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 tonight we're getting started in the Gospel of John.

And as I've mentioned with the other Gospels on the podcast,

technically we think of the title as being just John, just the name of the

author, or the gospel of John in a more general sense, but really the title is the gospel

according to John. So it's the gospel according to St. John, strictly speaking. And the reason that's

important is, though we talk about the four gospels all the time, what the actual title

emphasizes is that there's really only one gospel. There's really only one gospel of Jesus Christ.

But we have four different accounts from four different perspectives of that one gospel,

that one set of events, the one life of the one Christ.

The word gospel is actually, the Greek word, Evangelion, is actually a word that was used for things other than biblical literature.

But in Greco-Roman literature, it's only found in the plural, Evangelia.

And the way it was used in the Roman world was before Caesar or one of his generals or a senator

and another important Roman official would come into a city. A herald would be sent into the city

first to read the Evangelia of the Emperor or the General.

And what it was was a series of accounts of their military victories and their achievements.

So they would come in and they would say, you know, Hail Caesar, conqueror of Gaul,

you know, destroyer of the Germanic tribes, you know, savior of the world, you know, run through their

whole list of accomplishments. So when the New Testament writers pick up that word and put it in

the singular and talk about the Evangelion of Jesus Christ, they're talking about not just a story about Jesus or a set of stories about Jesus,

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