2.30 John's Gospel of Knowledge

History in the Bible

Garry Stevens

Judaism, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.4 • 711 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The gospel of John reads nothing like the other gospels. John defines Jesus as a cosmological figure, not the man adopted by God at his baptism that the other gospels talk about. John has a quite different biography of Jesus. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus travels to Jerusalem once in his life, to meet his destiny. The gospel of John has Jesus travelling to Jerusalem several times, and places the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of Jesus' career, not at the end. John's gospel is clearly the product of a community, rather than a single author. This community also produced the letters attributed to John. We have no idea how this community related to the Jesus-clubs founded by Paul, nor to the communities who read the synoptic gospels. I throw in an introduction to some of the ideas that the gospel used: from Platonism, from Philo Judeaus, and from Gnosticism. I finish with the Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic-influenced gospel.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gide. I'm Gary Stevens.
0:08.0	And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.
0:13.1	More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.
0:20.3	Episode 2.30, John's Gospel of Knowledge.
0:26.2	In the last episode of the history in the Bible, I finished my survey of the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels.
0:38.4	Time to tackle the odd man out.
0:41.6	The immensely popular gospel of John.
0:45.5	According to the Bible aggregation website, Biblegateway.com,
0:51.2	the three most referenced books of the Christian Bible are Psalms, Matthew and John. In its
0:59.9	final chapters, the gospel itself claims the book was written by the unnamed beloved disciple.
1:08.0	The beloved disciple is Peter's best buddy and friendly rival.
1:13.6	While the book is coy to the point of disingenuousness about the disciple's identity,
1:20.6	all the early fathers thought that he was the Apostle John, son of Zebedee.
1:34.6	His Jewish friends called him Yocanourn, and his Greek companions, Iwo Amus.
1:42.9	The Gospel of John reads as though it has passed through many hands, a succession of committees.
1:51.6	The book is full of awkward transitions and narrative jumps, like a badly edited film.
1:57.7	In Chapter 5, for example, Jesus has been speaking in Jerusalem.
2:03.6	In Chapter 6, he is suddenly and inexplicably teleported across the sea
2:13.6	of Galilee. At the end of chapter 14, Jesus declares, rise, let us be on our way, and then stays put for three more chapters. Modern scholars attribute the book not to a single author,
2:21.3	but to an entire school of thought.
2:24.7	One we call the Joannine community.
2:28.5	The Gospel of John reflects the trials and development of this school over the course of decades.
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