of John,
the whole thrust of New Testament textual criticism began to drive the dates of the New Testament documents earlier and earlier.
And so now the gospel of John is back into, is having a new renaissance of interest in the world of scholarship.
We'll see more about that later.
So secondly, we want to look at the way this book is interpreted.
Because I'll tell you, the way you interpret the book is going to determine the way you preach on it.
When Karl Barth was here at Princeton, someone asked him a question in the question and answer period,
he asked him if he would characterize his own hermeneutics over against that of Rudolf Bultmann.
And I loved his answer.
It was characteristically humorous, like all the answers of Barth in that question and answer period.
He said, I don't like all this talk about hermeneutics.
It's almost like vultures surrounding the text.
He said, I say to you fellows, you take a text and preach on it.
I'll take a text and preach on it and then we'll talk about hermeneutics.
He's right.
How do you preach on the gospel of John?
We want to look at that.
How do you interpret it so that you can speak to it?
Thirdly, we're going to try to follow through the major theological implications that come out of this text.
We're going to try to ask what are the affirmations in the gospel of John.
And then finally, I want us to ask what I call the discipleship question.
I think this is the most important part of all Bible study.
It should be done forth. It shouldn't be done first.
But it should be done forth.
And that is, we should always ask the discipleship question.
And that is, what does this gospel say to me today?
I hope that our study of the gospel of John this week will force each one of us to ask that question.
What is this book saying to me?
All right, the gospel of John.
Let me come right out and tell you what I think about it and how I want to propose to approach this book.
I believe the book was written after Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I think almost all scholarship has agreed on that point.
In fact, it's my contention that John is fully aware of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I think I can show you in many places in this book where John consciously provides a kind of correction,
a comment on Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I put the dating of this book at about 70 AD.
In fact, as you know, there's been a whole whirlwind and revolution in the dating of New Testament documents
that's come to the service in the last 20 years.
All right, put it this way.
All concrete arguments for a late date for the Johannine literature have now been dissipated.
All right, said everything that's short and sweet.
And that's his famous statement in how my mind has changed on biblical scholarship that he wrote.
As you know, John Robinson and a whole host of other scholars have done the same thing.
Robinson says, and I agree with him, there is no book in the New Testament.
In fact, all bright goes on to say, he sees no reason to date any book in the New Testament after 70 AD.
I have just written a commentary on the book of Revelation, and I date that book at 70 AD too.
I think the evidence is now overwhelming toward earlier dating of all the books.
Thirdly, I go with the tradition of the early church.
It seems to me that if you're going to go against the tradition of the early church,
you better have some very good reasons.
And I go with the tradition of the early church that gives the authorship of this book,
a first, second, third, John, and hold your breath.
I also believe the book of Revelation, all three of these bodies of literature all come from the Apostle John.
And I realize it's much more difficult to maintain that contention with regard to Revelation
because of the obscure Greek that's used in Revelation.
But I think there are even answers that can explain that.
But I believe they all come from the Apostle John.
Otherwise, if they do not come from John's pen, then there is a giant figure in the early church
that's totally unaccounted for, that we have no evidence of.
And this is highly unlikely.
Because they're early. These are early books.
And Papias, of course, as you know, it was about the only church father who suggested a John the Elder,
a presbyteros, a presbyter, who was supposed to be the writer of these books.
But no other church father agreed.
Irenaeus, Tertullian, and all church fathers,
Clement all agree that John, the beloved Apostle, writing from Ephesus, was the writer of these books.
John and his school put together these books.
This book is like Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and yet the book of John is different.
It's strikingly different.
It contains many of the same features that are in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
We have the presentation of John the Baptist, given prominence in this book just like he is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
We have the life of Christ presented, similar to Mark, he omits the birth narratives.
Again, I believe John deliberately omits many things that he's aware are in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
John is not trying to repeat their accounts.
This is probably the strongest argument for the fact that John is aware of those documents.
You know, Bo Reicke and other scholars are pointing out that they now believe the early New Testament documents circulated very widely in the early church.
And this would be a further evidence of it.
John hardly repeats the other gospels at all.
And yet he has the main lines.
We see the presentation of John the Baptist.
We see the presentation of the disciples, the call of disciples, just like in the other gospels.
We have the narratives of life events and teachings of Christ just as the others.
The Holy Week, which dominates the other gospels also dominates the gospel of John.
And then the resurrection is portrayed, the death of Christ is portrayed, the resurrection of Christ is portrayed, just as in the other gospels.
And yet John is different.
John's gospel is more reflective.
John's gospel is more interior.
John's gospel is more intensive.
For instance, there are only six miracles recorded in John's gospel.
And yet he will devote an entire chapter to one miracle.
Chapter nine, the whole chapter devoted to one miracle of a young man who was born blind and then healed.
Most of chapter six devoted to one miracle, the lonely man at the pool of Bethesda.
And so he has fewer items, yet each item is handled in greater detail.
John has more interest in the Judean ministry of Christ and much less interest in the Galilean ministry.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are totally preoccupied virtually except for Holy Week with the Galilean ministry of Christ.
And if you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you would come to the conclusion that Christ never went to Jerusalem until Holy Week.
Except for the being near it during the time of his baptism.
But John points out that Jesus went to Jerusalem three times.
And most of John's gospel has to do with the Judean ministry of Christ.
In fact, it makes it difficult to create a harmony between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John.
Because of the way he insists on three visits to Jerusalem.
John takes great care with details and with places.
He loves to interrupt himself with a size.
He gives us interesting details about the Pool of Psycar, which really Shekhem.
He insists that the pool, a Sheep's Gate pool, was called Bethesda Pool.
It's interesting.
Some scholars said, oh, that's a proof that John didn't write the book because there's no evidence of that pool being called Bethesda Pool.
Even Bultmann made that comment in his 1941 commentary.
That here's one more example of this book was not written by somebody who knew the geography.
Oh, Bultmann, you're wrong.
Because when the copper scroll was found at the Dead Sea Scrolls,
we found in the copper scroll that the sheep's pool was, in fact, called Bethesda Pool by the locals.
So it's the fact that John has inside information.
If you're interested in this one feature, read A.M Hunter's marvelous book.
It's over here in the Robert E. Speer Library, recent studies, recent developments in Johannine studies.
And he goes through all of the place names in John to show the incredible accuracy of John.
And one of those is the Bethesda incident.
This interest in details.
Another thing that John records for us are the arguments that are made against Jesus.
In fact, I have another quotation from a British scholar, Nathaniel Micklem, that I think is very interesting.
He's, listen, Micklem.
He says, there is a superb objectivity about the writings of the synoptic evangelist, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Jesus said this, he did this, there is no comment.
But this very objectivity is a weakness from another point of view.
We are given, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, according to Micklem, little idea of what it was to see Jesus, or to hear him,
of the impression he made, made, and I love this last line, of the atmosphere of strain which he inevitably created.
You know something, if you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you really cannot figure out what the people who don't believe in Christ,
what their arguments are.
Do you realize that we're indebted to the gospel of John for the arguments that are made against Jesus?
In my own commentary, I listed them all.
I think I ended up with something like 19 arguments that John faithfully records from arguments and dialogues that appear in John's gospel,
that give us some flavor of the strain that he caused.
It's from John that we discover what the opposition felt, what bothered them about his ministry.
So that you see, even in this regard, John is more interior. There's an intensity.
We have long dialogues that appear in John that do not appear in the other gospels.
For instance, we have nowhere in John any of the parables of the kind of parable we have in the book of Luke, for instance.
And yet, on the other hand, we have the mashal, the little figure in John 10 of the shepherd.
So John gives us a parable that's not in the other gospels, but none of the parables that are in the other gospels.
Only six miracles, instead of the numbers of miracles we have in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Yet everything is treated with more intensity.
This book is apparently more theological and more didactic than Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Though I think you'll realize if you're doing studies now in synoptic gospels,
that most interpreters of the synoptics now feel that they're also much more didactic theological than, for instance,
Micklem even suggests.
But it's true to say, the gospel of John is more theological.
In other words, his theological intent is clearer.
In fact, open up to John the 20th chapter of a very famous passage where John himself tells you what his goal has been in writing the gospel.
John 20 verse 30, he says,
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.
But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
In other words, the gospel of John is very theological.
John is trying to make an affirmation and trying to help us to understand the significance of Christ's life.
But having said that, I do not agree at all with C.K. Barrett or those form critics who weigh that concern of the gospel of John so heavily that they make the narratives secondary.
In fact, C.K. Barrett and his commentary on John says that the narratives are secondary and incidental to the concerned John has to affirm the faith.
I don't think that's true at all.
I think the gospel of John is a serious narrative of the life of Christ.
The fact that John takes the trouble to make corrections, to clear up things that are not clear in the other gospel writers.
It's his attempt not just to affirm the faith and to say what it all means, but to show what actually happened.
John goes to great detail to make the clear that after the arrest in the garden, Jesus was taken first to the house of Anus,
and then to Caiaphas before to pilot.
This is a, he goes into great care to make that point clear because in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that isn't clear.
It looks like after the arrest, he went straight to Caiaphas, Sanhedrin, and then to the trial before pilot.
John wants to make that clear.
He does many little marks like that are present in this book.
It's a serious historical narrative.
The problem with a form critical approach to the gospel of John seems to me, has been that the form critics were so concerned about the faith of the church that lies behind the gospel,
that they made the faith of the church became the constant and Jesus then became the variable.
In fact, that's not my own sentence, that's a sentence from Ernst Käsemann in his critique of Rudolf Bultmann.
He says in Rudolf Bultmann, the great tragedy of Bultmann's work was that in his existential treatment of John, the faith of the church, the Easter faith of the church becomes the great constant,
and then the life of Christ becomes the very other.
In other words, what's really important is to get you to believe.
It's not so important what actually happened because actually it's this great belief that we want.
You don't get that in John's gospel, no?
This book, and let me make a major statement now, this book is a very theological book with tremendous importance theologically,
but it's important theologically because of it's because it's important historically.
Because in the New Testament, it's the word and the work inseparably united.
What Jesus said and what he did cannot be separated, and the gospel of John makes that clear.
When he says these signs that Jesus did, he's not using signs in the Greek sense as something that points to some great reality,
but that which points has no real meaning in itself.
John is using signs the way the Jews use sign, like the Exodus.
The Exodus out of Egypt becomes for the Jews, and they're all the feasts, becomes a sign of God's redemption.
But it's a sign that happened.
The Exodus out of Egypt actually happened.
Now all the ceremonies in the festival year, like a Feast of Tabernacles and Feast of Pentacosts and Feast of Passover,
are all feasts commemorate the Exodus, but the Exodus happened.
That's why it's so exciting.
It's not that it's something the Jews said, now we must make up a story to help us appreciate God's redemption.
Oh, let's make up a story about coming out of Egypt.
That's a wonderful story.
Oh no, that would make the Exodus the work of a novelist who then creates a story to back up our faith.
But this is the other way around.
It happened and therefore we have faith.
God's love is an event that happens.
Jesus Christ does something and then we have faith.
Our faith comes out of the event.
The book of John is precisely an exciting book theologically, not because the early church created stories
to try to bolster an ideological Jesus or perhaps an ethical Jesus.
Take your pick.
Ernest Renan wanted an ethical Jesus, Rudolf Bultmann wanted an eschatological Jesus.
Either way, and then the church creates stories, like, I don't want to make fun of Bultmann,
but in his commentary on John 2, the water to wine incident,
this is the way he handles it.
Oh yes, now the church creates the water to wine incident to bolster the raging controversies
over the Eucharist.
How far fetched can you get?
In other words, the early church is having trouble developing theology of the Eucharist and
so they create a story about Jesus turning water to wine in order to help support the
doctrine of the Eucharist.
That means that the early church makes up better stories than God himself.
Because that's an exciting story.
It's a wonderful story.
But the question is, did it happen or did the church make it up?
Now listen, if you think the church made it up, you're going to preach one way.
If you think it happened, it's going to be more embarrassing, but you're going to preach
another way.
Everything becomes a story the church makes up on the one side, but the bad part of
that is the church gets to make up all the best parts of the New Testament.
And all God gets to do is these sort of ideological things like speak great statements about
redemption that are eschatologically courageous and wonderful, but they don't mean anything
because they don't actually happen in life.
So the Jesus touching the person with leprosy, oh, he didn't do that, that's a church saying
what God's love would be like if it were real.
Listen, when Jesus Christ touched a person that's sick, that is love.
That's the very thing itself.
Don't let it be spoiled by giving us the credit for making up those exciting stories.
You can see what I'm getting at.
The way you approach the text will have a profound effect on the way you preach on it.
The big question in the book of John is, are the signs in the book of John signs of
the church, or are they signs of God?
Did he do it?
Or did we make it up to try to show what it would be like if it were all real?
I don't believe the book of John is a document of early church faith in which devout early
Christians seek to fill in the gaps in a basically ideological or ethical message that
somehow comes out of eternity.
I believe that the book of John is so exciting because it's a serious narrative about the
strangest story ever told, the strangest life that ever lived, the God who is able to
speak for himself.
And the beginning was the speech.
Now that's what we're going to look at.
We're going to watch that speech unfold in these three next mornings, incident by incident,
and see what it all means, how shattering it is, how genuinely radical it is.
The Gospel of John is theologically vital to our day because it is historically vital.
If I could do one thing for you this week, and return the book of John into your hands
as an exciting historical document of the first century, then the book will have been revolutionized
once again for us.
We have the God in the book of John who speaks for himself.
And John stands by, shaking his head, not figuring it all out at all.
Don't give him credit for making up all these great stories.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this book.
Help us to study it, to understand it, to struggle with it, to feel uncomfortable in
front of it, and Lord, then heal us, win us to yourself, set us free, and give us the
courage to affirm this radical Gospel to our generation in terms that people can understand.
In Christ's name we pray.
Amen.