Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia.

So, any other questions?

Will we sort of dive in? Okay. So when I say dive in, we are going to dive in because St. John's

gospel here, beginning in one verse one, dives right in. He's got sort of this poetic, the first 18

verses are sort of this poetic introduction,

which is very different than the other three. St. Matthew and St. Luke have genealogy material

and sort of try and locate us historically. You know, here's when these things happened,

and then start with Jesus' birth and go from there.

St. Mark starts relatively abruptly, but he goes right into Jesus being baptized.

And the story goes from there.

St. John, we could already see as taking a different approach because he begins with a poem.

He's going to tell us who Jesus is, not by telling us when and where he lived or who his ancestors were,

but by poetically describing who Jesus really is.

Is that kind of similar to the beginning of Genesis as well?

Yes. Genesis, Genesis chapter 1 through about 2 verse 2

is basically a poem about the creation of the world.

So John 1 verse 1,

in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

So you notice the first three words in the beginning is lifted directly from Genesis.

In the Hebrew, it's Barashit, Mara, Elohim.

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