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,

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

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started in just a second. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started in just a second.

And when we get started, we'll be starting at the beginning of Gospel Corning to St. John Chapter 21, which is the final chapter.

And so for the final time, I will say that if you want to go back and listen to the introduction to the gospel according to St. John, it's now on the interwebs.

Actually, right now it's posted up through the end of chapter 5.

So if you want to go back and relive the summer, it is there for you to do.

And to get us caught up to where we are, obviously we're here at the very end of the gospel,

according to St. John, we saw that there was sort of a sort of mini

post script at the end of chapter 20 where the author sort of addresses the reader sort of more

directly. Jesus sort of final words to Thomas there, you know, you believe because you've seen,

blessed are those who believe who have not seen.

We said that was talking about, for the most part, St. John's original readers who were living

a good generation after the resurrection of Christ.

And so most of many, if not most of them, would not have seen Jesus.

They had seen at least St. John and maybe some of the other apostles, but even that, not very recently.

Because you have to remember, by the time St. John's Gospel was written,

saints Peter and Paul, for example, had been dead for probably about 30 years already.

They've been martyred by Nero about 30 years before that.

So this is an age where most of them hadn't had the kind of direct contact.

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