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So you may have noticed that we haven't talked about the gospel of John yet. You know, I was almost going to say that we had accidentally skipped over it. So how did we get to that? How do we get to John now?

Well, that should teach you to question the person. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. My students question me. But I love it when people question me in general. Yeah, because really I thought I was thinking at one point that we accidentally skipped it. But how does that fit into the chronology?

Yeah, remember we're going in rough chronological order. So the gospel of John fits in now after all it's one of the latest books. It's after revelation, which is which is really interesting. That's right. That's right. So John is written after revelation. Not to say they were written by the same person because they're not.

Okay. One interesting thing I forgot to say about revelation is it is the only book in the entire New Testament where scholars think the author's native language was air make. Interesting. So that's just interesting to chew on. So whoever wrote revelations did not write the gospel of John. Wow, we are not going to be able to do. So we're going to do what's called the Jo Hanin literature. Isn't that cool. Now you know how to use the outer title of John. It's Jo Hanin.

So I'll use that all the time at parties for sure. Yeah. So what do you think of the Jo Hanin sections of the New Testament? Yeah. So the gospel of gospel and epistles of John are this closely related book. You know, we have gospel John. We have first, second, third John, the epistles and letter letters. And those are very broken up in the New Testament. Wow. The gospel of John were not.

Really going to be able to give it at all credit it is due because John is such a theologically rich book. It has the most known and most translated verse of the entire Bible.

John 316. So wow, how do we approach this? First, we need to say that John is radically different from the synoptics. And the synoptics are Matthew Mark and Luke present one picture. John produces a very different picture. And most scholars think that John is independent. Ultimately, it goes back to similar traditions about John, but they're very different.

And I'm going to return to John versus the synoptics when we cover the historical Jesus. So in John, the basic message is the most important thing to understand is Jesus's identity. Jesus is the word of God. He is the revelation of God. He is through Jesus that we know God. So basically all of John is this meditation upon the identity of Jesus.

Interesting. Okay. And John's Jesus is super Jesus. He is supremely in control of all time at all times and of all time. Thomas saying my Lord and my God at the end of John is the only time Jesus is explicitly called God in any of the gospels.

Jesus says, you know, we're as in the in the synoptics, we have let this cup pass from me. In John, Jesus says, this cup, my father gives me, shall I not drink it? Why on earth would I say something like let this cup pass from me as if?

And then he says, that's like a valley girl. He says, give me this cup and actually make it a double. Yeah, exactly. He's like, boom, you know, I am going to. And in fact, the death of Jesus, the death is not the emphasis. It is Jesus is lifted up.

You know, it's just that first really hard step back to heaven because Jesus is the man sent from heaven. He comes down. He teaches us what we need to know about his identity. And then he goes back to heaven. And now it's how Jesus works.

One more bad pop reference. Matthew, Mark and Luke had Jesus Christ and John has Jesus Christ superstar.

So let's see. So Jesus is just so different. And I want to just highlight the fact that John is literally very sophisticated. So he plays with irony. He plays with multiple meanings.

And basically the idea, the trope, you know, the pattern is that someone misunderstands Jesus and Jesus says that gives Jesus the opportunity to wax eloquent for chapters at a time about his identity.

You know, so one joke is like his disciples says, hey, Jesus passed the bread. And Jesus says, did you know that I am the bread? And the disciples like, I just wanted the bread. And Jesus says, let me talk for hours about the bread of life.

So you get, you get, you get Nicodemus saying, well, born, born again. How can someone crawl back into his mother's womb and be born again? And Jesus, it's really the word anothen in Greek has a double meaning, meaning again and from above.

And so Jesus is really saying you need to be born from above. You need to be born with a spiritual heavenly birth in order to understand me, whereas Nicodemus is like, I don't get it. And then the Samaritan woman at the well says, oh, you want to give me indoor plumbing? You know, when Jesus says, I have water. You don't need to come to the well. She's like, awesome. That'd be great. And he's really talking about spiritual water. So once again, there's all this misunderstanding and it leads Jesus to talk about his identity.

Right. And that's the thing that plays out over and over, over and over again. And so for John, Jesus is the pre-existent word of God. And here's where it gets really dramatic is in these I am sayings. And the

the English translation obscures these by saying things like I am he, especially in the King James version, but if you look the he is an italics meaning it's not there in Greek.

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