John 1:1-14
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 came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Today we begin our look into the Gospel according to John, the third of the gospel accounts to be written and the one that is so very “different” from the other three. We will probably spend a few weeks here simply because John’s gospel has such a different agenda and needs more explaining to completely understand it. Although other opinions do certainly exist, the most generally accepted dating puts John as having been written somewhere in the 90's – as much as seventy years after the death of Jesus.
Down through the centuries this gospel was uncritically accepted as written by the disciple John. This is no longer believed by most, but the question of just who this “John” was still remains a puzzlement. Among the many theories the most commonly accepted, in our time, seems to be that this account was written by a diaspora Jew whose milieu was a Hellenized Judaism.
Just a brief explanation of some of those terms if you’re not familiar with them. For centuries the Hebrew people had kept to themselves. They started out as nomads but once they reached the Promised Land they stayed there, circling around Jerusalem, surrounded by their own kind.
They didn’t colonize other locations and they were hugely suspicious of outsiders coming within their ranks. They lived this way for hundreds of years until the waves of conquering armies began to overtake them. Every time a new people defeated and overtook their country, the Jewish inhabitants were forcibly split up – to prevent insurrections – and scattered around the near eastern world. Thus the Jewish people were forced to leave their insular lives and branch out into the wider world. These are the diaspora Jews – the ones who settled into the new lives and to some greater or lesser extent accepted the ways of their new neighbors - some clinging strongly to their Jewish ways, others, not so much, people being as they are.
The word “hellenized” means influenced by Greeks thoughts and actions. In Jesus’ time and later years, for instance, Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the middle east – the language everyone spoke to some degree so people could converse with others from outside their realm – much as English can be spoken today by most people, even if they still use their own language among their own kind.
Starting in the hundred years before Jesus, Jewish thought was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy brought in by Greek invaders – a manner of thinking and making-meaning that was quite different from traditional Jewish thinking. Greek thinking was rational and logical. There were myths and stories, all right, but under these was a layer of rational thought subject to study and proof, whereas Jewish thought was based on revelation and a relationship - a relationship between the People and the One God who chose them. But when the faith of the Jesus followers began to expand out into the world it was into a world ruled by this Greek way of thinking. Over time, both Mediterranean and Jewish-Christian thought would by changed by their coming together.
Old Testament Jews, for instance, had no concept of an afterlife – that concept entered by way of the Greeks and by Jesus’ time it had become altered and fairly commonly accepted into Jewish thought. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time accepted the concept of life after death, while the more conservative Saducees did not.
I’ve taken time to go into all this because these historical facts of an insular, segregated people being forced out of their limited world into a broader world they did not particularly want to interact with all play into how and why the various gospels were written as they were. Greek thought will play a large role in John’s gospel and we’re going to keep running into it. It is in many cases markedly different from Jewish thought and explains some of the vast difference between John and the other three gospels. While the thought of the writer of John largely remains Jewish, the style becomes an international Greek.
In the Synoptic gospels, Jesus teaches in parables – in short, easily remembered sound-bites. In John we’ll find that Jesus speaks in long, extended discourses – sounding much more like the style Greek philosophers used when they taught in the marketplace - expounding at some length on their topics.
In a gospel account full of differences and usages that are unique to John, possibly the greatest difference lies in the opening paragraph – the Prologue. Where Mark first introduces Jesus as a fully grown adult, and Matthew and Luke both begin their accounts with Jesus’ birth, John starts his story of Jesus with creation itself, referring us back to the opening words of the Bible in Genesis. Before anything else was called into being, the essence of Jesus was.
Down through the centuries this gospel was uncritically accepted as written by the disciple John. This is no longer believed by most, but the question of just who this “John” was still remains a puzzlement. Among the many theories the most commonly accepted, in our time, seems to be that this account was written by a diaspora Jew whose milieu was a Hellenized Judaism.
Just a brief explanation of some of those terms if you’re not familiar with them. For centuries the Hebrew people had kept to themselves. They started out as nomads but once they reached the Promised Land they stayed there, circling around Jerusalem, surrounded by their own kind.
They didn’t colonize other locations and they were hugely suspicious of outsiders coming within their ranks. They lived this way for hundreds of years until the waves of conquering armies began to overtake them. Every time a new people defeated and overtook their country, the Jewish inhabitants were forcibly split up – to prevent insurrections – and scattered around the near eastern world. Thus the Jewish people were forced to leave their insular lives and branch out into the wider world. These are the diaspora Jews – the ones who settled into the new lives and to some greater or lesser extent accepted the ways of their new neighbors - some clinging strongly to their Jewish ways, others, not so much, people being as they are.
The word “hellenized” means influenced by Greeks thoughts and actions. In Jesus’ time and later years, for instance, Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the middle east – the language everyone spoke to some degree so people could converse with others from outside their realm – much as English can be spoken today by most people, even if they still use their own language among their own kind.
Starting in the hundred years before Jesus, Jewish thought was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy brought in by Greek invaders – a manner of thinking and making-meaning that was quite different from traditional Jewish thinking. Greek thinking was rational and logical. There were myths and stories, all right, but under these was a layer of rational thought subject to study and proof, whereas Jewish thought was based on revelation and a relationship - a relationship between the People and the One God who chose them. But when the faith of the Jesus followers began to expand out into the world it was into a world ruled by this Greek way of thinking. Over time, both Mediterranean and Jewish-Christian thought would by changed by their coming together.
Old Testament Jews, for instance, had no concept of an afterlife – that concept entered by way of the Greeks and by Jesus’ time it had become altered and fairly commonly accepted into Jewish thought. The Pharisees of Jesus’ time accepted the concept of life after death, while the more conservative Saducees did not.
I’ve taken time to go into all this because these historical facts of an insular, segregated people being forced out of their limited world into a broader world they did not particularly want to interact with all play into how and why the various gospels were written as they were. Greek thought will play a large role in John’s gospel and we’re going to keep running into it. It is in many cases markedly different from Jewish thought and explains some of the vast difference between John and the other three gospels. While the thought of the writer of John largely remains Jewish, the style becomes an international Greek.
In the Synoptic gospels, Jesus teaches in parables – in short, easily remembered sound-bites. In John we’ll find that Jesus speaks in long, extended discourses – sounding much more like the style Greek philosophers used when they taught in the marketplace - expounding at some length on their topics.
In a gospel account full of differences and usages that are unique to John, possibly the greatest difference lies in the opening paragraph – the Prologue. Where Mark first introduces Jesus as a fully grown adult, and Matthew and Luke both begin their accounts with Jesus’ birth, John starts his story of Jesus with creation itself, referring us back to the opening words of the Bible in Genesis. Before anything else was called into being, the essence of Jesus was.
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 came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
The Greek word we translate into English as Word – (capitalized) – is Logos. Logos is the rational principle that orders and governs the universe. This is such a Greek concept – we have not – and will not – hear anything like this from any writer writing from a strictly Jewish point of view.
John is not saying here that Jesus is the Word – Jesus was not present at the creation. John is saying that centuries later that divine ordering principle – that Logos – would become enfleshed in the person of Jesus.
That’s enough John-thinking for today. Next week we will attempt to enlarge on this concept, as well as take a look at the “I AM” statements that are only found in John’s gospel.
John is not saying here that Jesus is the Word – Jesus was not present at the creation. John is saying that centuries later that divine ordering principle – that Logos – would become enfleshed in the person of Jesus.
That’s enough John-thinking for today. Next week we will attempt to enlarge on this concept, as well as take a look at the “I AM” statements that are only found in John’s gospel.
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