Introduction to John

The Gospel of John might be described as needing no introduction at all. This particular Gospel and book of the Christian Bible has been one of the most frequented and theologically significant in the entire canon, maybe in all the literature of the world. Yet possibly for that very reason it has also been one of the most abused and distorted and at the center of a host of interpretive and theological debates. And while this Gospel is itself intended to provide an introduction to the gospel of Jesus Christ, it still requires its own introduction, if only because of its sacred purpose and the importance of its subject matter.

Prolegomena

The modern commentary is expected to provide a certain amount of space to giving an introduction to the text to be commented upon, almost always in relation to its historical context. The author, origin (date, provenance, and audience), and purpose of the document are usually explored and defended with the methodological assumption that such data is significant for the interpretation to follow. It is unquestionable that this historical information about the text to be commented upon is vital to correctly understand its meaning and application. Yet it is rare for commentators to defend or even explain this implicit methodological foundation. This is unfortunate for two primary reasons.

First, it minimizes the hermeneutical issues involved in any kind of interpretation. Presumably, modern commentaries take for granted that the commentary genre is an overtly historical task and therefore feel no need to explain their method and its philosophical and theological underpinnings to the reader. But this is hardly the case. Not only does the text carry its own interpretive commands innate to its origin and nature, but the act of interpretation forces the interpreter to make a plethora of methodological assumptions regarding the text in view.

The second reason is even more important: it minimizes that the text in view is in fact the biblical text, that is, part of Christian Scripture. The very reason why there is so much interest in this particular text is treated as methodologically unimportant to the task at hand. By definition, then, this text raises the interpretive stakes. For its author is not merely historical but also divine; and its audience is not merely confined to the ancient world but still exists and receives this text in the modern world. Without denying that this text has an origin and purpose in a time long past, as Scripture it must also be understood to have a divine origin and eternal purpose that demands its reception in every generation—even those still to come.

The dual origin of this text is the constant issue facing the interpreter. And after two millennia, with even greater cultural and historical distance between this (now ancient) text and the (contemporary) reader, the interpretive gap is even more of an issue. It would be an understatement to say that this gap has been the subject of much disagreement and debate over the last few centuries; there is no way a commentary on a biblical Gospel can avoid this issue. In fact, a biblical Gospel, maybe specifically the Gospel of John, is where these interpretive tensions or “gaps” (i.e., “Lessing’s Ditch”) are the most apparent. For certainly a book that begins, “In the beginning . . . with God” (1:1) is not easily given a date or provenance that is functional for the modern historical-critical method.

In light of the above discussion and the last few centuries of hermeneutical debate we can summarize two basic approaches to the biblical texts that confront the interpreter and this commentary: critical and confessional. It is often assumed that the critical approach takes its directives from the ancient context and historical identity of the text, and the confessional approach takes its directives from the contemporary ecclesial context and divine identity of the text, but as we will see below neither of these are entirely accurate. It is only partly correct to pit the approaches against one another in a manner that pits history against theology. While the critical approach is almost required to deny any divine authority to the interpretive task, the confessional approach not only embraces unhesitatingly the ancient context and historical identity of the text as part of the means of revelation but does so specifically for theological reasons. That is, while the critical approach cannot find warrant to move from the authoritative foundation of the natural (historical) to the supernatural, the confessional approach cannot find warrant to stop the move from the supernatural to the natural, since creation is a subset and necessary corollary of the Creator.

The critical approach finds its roots in what has for about two centuries been called “historical criticism.” While the church has always practiced a historical reading of Scripture, the Enlightenment’s rationalistic demands developing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within and outside the church pressured a more “scientific” interpretive method to provide warrant for belief or disbelief in the doctrines derived from the Bible, with sophisticated historiographical methods dictating the terms of interpretation by the nineteenth century.1 Early versions of historical criticism function “in godlike fashion,” making a new kind of dogmatic claim that silenced the dogma of the church.2 More contemporary versions, however, are more admissive of their perspectival nature and simply argue (along with the confessional approach) that their perspective is the most faithful to the object of study, that is, verifiable by their own standards of ethics and warrant.3

In a recent and more sophisticated work on the critical approach, Barton argues that the plain sense of a text should not be equated with its original sense or what it “meant.” Rather, “biblical critics are concerned with what texts mean, now equally as much as then.”4 Barton argues that the difference between critical and confessional approaches is not historical but literary, “the kind of text” being studied.5 Barton’s analysis establishes a common point of difference between the critical and confessional approaches: the nature and function of the biblical text itself. This means that history and its application is not the difference, as is commonly assumed. A confessional approach is just as concerned with the historical context and identity of the text as the critical approach, just for different reasons and with different warrant. Both approaches believe that the ancient context of the Bible is a determiner of its meaning. And both approaches feel the need to disregard certain historical judgments made to the text by the other approach. Just as the confessional approach will challenge historical value judgments of the critical approach to the biblical events (e.g., Jesus’s resurrection from the dead or walking on water), so also the critical approach will challenge historical value judgments of the confessional approach to the biblical text (e.g., inerrancy). In this sense, then, both approaches rely on history and theology (or ideology), but do so from very different foundations, neither of which are value neutral.

What are the foundations upon which each approach establishes its authority? Is there a verifiable foundation upon which objective truth judgments can be established for determining meaning? Even by the standards of the critical approach, not without faith! Barton claims as much when he argues that the critical approach honors the text “as part of the givenness of a world we did not make.”6 But what exactly is this “givenness” and from whom has this been given? With what is almost a version of the cosmological or teleological argument, Barton’s use of “givenness” is an ideological starting point that logically grounds the meaning of the text in the historical “world” to which it naturally relates. The confessional approach is no less theological (ideological) when it honors the text as part of the givenness of the God who claimed to write it. But this “givenness” is also a theological starting point that logically grounds the meaning of the text in the God to whom it naturally relates.7 Both can be said to rely on the self-attestation of the text itself, but only the confessional approach ultimately trusts itself to the witness of the biblical text.8 The ultimate difference, then, is what each approach believes to be the foundational “given”: the world or God—an ironic choice in light of the Gospel of John. In this commentary we chose the Creator over his creation.9

In short, the exploration of what this Gospel means cannot begin until we have explained what this Gospel is, for interpretation is guided by the nature of its object. And these two approaches have differently defined objects in view, even when both are interpreting the Gospel of John, and the difference in object yields different warrants, guidance, and insights into its meaning. The issue was never history against theology or ancient versus ecclesial context, but which “givenness” is the most appropriate foundation for grounding the meaning of the text. It is the argument of this commentary that only the confessional approach can handle not only the God of the biblical text but also its full historicity, denouncing any dichotomy between history and theology by claiming that God both uses and is made known by the historical reality to which the text points and through which the text communicates. Using the Gospel’s own terms, when “the Word became flesh” (1:14), it was “the Word” and not “the flesh” that was the primary agent of the encounter and therefore the primary ground of meaning.10 Similarly, the paradox of Scripture is most suitably handled by the confessional approach.11

The above discussion has tried to situate the introductory topics regarding this particular kind of text in its divine identity as Christian Scripture. If one does not begin with this definition of the text—the Gospel of John, then they are not only reading in an entirely different manner but also in a deficient and inappropriate manner. The fact that commentators rarely define or defend their methodological foundation gives further warrant for such prolegomena here. For this reason we must include in the introduction to this commentary a section on methodology befitting Christian Scripture, and it is that section with which we must begin.

The Doctrine of Scripture and Methodology

The prolegomena which we covered above has magnified the importance of defining rightly the object of our study, the ontology of the Gospel of John. Before we can explain what the Gospel does we must first explain what the Gospel is. And since the Gospel of John is part of Christian Scripture, it must be dealt with accordingly. To do this, however, we must first apply the doctrine of Scripture specifically to this Gospel.

Doctrine of Scripture

To define the Gospel as part of Christian Scripture is to place it in a much larger communicative context than simply the first-century context in which it took on its literary “flesh.” By categorizing the Gospel as Scripture, we are depicting it in light of its “origin, function, and end in divine self-communication”; yet we are also depicting the manner in which it must be read and the kinds of responses appropriate to its nature: “ ‘Scripture’ is a shorthand term for the nature and function of the biblical writings in a set of communicative acts which stretch from God’s merciful self-manifestation to the obedient hearing of the community of faith.”12 While such language might not be common vernacular in an introduction to an exegetical commentary, it should be, for the object of interpretation demands to be treated according to its true and sacred nature. Not to treat this Gospel as Scripture is itself a form of eisegesis, and it is a disobedient hearing of the (canonical) text’s own claim and of the God by whom it was authored.

The doctrine of Scripture is necessary for the exegetical task in two ways. First, it gives insight to the interpretive rules demanded by the object of interpretation. In a sense, Scripture becomes its own kind of genre: “If genre is a function of communal reception and usage as well as of inherent characteristics, then the genre of the biblical texts is that of ‘holy Scripture.’ ”13 Functionally, then, the doctrine of Scripture explains the (theological) genre of the Bible and the generic conventions to be followed by the faithful reader.

Second, the doctrine of Scripture gives oversight to its constituent parts and unifies their functions. Three are immediately apparent: (1) since the Gospel speaks in time-and-space history, a doctrinal framework is needed to make sure history remains subservient to the God of creation; (2) since the Gospel speaks in literary form, a doctrinal framework is needed to make sure words stay subservient to the Word; and (3) since the Gospel speaks about the things of God, a doctrinal framework is needed to make sure theology is defined by the person and work of God himself, the true subject matter of the things of God. In short, the doctrine of Scripture gives oversight to the historical, literary, and theological components of the revelation of God, which we will refer to as creation, canon, and creed in order to match their doctrinal nature. A brief explanation of each is in order.

Creation

The doctrine of Scripture provides the necessary requirements for understanding the historical content and context of the Gospel. To make interpretive judgments regarding the meaning of the Gospel by comparing it to the historical (and social-cultural) setting in which it originated and occurred without the oversight or mediation of the doctrine of Scripture is to conflate the meaning of the text to its historical context. The Bible is not to be read as any other book. The view that supposes texts are wholly limited and confined by their immediate circumstances of origin, and that as soon as they stray from their appointed time and place they will be misread and misunderstood, embraces a historical perception of this body of writings that is theologically foreign to them.14 This is not to say that Scripture is unhistorical or less historical—not at all! It is to say, rather, that it is more; it speaks from a more comprehensive position.

A doctrine of Scripture allows the biblical narrative, with all its historical necessity and detail, not to bow the knee to the claims of historical naturalism. “For a Christian theological account of Scripture . . . the problem . . . is not the affirmation that the biblical texts have a ‘natural history,’ but the denial that texts with a ‘natural history’ may function within the communicative divine economy, and that such a function is ontologically definitive of the text. It is this denial—rather than any purely methodological questions—which has to form the focus of dogmatic critique.”15 Helpful here is Billings, who explains that every interpreter implicitly answers two questions when they interpret the Bible: (1) Is revelation grounded in inherent, universal human capacities or in the particularity of God’s action with Israel and in Jesus Christ?; and (2), Is Scripture received from within a deistic hermeneutic or with a Trinitarian hermeneutic?16 In both cases the latter option is necessitated by a doctrinally defined reading of Scripture, for an interpretation that is naturalistic and/or deistic is poorly matched to the divine character of Scripture. For this reason the interpreter is given dogmatic reasons to believe that God was involved in the entire messy process, from the historical event to the textual expression of the text of Scripture (composition, transmission, and reception). This requires a highly theological account of “history,” not only as a tool of interpretation but also as a philosophical construct.

A sophisticated account of a theology of history has been provided by Rae, who argues that in relation to biblical interpretation “the very idea of history requires both the biblical doctrine of creation, and a teleology, an account, that is, of the directedness of history towards some goal.”17 Similar to our discussion of historical criticism above, Rae argues that theology had been excluded from the consideration of biblical texts, which ironically is itself a dogmatic presupposition.18 The key for Rae (and others)19 is the logical priority of Scripture: “We simply cannot proceed to investigate the Bible’s witness to revelation by assuming that we know apart from revelation what history is. The order of knowing must be reversed.”20 Since all history doctrinally finds its purpose (telos) in the person and work of God, history only has meaning in the purposes of God. This is why the doctrine of creation is so important (and must be related) to the doctrine of Scripture. Creation implies that the world is invested with a telos. “There is a reason for its being, and history, in consequence, is to be understood as the space and time opened up for the world to become what it is intended to be.”21 History becomes God’s own confession, under his creative, providential, and redemptive purposes, to extend himself to the world. The referentiality and meaning of Scripture, therefore, is given definition not only by its placement in the originating (historical) context but also in the fuller context of God’s communicative grace.

The history in this Gospel, therefore, cannot be understood by rational inquiry without recourse to revelation. Nor can its purpose and meaning be reduced to a set of laws or by comparison to apparent analogous entities—to do so would be naturalistic and deistic. Rather, history, once understood to be framed by the Alpha and Omega (Rev 22:13), becomes a subset of creation—and therefore the Creator—and is embedded with promise and purpose that is revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who is both its ground and goal.22 The incarnation, as the Gospel records it, is not something entirely new but is the magnified, replacement grace (1:14) of a God who had been active and present in his creation since “the beginning” (1:1).

Canon

The doctrine of Scripture not only gives definition to the material nature behind the text but also to the literary nature of the text itself. Since such a doctrine provides a “conceptual framework, suggested by the narrative itself, for interpreting that narrative,” it becomes essential for the exegetical task.23 Vanhoozer suggests that by referring to Scripture as a divine “speech act,” the classical doctrines of revelation, inspiration, and infallibility can be integrated and interpreted.24 As a speech act, Scripture can speak not merely in word (what God says) but also in action (what God does).25 “The notion of a divine speech act addresses both the problem of the nature of God’s activity and the problem of the nature of biblical language. Scripture is neither simply the recital of the acts of God nor merely a book of inert propositions. Scripture is rather composed of divine-human speech acts that, through what they say, accomplish several authoritative cognitive, spiritual and social functions.”26

In this way, then, Scripture, including this Gospel, speaks by word and action in a multitude of modes and manners, that is, illocutionary acts, which simultaneously form a unitary act. A right reading of the Gospel will interpret the illocutionary inferences, or communicative intentionality, provided by the text itself through primary (explicit) and secondary (implicit) data. In this Gospel the inference is made explicit (20:30–31): that the reader would come to believe in Jesus Christ and have life in his name. This intentional communication, as a subset of the doctrine of Scripture, makes it more than a communicative act—it is a missional act: “the self-presentation of the triune God, the free work of sovereign mercy in which God wills, establishes and perfects saving fellowship with himself in which humankind comes to know, love and fear him above all things.”27 Scripture as a whole, and the Gospel of John in particular, is the communicative grace of God.

By canon, then, we refer to more than the collection of biblical books;28 we are referring here primarily to Scripture’s function and identity, both of which have implications for interpreting the Gospel of John. First, according to its function as canon, this Gospel cannot be treated as if it were a single unit. Without denying that the Gospel took on literary “flesh” in the context of a particular historical author and audience, as the Word of God it was always intended (doctrinally) to be read as part of a collection. Though an argument could be made that the Gospel was originally created (historically) with this intention from its inception,29 our argument is more dogmatic than historical. Since this Gospel makes up one of many parts of God’s intentional communicative Word, then this Gospel must be viewed as functioning cooperatively. This in no way denies that the Gospel had value and meaning for its particular historical context, only that its meaning is so tied to its larger canonical context that the latter extends and even explains the former. Again, while the critical approach demands that only the historical context be determinative for meaning, the confessional approach understands that in the providence of God this Gospel’s historical and canonical contexts function symphonically to communicate the intended fullness of the Word of God.

Second, according to its identity as canon, this Gospel cannot be treated as if it were (another) source to the Word of God but must be treated as the very source of the Word of God. That is, the Bible is not a window to that which is inspired but is itself the inspiration. When we speak of Scripture, we are speaking about the source of revelation and claiming (dogmatically) that Scripture is the locus of revelation, not merely a mediator of revelation. This issue is easily confusing and needs to be attended to carefully (for further definition, see “Text versus Event” below). This is not to deny in any way that the text is referring to real historical people, places, and events but to claim that the revelation, inclusive of real events, is located in the inscripturated account; God is giving divine commentary on his own actions in history. Again, while the critical approach is tempted to find meaning behind the text (in the event), the confessional approach realizes that this text, as a divinely inspired communicative act, is God’s revelation per se (in or by itself).

The Gospel of John cannot be read as just any other book. Its form, function, and canonical identity are not ancillary to its interpretation and meaning; they are determinative. Even the reality to which it points cannot be defined without recourse to revelation, nor can its meaning be determined outside of its canonical context. Rather, the Gospel, once understood to be framed by the rest of Scripture, becomes a subset of the biblical canon and embedded with the full significance of the Word of God. Canon is not ultimately a historical account of the biblical collection but “a trinitarian and soteriological account of revelation . . . in which God establishes saving fellowship with humanity and so makes himself known to us.”30 In this way, then, the Bible is addressing not merely the past but the present and not merely an ancient audience but the contemporary church. Stated more straightforwardly, this Gospel mediates the gospel.

Creed

The doctrine of Scripture not only gives definition to what lies behind the text (creation) and to the text itself (canon) but also guides the reader to the goal of the text or its true subject matter. In light of God’s use of creation in Scripture and the canon of Scripture, the biblical speech act can be described as “Jesus Christ’s own self-utterance.”31 And if this Gospel fits the generic form of a biography (see below), then it is more accurately an autobiography, for this word about God is also the Word of God. Since Scripture is God’s communicative act, then its message and subject matter are about him—his person and his work. It is in this way that this Gospel proclaims the gospel.

To read this Gospel in a manner unbefitting of Scripture, as a mere historical account of the religious reflections or traditions of some first-century Christian group, is to read anthropocentrically in a manner that puts humanity and not God as the source and subject matter. Quite simply, if this Gospel were only written by and to a Christian group in the first century, then the reader would have every reason to use the resources of the first century to reconstruct the group(s) and its intended communication. However, if this Gospel was written also by God, then the same is true: the reader should make every effort to interpret the Gospel according to its author and his intended communication.

One of the consequences of the critical approach, however, is the loss of connection between the doctrines of the church and the text of Scripture. This is primarily because Scripture is expected, according to scholarly rules of interpretation, to be grounded historically in the first century, thereby excluding by methodological necessity eternal theological truths. The text becomes historically grounded in a manner that a faithful reading of the text’s “literal sense” is in reference to subjects driven by and derived from the context of the Gospel’s origin, not “figuration or typology [which] was a natural extension of literal interpretation” in earlier eras of biblical interpretation.32 The doctrines of the creeds, according to this approach, are entirely imposed upon the text of Scripture. Helpful here is Yeago, who explains that Scripture speaks not merely with concepts, the use of explicit words or terms, but also judgments, which can use a variety of concepts but in a manner that speaks beyond them, making a further implicit referential claim.33 A text uses concepts but makes judgments. “The only way to uncover the judgments made in a text is to pay close attention to what is said and implied, to the specific, contingent ways in which its conceptual resources are deployed.”34 In this way, then, the text may make judgments beyond its use of concepts, with the Trinity being a classical example, so that it may (and does!) speak to subject matters not contained by any one concept.

Since context is so determinative of how and to what the interpreters “pay close attention,” the critical and confessional approaches will “uncover” different judgments in the text. For example, what looks like historical discrepancies or even unimportant detail to the critical approach will have a much different and contingent significance for the confessional approach. The critical approach interprets the conceptual resources by the text as referring to historical issues—the belief of the “Johannine commmunity” standing behind the Gospel or even simply the historical event itself. But the confessional approach interprets those same conceptual resources in a manner that can (and does!) also refer to the divine context and content of the text (Scripture). The confessional approach, for example, interprets the Gospel’s depiction of the relation between the Father and the Son as reflective of the Trinitarian identity of God, even if the concept (the Trinity) is not used. If God is Trinitarian in nature, then depictions of him, even if partial, are also reflective of the Trinity. In a sense, without denying the logical priority and authority of Scripture, the subject matter of Scripture functions in a circular manner, not only as the result of a reading of Scripture but also as a guide for further readings.35

The subject matter of Scripture has been deemed by the church to be clear, which it summarized by the doctrine called the perspicuity of Scripture. Its clarity is not, however, because the meaning of the text and its subject matter are obvious. Rather, it is because of the (doctrinal) conviction “that Scripture has the capacity to address and transform the human being, and to offer a reliable guide to human action.”36 Webster defines it well: “Scripture’s clarity is neither an intrinsic element of the text as text nor simply a fruit of exegetical labour; it is that which the text becomes as it functions in the Spirit-governed encounter between the self-presenting saviour and the faithful reader. To read is to be caught up by the truth-bestowing Spirit of God.”37 The doctrine of Scripture guides the reader to look rightly at the text, that is, to look for the self-presentation of God through the work and person of Jesus Christ by the empowering Holy Spirit. The Gospel of John may not say all that Scripture in its entirety is saying, but it is speaking about the same thing, just as there can be four Gospels that all speak to the same unitary subject matter. To use a metaphor, reading Scripture is like listening to a symphony, so that even when we listen to only one instrument (a biblical book), we are always aware of the part it plays in the symphony (the whole of Scripture) and thus read it in light of its symphonic cooperation. We read the Gospel of John, therefore, as part of and in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Methodology

Our discussion of the doctrine of Scripture above is directly related to methodology, for we cannot begin to draw out (“exegesis”) its meaning until we have defined its nature. Although there are presuppositions and stances that one must adopt from the start, a robust doctrine of Scripture is expressed methodologically not by a rigidly defined procedure but by a posture that is sensitive to the narrative’s own movements, pressures, and expectations (explicit and implicit) demanded from an obedient, believing reader. It is an art as much as a science, yet some basic principles or postured practices can be explained.

Historical-Critical/Grammatical and Theological Exegesis

Since this Gospel is a historical narrative, it is essential that its historical nature be properly treated. Yet its historical nature cannot render mute its nature as Christian Scripture, which commonly occurs, even if only partially, in light of the dominance of the critical approach and its concerns. Over the last few decades it has been common for confessional interpreters to distance themselves from many of the tenets of the historical-critical method and yet try to maintain their “historical” methodology by removing “critical” and referring to their method as historical-grammatical, with the “grammatical” suggesting that they attend more confessionally to the literal sense of the text.38 The strength of the historical-grammatical method for interpreting a historical narrative is obvious, but there is also a potential weakness: history—as in the historical context in which the Gospel was written—must serve as the foundation for all other methods. Blomberg states it plainly: “This does not mean that I reject theological and literary analyses; indeed, I find them crucial. However, they can be engaged in legitimately only when built on the appropriate historical foundations.”39

The demand for a historical foundation raises a potential weakness of the method: Does a historical foundation make doctrine secondary? Our discussion above would push against such a hierarchy, not only because there can be no conception of history (i.e., creation) without God but also because the nature of Scripture requires the foundation of doctrine in order to rightly interpret this unique text. To make historical analyses the foundation limits from the start what the interpreter sees in and does with the text. And as we discussed above, as necessary as history is for reading a historical text, the tenets (dogmas) of history are unable to grasp or express the nature of Scripture. The concern, therefore, is that history as an interpretive science is unqualified to grasp the fullness of the biblical text and its subject matter.40 A method is in grave danger if it grounds a reading of Scripture on a historical foundation in such a manner that doctrine or theology seem to be an imposition that must be guarded against.41

A recent response to the historical-grammatical method by others within the confessional approach has been an overtly theological method often called “theological interpretation of Scripture.”42 This approach has been variously defined, rarely applied to the biblical text—more theoretical than exegetical in form, and the object of much confusion and criticism.43 While this “theological interpretation” movement, if it may be called that, has brought to light several important issues regarding the confessional approach, it may have only tipped the imbalance to the other side. Even more, neither side—the historical-grammatical or theological interpretation of Scripture, if they may be referred to as “sides”—actually admit imbalance. The proponents of the historical-grammatical method believe they are doing theology—and they are, even if they do place it on a primary, historical foundation; and the proponents of theological interpretation of Scripture believe they are concerned with the text’s original, historical location—and they are, even if they subsume it under a theological starting point within which it is easy to misplace.

What, then, is the methodological approach of this commentary in response to a historical narrative like the Gospel of John? The answer of this commentary is balance according to the nature (ontology) of Scripture: to qualify the interpretation/exegesis of Scripture as either historical or theological is to make a false dichotomy from the start. Exegesis of Scripture can only be properly both, meeting the demands of a historical narrative that also bears the identity of Scripture. To choose between historical and theological emphases, therefore, is to pit the text against itself, as our discussion above has tried to explain, for creation and Creator cannot be divided. What does this look like? In general the approach of this commentary will begin with certain presuppositions that hold tightly to the necessity and meaning-deriving use of history while at the same time limiting the tenets of historical science by the doctrine of Scripture. But this does not provide a step-by-step procedure, for it is directed equally by both the text’s historical concepts and context and the text’s judgments and (theological) subject matter. In fact, the art of this kind of interpretation is the ability to allow both of these aspects of the text and its direction for meaning to be cooperatively active and interrelated in the exegetical process. As much as it is an art, it is only because it is a creative balance of two sciences. If there is a foundation, it is God since by definition Scripture is his spoken word; yet this does not distance history but embraces it, since God is the Creator of his creation. And because there is a God, there is a goal (telos); the communicative intention of God—in historical event and written expression—becomes the goal of interpretation.

In short, our method is the application to the text of what Webster calls “biblical reasoning,” where the text is read and applied by both exegetical and dogmatic reasoning.44 In this approach the words of the historical authors “are not wholly identical with the divine Word, but they are the subject of a special mission, they are ‘sent from God,’ ” an embassy of God in which “Scripture is the textual settlement,” extending the prophetic and apostolic speech into the church’s present.45 Exegesis, therefore, at least as this commentary will attempt to perform it, is an intellectual engagement with the living and gracious communication and self-presentation of God. It is no less than participation in the depths of the life of God by means of his Word to the world. A commentary, then, may be the most fitting genre for interpretation, since it remains closest to the text’s own literal sense, functioning more as “contemplative paraphrase rather than as repository of textual-historical information.”46 For the purpose of a commentary, an exegete is not to speak but to listen so that the only word heard and understood is the Word of God.

Text versus Event

One distinction not always recognized in the interpretation of a historical narrative in light of the doctrine of Scripture is the manner in which history is defined and its meaning textually mediated. To state the issue briefly, what is the object to be interpreted: the event behind the text or the textual account?47 The difference is stark and involves two very different interpretive acts. Although our approach will involve the latter, text-based focus, we will explain the interpretive results of both.

The event focus treats the historical narrative (the Gospel) as a window through which the interpretive act is mediated. The meaning is derived from the event about which the text speaks. While such an interpretation would claim to be text based, it is functionally making the text one source (even if primary) among many texts that are useful, since all textual information is important and functionally authoritative—with no distinction between inspired and uninspired texts (i.e., there is not a functional necessity for a doctrine of Scripture). In this way many judgments are made regarding the textually mediated event that find no warrant in the text itself, since focus on the event allows for numerous impositions to the reality (or subject matter) about which the text is speaking.48 In short, the locus of revelation (i.e., where the revelation is located) is not the text but the event behind the text, the “revelation in history.”49

The text focus, in sharp contrast, does not treat the text as a mediating source between the interpreter and the object of interpretation; rather, the text is the object of interpretation. The meaning is derived from the text which speaks about an event. While such an interpretation still claims to be based on real history (an event), it is functionally making the account provided by the text the only authoritative source, since it combines both the account of the event and its interpretation. In fact, to bring event reconstructions from other sources is prohibited without warrant from the text (the Gospel) itself, because there is a dramatic distinction between inspired and uninspired texts (i.e., there is a functional necessity for a doctrine of Scripture). In this way all judgments made regarding the event are directed by the (inspired) text alone, since the focus on the text demands that nothing be added to the account and especially to its meaning (subject matter) except that which the text allows. In short, the locus of revelation is not the event behind the text but the text as Scripture, so that revelation is located in the text in a manner that includes not only the recorded account but also the interpretation (whether explicit or implicit) of the account.50

It was Frei’s landmark monograph, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, that declared a major (false) turn had taken place in biblical hermeneutics in which the “ostensive” or apparent reference (i.e., the event behind the text) had become the locus of meaning, making the text itself, ironically, less applicable to the interpretive task.51 “It so happens that reversal coincides with the Enlightenment project of describing the world without reference to God,” which suggests that the biblical text had lost its doctrinal status as Scripture.52 But while Frei rightly diagnosed this developing hermeneutical error, he wrongly suggested that the response was not to develop a more robust doctrine of Scripture but rather to redefine history. In sum, Frei collapsed the history into narrative.53 While he was correct when he argued against the separation of text and reality, he was mistaken when he argued that there should be no distinction between the witness of the text and the reality of which it speaks. Not to separate the witness from its subject matter is to make a categorical mistake.54

Frei and several after him came to adopt a “narrative theology,” in which the general hermeneutical category of narrativity was imported into theology as a foundational explanatory category—a new kind of “natural theology” that he so strongly opposed in regard to making history a foundational explanatory category. Contra Frei, God became “flesh” (John 1:14), not narrative! Yet contra event focus, the biblical narrative is neither expendable nor merely one of many sources through which God communicates. It is neither “narrative” nor “history” that can function as the foundational explanatory category; only the category of Scripture defined above can keep the necessary distinction and yet hold in their proper relations the narrative witness and its true subject matter, the (historical) person and (theological) work of Jesus Christ.

The text-focus approach guides the interpreter in a plethora of ways, two of which can be briefly summarized. First, because Scripture is both the authorized account of the event and its interpretation, the details of the narrative are paramount for interpretation. What is included is important, and what is not included is also important in its exclusion. To try to reconstruct what is not revealed in Scripture, unless the text gives implicit warrant, potentially creates a different story than the narrative. Even more, interpreting an event is entirely different than interpreting a text, primarily at the level of perspective. Events remain open to multiple perspectives. The meaning or sense of an event lies in the ability of the onlooker to gather the appropriate data and evaluate it from a certain (limited) vantage point. Narrative texts, however, provide readers with a privileged perspective on an event; they have the advantage of the author’s guidance and perspective on the event.55 Thus, the world of the event “reaches us through the mediation of the words, selected and combined to form their own logic,” offering the reader “a pre-interpreted image of reality” instead of the raw material given from the event itself.56 Quite simply, the reader enters the world of the narrative—and it alone—not as a narrative theologian (Frei) but as a faithful listener to the Word of God. There is no better place from which to access what is real and true than from the words of Scripture. In fact, the reader is actually in a preferred position, beyond even those who were present at the historical event.

Second, in light of the hermeneutical turn to the event behind the text, the Gospels are rarely read without recourse to reconstructive comparison. This raises numerous issues, both historical and theological, most of which bump into the guiding paradox that God ordained four Gospels and yet there is one gospel of Jesus Christ. Only a few comments can be made here. Any attempt to reconstruct a singular event between the Gospel accounts not only places the locus of meaning in the event itself (and not the Scriptural witness) but at best creates a fifth Gospel of sorts; or worse, it is functionally combining the four Gospels into one historical Gospel, which has already been rejected by the church (i.e., Tatian’s Diatessaron, which means “through four”).57 The church believes that the singular gospel is not a singular witness, a Gospel narrative, but a singular subject matter, a gospel message. The unitary nature of the Gospels can only be at the level of their message, with all four playing their own parts in a united and symphonic form.

Furthermore, if a unitary reconstruction of the Gospels is to occur, it is not in regard to the historical witnesses (the narrative Gospels) but in regard to their theological subject matter. As strongly as the church must maintain the need for the separation of the four Gospels, it must also pursue their unification into one gospel. This means that each Gospel must be interpreted for the individual Gospel’s role or contribution to the one gospel, not in a manner that combines their events but in a manner that prepares to hear in unison their individual roles in the symphony of the gospel. For this reason our commentary on John will not engage in historical reconstruction with the other three Gospels but will focus on the witnessing role of the Fourth Gospel, as an exegetical commentary should, providing the material from which the subject matter can later be derived. This in no way denies a unified historical account of events, but places the pursuit of reconstructing the event under the category of apologetics, not interpretation or theology. We will at times in this commentary address interpretive issues driven by reconstruction of events and between the Gospels, such as the temple cleansing or the date of the crucifixion, not because it is methodologically required or even preferable but because it is pastorally relevant to the reader.

Canonical Connections and “Impressions”

Another distinction not always recognized in the interpretation of a historical narrative in light of the doctrine of Scripture is the manner in which its literary context is defined and its meaning textually connected. To state the issue briefly, how does the doctrine of Scripture give definition to the nature and function of the canonical context of this Gospel? There are two important ways in which the doctrine of Scripture gives literary definition to our interpretation of the Gospel.

First, the doctrine of Scripture demands that this Gospel be viewed as one part of a larger whole. This does not mean the Gospel has no definable literary boundary within which the narrative should be read and interpreted, for certainly the Gospel is its own literary unit with a functional structure, bearing meaning as an individual and intentional form of communication. Yet by its placement in the biblical canon, the doctrinal logic also explains that this book is incomplete on its own and was never intended to be read in isolation. In a sense, just as there are four Gospels and yet one gospel, so also there are sixty-six biblical books and yet one Bible. For this reason the message of this Gospel is not only grounded in its historical connections but also in its literary-canonical connections. Thus, our interpretation of the Gospel should assume that its divinely intended communication will make canonical connections in both directions—not merely to that which precedes it in space-time history (the OT) but also to that which it precedes (the rest of the NT).58 That is, the connection between this Gospel and the rest of Scripture is canonical before it is chronological.59 This assumption, however, is based upon a doctrinal presupposition about the unified and interconnected nature of Scripture and its author, God himself. Any interpretation of the Gospel that makes connections to historical parallels and backgrounds but not also to canonical connections and therefore to the full subject matter of the Bible is not rightly conceiving of the Gospel as Scripture.

Second, befitting the literary connections demanded by the canon of Scripture, a necessary corollary is that Scripture, as the real Word of God, is connected to the Gospel of John not only as a unified witness and text (canon) but also as a unified subject matter and message (content). Again, however, the logic for this is doctrinal, demanded by the fact that the intentional self-communication of God incorporates the whole of Scripture and works in a unified manner, without denying a distinction in roles and comprehensiveness assigned (by God) to the individual books within Scripture. This means, in one sense, that the subject matter of Scripture must ultimately be derived from the full divine self-communication, and this Gospel is a necessary part of that communication. This also means, however, that the full divine self-communication is needed to understand each of the parts; the whole canon is expected to cooperate in the interpretation of its parts, and the Gospel of John is one of those parts. Thus, the connection is not merely to concepts but judgments, and the full canon is needed to interpret this Gospel in light of the revealed intentions of God.

This literary function of both concepts and judgments is important when interpreting the Gospel of John. For example, from its very first words (1:1) this Gospel is intentionally connecting itself (its story and theology) to the Old Testament, with interpretive language like quotations, allusions, and echoes only partly depicting the cooperative intentions. In light of our discussion above, especially in regard to the unified nature and function of the whole of Scripture, we are doctrinally committed to assuming that the books of the Bible are interconnected in their very being (ontology) and therefore their subject matter, and not merely when they use the same words and phrases. Not even typology is sufficiently warranted to be the category of connection across Scripture, for it is utilizing and therefore limited by historical categories dependent upon reading extratextual (or behind-the-text) realities like persons, events, and institutions through which the subject matter is attempted to be derived.60 While wanting to affirm the text’s ability to describe God’s economy in the fullness of its historical account (function—what God does) or what theologians describe as the economic Trinity, we must also affirm the text’s ability to describe God in the fullness of his own unique nature (ontology—who God is) or what theologians refer to as the immanent Trinity (see comments on 20:21–22). While redemptive history is well suited to grasp God’s economy (function), it is unable on its own to account for or describe God’s immanence (ontology).61

This might sound strange on the ears of the contemporary exegete, for the division of labor between biblical studies and (systematic) theology has resulted in the former focusing on the economic Trinity (history) and the latter focusing on the immanent Trinity (doctrine)—even though both are addressing the same subject matter! While we would not be warranted to assume such interconnection with any other set of books, Christian Scripture demands that we do so. In this way, then, our reading of this Gospel is sensitive to links by means of both concepts (explicit) and judgments (implicit), with the latter being interpreted by the text’s own carefully designed details and intentions. Thus, a particular pericope is read in light of the full canonical context and guided by the textually mediated clues so that “judgments” (not only economic but also immanent) are not read into the text in a foreign manner but naturally arise from the narrative pressures themselves.

This kind of narrative sensitivity to the contextual judgments applied by the use of a term or word was hardly foreign to the ancient world. In fact, the modern tendency to squabble over the precise meaning of a word would have been foreign to an ancient audience. Downing has helpfully shown that the widespread contemporary expectation of and insistence on clarity in the use of words is not justified in texts from the ancient Greco-Roman world.62 “To read ancient authors as though they ‘must’ have shared the concern evinced by some among us for connotative precision risks making a category mistake, a mistake in the genre of verbal articulation deployed.”63 In contrast to strict construals of the meaning of words, words functioned more like names; they were “expected to evoke in hearer’s minds shared impressions of people and events and things, and shared ideas, generalities, abstract concepts.”64 Words were assumed in the ancient world to make similar “mental impressions” upon the reader, with the implication that those impressions had a creative and flexible freedom within the bounds of appropriate meaning.65 And the bounds of appropriate meaning are derived from the narrative itself. Some words make impressions that speak of two things simultaneously—e.g., the “exaltation” or “lifting up” of Jesus (see comments on 3:14), whereas other words are intended to bear significant theological freight, often repeatedly throughout the Gospel (see comments on 1:17). Throughout the commentary we will refer to “impressions” derived from our interpretation of the narrative’s details or intentions in regard to the use of a word/term or even in some instances a paragraph or scene. Again, it is important to note that by “impression” we refer not only to the historical and literary connotations suggested by the use of a word but also to the theological (doctrinal) connotations by means of its relation to the rest of the canon.66

The Biblical Reader

If our method is rooted in God as the primary communicator and the text as the primary mediator, which includes not only the historical author and context but also the canonical context, then there is also the need of a primary reader. While it is common to assume that the primary reader is not the contemporary church but the ancient or original reader, such an assumption would conflict with the nature and role of this Gospel as Christian Scripture. This is not to deny or remove the original reader as a coparticipating reader but to claim for doctrinal reasons that the truly “biblical” reader is the church (past, present, and future).67

When we speak of the biblical reader, we are addressing one very important aspect of Christian discipleship. “A Christian theological depiction of the hermeneutical situation will involve the development of a Christian theological anthropology of reading . . . which makes extensive appeal to the language and belief structure of Christian faith.”68 Two aspects can be briefly summarized. First, the biblical reader is an active participant in the Word of God. The reader is to be envisaged as located within the interpretive context we have outlined above, involving the self-communicating of God and the functional doctrine of Scripture (involving creation, canon, and creed). “The reader is an actor within the larger web of events and activities, supreme among which is God’s act in which God speaks God’s Word through the text of the Bible to the people of God. . . . As a participant in this historical process, the reader is spoken to in the text.”69 The biblical reader is expected to respond faithfully to God’s communication through Scripture.

Second, the biblical reader is a passive recipient of the Word of God. Since Scripture is God’s self-communicative act, a gracious encounter between the holy God and his fallen world, a truly Christian reading is not within the range of human competence, primarily because the reader’s capacities are distorted by sin—“by choice of wrong ends to which to put the text; by desire to fashion that which the text says into something which pleases, rather than something which disturbs or judges or commands or calls to repentance.”70 A truly biblical reading of Scripture requires that we love its author (God); if this is daunting, we are to be reminded (from Scripture) that our love is grounded in the fact that God initiated love: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). In short, a biblical reading requires that the reader become a certain kind of person, one who through the Spirit is liberated from self-concern and the pursuit of self-interest, and one willing to love and pursue the ends for which God designed human life.71 This kind of reading is the source and symptom of Christian discipleship. The biblical reader, therefore, is expected to relinquish himself to God’s communication through Scripture. The most competent reader of Scripture will be the one who stands under (not over) it.72

The Gospel of John and Interpretation

We have worked hard to locate the Gospel of John in its divine context as Christian Scripture; now we must locate this Gospel in its historical context—the first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman world. For as much as God spoke out of his timelessness, he also spoke into a time-bound situation involving people, places, and processes. While the interpretation of this Gospel in light of the doctrine of Scripture might be uncommon, the Gospel has a long history of being examined and defined in relation to its originating historical context.73 For this reason our introduction must also address the necessary elements of the historical context into which God spoke through this Gospel.

The historical circumstances in which the Gospel of John came to life are not easily defined or explained. The origin of the Gospel, in fact, is often referred to quite pessimistically as “the Johannine Problem.” In the words of one commentator, “Everything we want to know about this book is uncertain, and everything about it that is apparently knowable is a matter of dispute.”74 As much as there is truth in this statement, it is more accurately a summary of the scholarly discussions over the last two centuries regarding the Gospel, which has spent as much time looking “behind the text” as it has spent reading it. The full truth is not quite so pessimistic. The Gospel of John is clearly concerned to root itself in its necessary historical and theological foundations and to guide the reader to see and understand how it serves as a witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as well as to his church, beginning with the twelve disciples. The Gospel is well aware of the historical context into and through which it speaks, and its message embraces the historical context in great detail—for Jesus the Word “became flesh” (1:14), was crucified under Pilate (18:28–19:27), and was resurrected (20:1–10) in real history. Without getting sidetracked by the countless explorations into the Gospel’s context by those assuming the critical approach to the Gospel, our discussion below will offer an introduction to the exegetically important topics related to the historical and social-cultural context of the Gospel necessary for a thorough interpretation of its contents and subject matter.

Authorship

The Gospel is formally anonymous, which means that its author’s name does not appear in the text of the work itself. This does not mean, however, that the text is intentionally anonymous, shielding its author’s identity from the readers. From its beginning the Gospel speaks in a first person manner identical to other ancient books that were also formally anonymous but not intentionally anonymous (e.g., Lucian’s Life of Demonax). For this reason, then, the Gospel was not intended to be formally anonymous, which almost certainly explains the title added to the Gospel sometime after its completion (see below). Quite simply, book “publishing” in the ancient world was entirely different from today. Authors commonly spoke in the first person in a formally anonymous document because their works would have been circulated in the first instance among friends or acquaintances of the author, who would know the author personally from the oral context in which the work was first read. Knowledge of authorship would be passed on when copies were made for other (less familiar) readers, and the name would be noted with a brief title on the outside of the scroll or on a label affixed to the scroll.75 This is not to claim that the Gospel was only intended for the immediate context of readers (on audience, see below) but to explain the manner in which texts were “published” in the ancient world.

“The Gospel According to John”

The title added to the Gospel when passed to those less (personally) familiar with the author was “The Gospel according to John” (ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ). The title and comparative titles in related literature are important to our understanding of the author and his relation to the text.76 Several questions need to be answered. First, how is the title to be interpreted? The title departs from the almost-standard title of books in antiquity, which lists the author first (in the genitive case) followed by the title of the content. Thus, one would have expected the title to read, “John’s Biography of Jesus,” like other biographies around the first century (on genre, see below). But it is significant that the name of the author is last and that the text is not called a biography of Jesus but “the Gospel.” Since all four Gospels have the same title prefacing four different authors, the title is making a striking claim: there is one gospel written or expressed in four different accounts—“according to” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Thus, there is one gospel and four Gospels, with each Gospel offering a necessary perspective, witness, and interpretation of the one and only gospel. The title, then, is making both a historical and theological statement.

Second, when was the title attached to the Gospel of John? From the beginning of the manuscript tradition (ca. AD 200 onward), the only title for all four canonical Gospels is in this form.77 No other title was ever used for any of the Gospels in known literature, a remarkable fact which demands that the titles be viewed as early and even original.78 In short, “the universality of these ascriptions of authorship and the fact that they seem never to have been disputed indicate they became established usage as soon as the Gospels were circulating.”79 The titles became such a standard that even the apocryphal Gospels, the majority of which came into being as early as the first half of the second century but clearly later than the canonical Gospels, borrowed the form of the canonical title: “The Gospel according to” Thomas, Peter, Philip, Matthias, Mary, and so on. Even the Gospels of particular groups were given titles matching the canonical Gospel form. The early origin and application of the title suggests, therefore, that it offered significant instruction regarding the authorial connection to each particular account and situated each Gospel to the gospel. While the title of the Gospel might not be defined as inspired, its intimate connection to the origin of the inspired Gospel text provides it with a certain amount of authority in its own right. For this reason, in spite of the plethora of names suggested for the author of the Fourth Gospel, especially in the last two centuries, to suggest a name other than “John” is to disregard the author-designating title affixed to the Gospel from its earliest stage of origin. That is, the burden of proof is on those who want to argue against Johannine authorship.

Third, what are the practical roles of the title? One of the clear roles is to define the four Gospels as the gospel, a term which speaks beyond its genre (see below) to its message, its subject matter, and even its purpose—to “evangelize” or “announce good news,” according to its etymology and secular use in the ancient world. The term gospel throughout the NT is the oral proclamation about Jesus Christ—who he was, what he accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection, and the promise of his future return—involving a call to repentance and faith. The apostle Paul refers to the gospel as “the gospel of God,” from and about God, which “he [God] promised beforehand through his [OT] prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (Rom 1:1–2).80 Thus, as much as this Gospel is a record of the life of Jesus, it is also God’s announcement of eternal life for the world.

There is another important role communicated by the title. By affixing the title to this Gospel the text is grounded in the eyewitness testimony of its author. Richard Bauckham has written a paradigm-shifting monograph that has convincingly argued for the nature and function of the Gospels as eyewitness testimonies. While a complete survey of Bauckham’s contribution is beyond the scope of this commentary, one of the primary implications is how the category of eyewitness testimony is essential to grasp correctly the history and theology contained within and projected by the Gospel. According to Bauckham, “Testimony offers us . . . both a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as history, and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.”81 It is the theological aspect of testimony that offers a significant advancement to the traditional (historical) understanding, for it adds the historically grounded assumption that the author is not a dispassionate objective observer but a participant, one who was personally connected “to the events and whose direct experience enabled him to understand and interpret the significance of what he had seen.”82 In the ancient world eyewitnesses were not just data gatherers but data interpreters; they did not conceal the meaning, as if they were blocking the view, but served as the required connection to the object, the spectacles necessary for corrective vision. As Byrskog explains, “Involvement was not an obstacle to a correct understanding of what they perceived as historical truth. It was rather the essential means to a correct understanding of what really happened.”83 There was no dichotomy between fact and meaning or between empirical report and engaged interpretation. You could not have one without the other, for they are, quite simply, the two sides of the same coin. The reader of the Gospel is not going to an event behind the text (see “Text versus Event”), as if the text and the author are mere tools for (historical) reconstruction and are expendable; the reader is reading through the eyes and ears (the testimony) of the authorial witness.

The affixed title, therefore, not only situates the Gospel to a particular author but also situates the author as a particular kind of witness. And while the Gospel proper does not name the author, it clearly gives definition to the nature and function of his witness. The formal (but not intentional) anonymity of this Gospel allows the author to function both inside and outside the Gospel. In this way the title of the Gospel becomes an essential component of the Gospel, a judgment drawn from the Gospel proper that can appropriately be reapplied to it. With this title the Fourth Gospel is rightly declared to be both a textual participant in the fourfold Gospel account and propagator of the gospel, and also a personal participant in the living subject matter of the Gospel/gospel: Jesus Christ. For this reason the identity of the author is as much a hermeneutical (theological) issue as a historical one. To treat the authorship of the Fourth Gospel as an isolated debate is to compartmentalize inappropriately the message from its messenger. It is an act that subjects a testimony (and its author) to interpretive violence and is rooted in “the temptation to reduce the voice of the Other to our own.”84 For this Gospel, the identity of the author cannot merely be a historical plaything about which there are several unconfirmed suggestions. The author of this Gospel is its eyewitness and therefore is personally and authoritatively connected to the very message of the text. For a fuller explanation of these issues, see comments on 21:24.

The Identity of “John”

The author of the Gospel only explicitly reveals his identity as the “Beloved Disciple” (see 21:23–24; on the Beloved Disciple, see comments on 13:23), befitting the formally anonymous nature of the Gospel. There are several reasons why this literary technique is utilized by the author, so that the formal anonymity is serving a greater hermeneutical purpose than mere identification (see comments on 21:24). Yet the historical identity of the Beloved Disciple is also significant. Recent scholarship has offered several diverse suggestions concerning his identity. Although not a comprehensive list, several of the most prominent or interesting suggestions include the following: the apostle Thomas, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, and even the Samaritan woman.85 None of these suggestions finds any internal or external support; that is, not only do none of these options (or well over a dozen others) find any warrant from the Gospel itself, even if they have traits that overlap with the Beloved Disciple, but none of them were ever recognized as the Gospel’s author by the (orthodox) church.

It is unavoidable and necessary to claim with the affixed title of the Gospel that the author of the Gospel was named John. From as early as the second century the author of the Gospel was identified as the apostle John, the son of Zebedee (see Irenaeus, Haer. 3.1.2), and from at least that point (if not earlier) the church has unanimously attributed the authorship of the Gospel to the apostle John. The apostolic authorship of John stood firmly until the middle of the eighteenth century, shielded by dogmatic considerations that guarded against any so-called scientific progress.86 Only when issues arose that were less concerned with credibility and biblical authority were other authors able to be suggested.87 If the church is not an authority on the identification of the author on its own right, at least this fact suggests that the evidence is so convincing regarding the identification of the apostle John that there was no definable dissent for nearly two millennia. This matches the title affixed to the Gospel, “according to John.” Thus, both statements commenting upon the author of the Gospel and the manuscript tradition of the Gospel itself declare forthrightly that the author is John. To argue that someone with another name wrote the Gospel is to argue with no evidential support from either the manuscript tradition or the history of the church.

There is another “John” mentioned briefly in some of the postapostolic tradition, however, that some believe strongly suggests it is not John the apostle but one called John the elder who should be rightly identified as the author of the Gospel. The recent works of Hengel and Bauckham have gone a long way to make this “other John” a reasonable candidate.88 Hengel and Bauckham explore the traditional external evidence, especially the famous fragment from the prologue of Papias (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.4), in order to argue that “John the elder” is the author of the Gospel. This John, not the apostle, is the Beloved Disciple; he is not one of the Twelve but is a Jerusalem disciple of Jesus. The proposal of John the elder not only accounts for the formal anonymity and the fact that there is no evidence that the Gospel was ever regarded as anonymous (unlike Hebrews) but also explains the eventual attribution to John the apostle. According to Bauckham, the lesser-known John the elder was replaced by the fame of the better-known and more prestigious John the apostle.89 Confusion over the formal anonymity allowed oral tradition to eclipse John the elder for John the apostle, which was solidified by Irenaeus when he applied the title “apostle” to the author of the Gospel (Haer. 1.9.2–3; 2.22.5; 3.3.4), not in a technical manner but in order to indicate the author was a reliable authority and authorized by Christ. The looseness of the title “apostle” as an application to the reliable witnesses of Christ soon became connected to the Gospel, and once he was considered an apostle, John the elder became indistinguishable from the son of Zebedee. Thus, while there are eighteen centuries of voices claiming John the apostle wrote the Gospel, Bauckham suggests that they are all repeating the mistaken interpretation of Irenaeus and ignoring the earliest tradition (from Asia) regarding the origin of the Gospel.

As much as the external evidence from the postapostolic period does suggest that there are two distinct “Johns” in earliest Christianity, not only is the exact identity of the one called John the elder vague and difficult to define with precision but there is even less warrant for attributing the authorship of the Gospel to him and not John the apostle. The brilliance of Bauckham’s interpretation of the postapostolic evidence is still unable to offer a reading that is demanded by the tradition. Quite simply, Bauckham offers a revised reconstruction of the origin of the Gospel by reinterpreting the bulk of the tradition that clearly attributes authorship to the apostle John through the lens of a few statements in the tradition that could be read differently in regard to an individual named John the elder. While not impossible, neither the external evidence itself nor the internal evidence allow such a conclusion.90 Just as the author waits until the epilogue to declare his identity as the Beloved Disciple (see 21:23–24), he also waits until the epilogue to connect the Beloved Disciple to one of the sons of Zebedee (see 21:2), thereby making clear that John the son of Zebedee, the apostle John, is the author of the Fourth Gospel.

The apostolic authorship of the Gospel adds an important dimension to the nature of its authority. Related to what we discussed above, just as the formal (but not intentional) anonymity of the author makes him a textual participant in its narrative account, and just as the authorial eyewitness makes him a personal participant in its living subject matter, so also does the identity of the author as John the apostle make him an apostolic participant in its message and therefore uniquely qualified in every way to serve as a herald of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Again, the identity of the author is as much a hermeneutical (theological) issue as a historical one; the message and the messenger unite to become part of “the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph 2:20).

Genre and Literary Forms

As important as it is to define this Gospel as Scripture, which we described above as its own kind of genre, we must also understand what it is and does according to the cultural conventions of its literary genre and other literary forms. As we discussed above, this commentary is engaged in the interpretation of a text; without denying there was an author, audience, and a particular social-historical context out of which this text was created, the object of our interpretation is the textual form and identity of the Gospel itself.91 For this reason we must define carefully not only its dogmatic form and function according to a doctrine of Scripture but also its literary form and function according to the conventions of a text or narrative. After defining the genre of the Fourth Gospel, we will also give definition to three other common literary forms (subgenres) utilized by the Gospel.92 Our goal is to gain an overview of the conventions of the Gospel’s genre and literary forms in order to more competently handle the narrative’s communicative act.

The Gospel in Narrative Form

Genre, or a text’s type of literature, is extremely important for the interpretive task.93 The term genre is used to understand a text, both descriptively and prescriptively, according to a generally recognizable type of writing with a certain style, purpose, and identifiable features. A text’s genre has particular conventions that both designate the nature of the text and the manner in which it “works.” Genre is important because it guides the reader to handle the text with a more precise literary competence, so that the text is handled according to its own nature and cultural conventions. While genre is just that—generic and not specific, it plays an important role in understanding and utilizing the intended act of communication between author, text, and reader.

The Gospels have long been discussed in regard to their genre or literary type. At least since the work of Burridge, it has become standard to recognize and interpret the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies.94 Burridge convincingly explained how the Gospels share a family resemblance with the wide-ranging form of Greco-Roman biographies from the Hellenistic period both before and after the life and ministry of Jesus. The Gospels, therefore, are not a newly invented genre but have been adapted to a recognizable literary form that is both biographical and historical.95 But others have rightly pushed beyond Burridge’s definition to see the Gospels as stemming just as equally from the Old Testament Scriptures. Loveday Alexander, for example, considers the Gospels to be unique biographies in light of their kerygmatic nature. According to Alexander, “It is to the biblical tradition, surely, that we should look for the origins of the ‘religious intensity’ of the Gospel narratives and their rich ideological intertextuality with the biblical themes of covenant, kingdom, prophecy, and promise—all features hard to parallel in Greek biography.”96 Something similar was argued by Adela Yarbro Collins, who not only wants to see an equal connection to both Greco-Roman biographical and the Old Testament (Jewish) Scriptures but also a shared emphasis between the historical and didactic. That is, while the goal of a more historical genre serves to give “an account of an important series of events,” a more didactic genre has as its goal the instruction of the reader “not only about the life of a particular individual but also about the way of life that he founded.”97

This is not to deny that the Gospels are Greco-Roman biographies; it is simply to add that the generic conventions of the Gospels also borrow from the Old Testament Scriptures and their similar but more didactic historical-biographical narratives. Collins, in reference to the Gospel of Mark, for example, refers to its genre as an “eschatological historical narrative.”98 However we title or even define the generic conventions of the Gospels, it is clear that they include three aspects: biographical (on Jesus), historical (on real events), and theological-didactic (on a subject matter pertinent for the reader). That is, in collaboration with the doctrine of Scripture we discussed above, the generic conventions of this Gospel are rooted in both its theological identity (as Scripture) and its literary-historical identity (as historical biography). The prescriptive role of genre demands that the reader engage with its subject matter according to and through all of its innate conventions. The reader, then, must work hard to grasp the manner in which this Gospel is using all of its generic conventions and forms to guide the reading and interpreting process, a process which includes a personal engagement with and through the text itself—God’s Word.

What are some of the generic conventions that are important for a proper reading of the Gospel of John, rooted in its dual identity as both (ancient) historical biography and Christian Scripture? Several can be briefly stated.99 First, the Gospel genre demands the reader take seriously the history about which it speaks. It is important to note, however, the radical difference between ancient and modern biographies. Ancient biographies often mix chronological and topical elements in a flexible manner, treat words of characters in a more paraphrastic and selective manner, and have little to no concern for sensory details of the story and the inner person—the latter of which is a major difference from modern biographies. If this Gospel had been written in this century, we would probably have read about “the waves lapping at the shore of the Sea of Galilee” and heard a description of “coarse dry sand trod underfoot in the Judean desert.”100 While ancient biographies postured themselves differently to the “life” they are presenting, they were not in any way divorced from or unconcerned with the real historical reality about which they write. In fact, the four Gospels reflect vested interest in the historical details, serving as eyewitnesses of the actual person and events, as we discussed above.

Second, the Gospel genre presents the character and life of the subject of the biography to the reader as one to be emulated. The reader is invited not merely to appreciate the “life” displayed in the biography but to share in its admirable qualities, even share in its riches and resources. This is all the more significant in the Gospels and with the life of Jesus, whose life was lived for the purpose of gathering life-sharing participants. The reader of the Gospel of John is even invited to believe in the life lived by Jesus and to enjoin their life to his, thereby receiving “life in his name” (see 20:31).

Third, related to the previous point, the dual identity of the Gospels directs the reader to engage with the Gospels as a communicative act directed at them. The Gospels are not dissociated from the reader, mere tools about and for another, but written intentionally—both by the historical author and God himself—to the reader as proclamation. Said another way, “We should come to the Gospel narratives as we do to a sermon; they are to be treated not as mere conveyors of (historical or doctrinal) information but as instruments of transformation.”101 The Gospels announce and define the gospel, and they have been and should continue to be the church’s primary mediums for declaring the salvation of the world. To read them without this ultimate goal is to deny their literary intention and goal.

Basic Story Form

Beyond the generic conventions of the Gospel, the reader must be able to relate to it as narrative, that is, as a story. What stories are and how they work has been discussed since Aristotle’s famous work, Poetics, which provided a basic analysis of the primary parts of a story.102 In short, Aristotle explained that the foundation of a story is its plot, which must have a beginning, middle, and end. Modern literary criticism has developed further Aristotle’s premise, showing how a story can be seen to have a more developed emplotment trajectory. For example, Gustav Freytag argued that the basic plot structure has five components or acts: introduction, rising action, a climax or turning point, falling action, and resolution.103 This “story arc” is what develops the plot and therefore allows the story to work. “In large part the meaning of a narrative comes through paying attention to its form.”104 The reader of any narrative must be sensitive to the form the story takes and how it functions.105 For the form of the story becomes the structural guide to its interpretation and meaning.

This sensitivity to form can happen at the macro- and microlevel of the Gospel. At the macrolevel, along with what we discussed above regarding genre, the Gospel as a whole functions as a complete and unified story, which this commentary will continue to develop and explicate as it moves through the narrative. The plot of the entire Gospel centers upon the life and mission of Jesus. But this is no common life, for the life of Jesus is one that fulfills the purpose of the Father and finds its ultimate expression in the coming of the Spirit. In this sense, the plot of this Gospel involves the life of the Trinitarian God. The prologue introduces the basic plot of the Gospel, guiding the reader to understand the key characters and issues in the coming narrative. The entire Gospel, therefore, tells a single story that could be analyzed according to the emplotment form discussed above.

Yet the Gospel must also be analyzed at the microlevel, since it is clearly broken into smaller units that are also designed with a functioning emplotment. As much as this Gospel is one story, it is also comprised of a plethora of smaller stories which each bear a definable plot, even if less complex or technical. Since the early church all four Gospels have been seen as being an organized collection of different episodes (e.g., Eusebius) that unite to form a full narrative Gospel. In the modern period a smaller unit or episode is called a “pericope” (pl.: pericopae), a term from the Greek which can mean “a piece cut out,” hence a section or a smaller unit. While there are clear boundary markers between pericopae, because the pericopae participate fittingly in the larger narrative interpreters do not always agree which boundary markers are determinative for determining a pericope.

The boundaries of a pericope, however, are only part of its interpretation, for just as the entire Gospel is emplotted, so also is each pericope. While not every pericope is a smaller unit of the narrative, for there are other pericopae (with definitive boundaries) in the Gospel that bear the conventions of other subgenres that would not follow the same emplotment structure (e.g., dialogues), each pericope that is narrative in genre will bear the basic story form. As helpful as Freytag’s five-part emplotment structure is for reading narratives, a simpler form can be defined as having four acts, or what we will call in this commentary a four-scene structure:

• SCENE 1: Introduction and Setting
• SCENE 2: Conflict
• SCENE 3: Resolution
• SCENE 4: Conclusion and Interpretation

These four scenes are like handles, allowing the interpreter to grasp at the narrative’s precise, intentional, and developing movements. They also allow us to be directed by the narrative itself. That is, we are not interpreting an event but the interpretive telling of an event, with an emplotment that bears its own interpretive prejudice and authority. By being directed by the emplotment, we interpret the text according to its own rules and expectation—an especially important procedure when dealing with Christian Scripture. It is important to note these narrative handles are not intended to hinder the story but to provide the lenses that allow the fullness of the story—both its precision and beauty—to be seen and experienced.106 In order to be faithful to the basic story form, a brief summary of each of the four scenes is in order.

SCENE 1 provides the introduction and setting, explaining the characters, setting or context, and issues important for interpretation. By interpreting the text and not the event (see above), things included by the narrative are to be given foremost importance, whereas things not stated should only be allowed interpretive weight when the context or pericope itself implies its functional participation.

SCENE 2 introduces the plot’s conflict. The conflict of the pericope could be more complexly divided into “rising tension” and “climax,” and at times a more complex conflict is needed for the interpretation of a pericope that demands a rising or developing conflict, but the majority of pericopae can be rightly interpreted by the functional category of conflict. The conflict of the pericope is the problem or issue to be resolved; it is the engine that moves the story from its source to its solution and will help establish the issue being addressed regarding the meaning of the pericope.

SCENE 3 explains how the conflict comes to a suitable resolution. Again, the resolution might be given an unexpected solution that is more complex in nature, yet the resolution should (and will) match or be equal to the nature of the conflict. The nature of the resolution will guide the reader to understand the subject matter being addressed by the narrative’s emplotment.

SCENE 4 provides the conclusion and interpretation to the pericope, even if the interpretation is only given by implication. At times the force of the macrolevel narrative and its macrolevel plot makes a detailed conclusion or interpretation unnecessary, but the narrative pericopae will not leave the reader stranded. Each pericope will conclude similar to how it began: it will guide the reader to see the issue(s) at hand and their solutions and will explicitly or implicitly instruct the reader to appropriately engage with its story and subject matter.

The basic story form is not only important for interpretation but also for preaching and teaching. A pericope, whether a basic story form or some other subgenre, is a fully containable unit with the larger Gospel narrative. Although they must work cumulatively within the full Gospel, they can also stand on their own as units for interpretation and instruction. This commentary will argue that this Gospel can be divided into forty-eight pericopae (see Structure and Outline below). Not all pericopae are equivalent in length, since the boundary markers and four-scene structure for emplotment are the primary determinations of a pericope. And since some pericopae are more complex in nature, a preacher/teacher may want to divide a pericope into even smaller teaching units. The goal, however, is to understand how this Gospel’s parts all work together as a unified and developing story.

Dialogue

One of the unique features of this Gospel is the occurrence of lengthy dialogues, conversational exchanges between Jesus and either an individual or a group regarding religious and theological matters. The Johannine dialogues have long been noted but only briefly defined, and usually in relation to dialogue-like forms in the Synoptics, which are quite different in form and function from those found in John. Unfortunately, interpreters have minimized the functional importance of the dialogues of Jesus in the narrative of the Gospel and have, therefore, misjudged their important role in directing and establishing the theology of the Gospel. While interpreters might admit in principle that the form of a particular scene is a dialogue, in practice the dialogue is given little interpretive force or explanation. What becomes the focus instead are the words of Jesus, as if the purpose of the dialogue is simply to serve as a frame around the Jesus sayings. But the Gospel’s dialogues are not the Johannine version of the Synoptics’ pronouncement story, a narrative setting intended to serve a dramatic saying. Rather than serving as mere contexts or frames for Jesus’s statement, dialogues function as unified wholes that work with the words of Jesus. Not only do the dialogues make much less sense as independent entities but they are also essential to the movement of the narrative and the strategy of its plot.

In the twentieth century C. H. Dodd provided the most focused analysis of dialogues in the Gospel, and most scholars since Dodd normally rely on his now sixty-year-old conclusions. Dodd analysed the Johannine dialogues under the category, “The Sayings,” a title that immediately (and unfortunately) subordinates the dialogues to pronouncement-like stories. The elaborate nature of John’s dialogues forces Dodd to conclude that John has left the example of the Synoptics, which he suggests borrowed forms of Jewish origin, and borrowed instead from the Hellenistic world where “there was a long tradition of the use of dialogue as a vehicle for philosophical or religious teaching.”107 Dodd’s primary concern was not the function of the John’s dialogues but the relation between John’s dialogues and “the primitive Christian tradition.”108

In this century the conclusions of Dodd have indirectly received a renewed interest. Dodd’s suggestions regarding the Hellenistic world have been heeded, driven now by the more integrative approaches, especially by further comparisons with Greco-Roman “dramatic” literature and the application of narrative criticism. Recent work in narrative theory, for example, has made clear that narrative may be spoken of as dramatic in the sense that it does as much “showing” as it does “telling”; a dramatic narrative is a mediated presentation that uses a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic strategies as a specific act of communication. More recently, scholars like Parsenios and Brant have provided extensive analyses of John’s dramatic modes of narration. Parsenios argues that John, employing devices from ancient dramas, actually “thinks in dramatic categories” in a context in which dramatic thinking was common to literature.109 Parsenios argues with P. E. Easterling that the prevalence and influence of dramatic thinking was so extensive that one can speak of the “the theatricalization of ancient culture.”110 Brant also employs a full range of the dramatic conventions of the Greco-Roman world and applies them to John.111 Though she goes too far at times, she does offer helpful analytic tools that “provide heuristic devices for differentiating and identifying the various services rendered by Johannine dialogue in the construction of its dramatic world and action.”112 This is not to say that John is a drama instead of a biography; it is simply to suggest that an awareness of these dramatic modes and their performative natures are helpful in assessing the function of dialogues and dramatic conventions in the Gospel.113

The Function and Form of the Dialogues

There are two significant functions of the dialogues in the Gospel of John. First, the dialogues serve an important role in the developing story of the Gospel. The function of a dialogue is not merely the meaning of the language in the interaction but also what the language does. As much as dialogues do contain meaning, they also move and develop the plot. Thus, they are intimately connected to what has come before and where the plot of the Gospel is moving. The dialogue brings meaning to Jesus’s person and work so that the characters—and therefore the readers—are exhorted to take a particular action, thereby moving the plot along toward its ultimate goal: “that you may believe” (20:31). The dialogues cannot be divorced from the narrative movement and emplotment of the Gospel as a whole. The dialogues are not tangents for John; they are necessary elements in the developing story of Jesus, which ultimately involves the (dialogical) conflict between God and humanity.

Second, the dialogues serve to give meaning and direction to the pericope/scene in which they occur. The interactive movement and patterns of the individual dialogue also provide the controls needed to interpret and understand the message of the passage. The conventions of the dialogue give meaning to the verbal exchanges, helping observe and interpret tactical maneuvers between dialogue participants (interlocutors), for a dialogue is not guided by the pattern of conflict and resolution like a basic story form but by the interactive movement and patterns of ancient dialogue. Such insights into the function of a dialogue provide lenses with which to understand the passage’s details (e.g., playful words and phrases) and developing movement. Only by understanding the dialogical structure of the scene can the reader make sense of not only its details but also the rhetorical meaning of the interaction.

By means of these particular dialogue functions, three different forms (or kinds) of dialogues occur in the Gospel of John: social challenge, legal challenge, and rhetorical challenge dialogues.114 We shall discuss them each in turn. The first kind of Johannine dialogue can be called a social challenge dialogue, which takes the form of an informal debate. The purpose of the social challenge is not to debate formally a principle, idea, or point of law but to challenge the honor and authority of one’s interlocutor. It was common for challenge dialogues to involve both irony and the playful use of words, in which the poetic battle involved the creation of competitive possibilities and realities.

The second kind of dialogue can be called a legal challenge dialogue, which takes the form of a formal debate. As a formal debate the purpose is not merely to challenge the honor or authority of one’s interlocutor but to debate formally a principle, idea, or point of law.115 The structure of the legal challenge is different than the informal dialogues (social and rhetorical), which are less concerned with technical content. It was common for legal dialogues to contain forensic elements similar to a trial: accusations of legal infractions, testimonies, scrutiny of witnesses, and rendering of judgment.116 This basic structure provides handles to grasp the movement of legal dialogues and the subject matter being addressed by both interlocutors.117

The third kind of Johannine dialogue can be called a rhetorical challenge dialogue, which takes the form of a creative discussion of antitheses rather than a social or legal exchange of ideas.118 A rhetorical dialogue is not void of a social challenge, but unlike social or legal dialogues where the logic of the argument and carefully timed presentation is central to the debate, in a rhetorical dialogue interlocutors are allowed “to lay out the conflicting propositions and commitments that give rise to their plight or provoke antagonism.”119 The grounds for challenge are more immediately established, as each interlocutor sets the deeds or position in diametric opposition with that of the other. A rhetorical dialogue is not intending to advance an argument but to intensify conflict between two parties that have already agreed to disagree. The goal of a rhetorical dialogue was not toward invitation but toward exclusion. It is possible that people of differing social statuses would engage in a rhetorical dialogue rather than a social or a legal dialogue. There was no need to mediate between or determine the victorious position, only to reestablish the antithetical positions.

Seven Formal Dialogues

Our above analysis has introduced the generic function and form of dialogues as used by the Gospel. We have not yet classified each dialogue by their form and function. While there are several dialogical scenes in the Gospel where a particular interaction borrows a conventional aspect of a dialogue, what we might call partial or informal dialogues, there are only a limited number of formal dialogues in the Gospel that manifest the recognizable conventions and categories of the dialogue genre proper. The formal dialogues in the Gospel, then, are substantial enough in size to utilize observable conventions of technically defined social, legal, or rhetorical dialogues. It is important to note that the three kinds of dialogues are not mutually exclusive; dialogues often utilize and combine conventions from more than one kind of dialogue. This is especially common between the social and legal dialogues, since both are “insider” dialogues. Thus, while there is a legitimate distinction between the three types of dialogues in John, there is also a necessary overlap between them, since they are not different genres but different “patterns that fit into and weave into each other to form the conflict.”120

We would like to suggest that there are seven formal dialogues in the Gospel between Jesus and the following character(s):

1. 1. Nicodemus (3:1–21)—social
2. 2. Samaritan Woman (4:1–42)—rhetorical
3. 3. Jewish Crowd (6:22–71)—social
4. 4. Jewish Authorities and the Jewish Crowd (7:14–52)—social
5. 5. Jewish Authorities (8:12–59)—legal
6. 6. Jewish Authorities (9:1–41)—legal
7. 7. Jewish Crowd (10:22–42)—social

The number seven has a rhetorical significance frequently utilized by the Gospel and may be intentional. With the first and last dialogue falling under the pattern of a social dialogue, the entire public ministry of Jesus is framed by the conflict between the Word and the world. All seven substantial dialogues occur in the first half of the Gospel, that is, during the public ministry of Jesus (chs. 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). The dialogues include what is probably an intentional variety of interlocutors: two involve individuals (one Jewish man and one Samaritan woman), two and a half involve the Jewish authorities, and two and a half involve the crowd. The dialogues also utilize all three kinds of dialogues: four social dialogues, two legal dialogues, and one rhetorical dialogue.

There is nothing magical about the occurrence of seven dialogues in John; the concern of this commentary is merely to provide some guidelines for interpreting the dialogues. The occurrence of seven dialogues, however, does match well the Gospel’s own proclivity for seven. It suggests that the dialogues are not merely literary conventions utilized by the author in the telling of the story of Jesus but, like the seven “signs,” facilitate the Gospel’s plot by depicting in graphic detail the conflict between God and humanity over honor, law, and identity in a manner that allows for robust theological interaction. In contrast to serving as the context for Jesus’s one-liners, dialogues in the Gospel of John play a significant role in the narrative. Using the conventions and patterns of ancient dialogue, the Gospel’s dialogues offer a dramatic theological presentation that engages the reader at numerous levels, drawing them more fully into the depth of the Gospel story that began in the conflict between darkness and the light (1:5) and ends at the cross.

Monologue

The Gospel is also unique in its use of extended discourses or monologues of Jesus. The Synoptic Gospels have few monologues that are substantial in length in comparison to the Fourth Gospel, which according to Dodd “worked on a radically different principle of composition.”121 As he did with dialogues, Dodd bases the monologues in this Gospel upon a comparison with potentially related “sayings” in the Synoptics. Similar to his concern with the dialogue, Dodd’s primary concern was not the function of John’s monologues but the relation between John’s dialogues and “the primitive stage of tradition.”122 Dodd’s goal was to uncover the origin of the monologues in the various “branches of oral tradition” and “the variations belong[ing] to its pre-literary history.”123 Dodd’s primary concern, therefore, was not the function of John’s monologues in the narrative but the relation between John’s monologues and “the common deposit of tradition,” which he suggests was shared by all four Gospels though applied by the Fourth Gospel in a radically different “pattern” and by a “different channel.”124

Similar to our discussion above regarding dialogues, our concern with the monologues of John is in regard to their narrative function.125 A monologue is similar to a dialogue in that it is set in the context of an engagement and conflict, but rather than engaging point for point it allows for a lengthy argument. Like the three types of dialogue, a monologue can contain elements of rhetoric, challenge, and conflict, but it does so in a sustained presentation. The function of a monologue is similar to a dialogue in another way: its significance is not merely the meaning of the language and the propositions of the argument but also what the language does. As much as monologues do contain meaning, they also move and develop the plot. Thus, they are intimately connected to what has come before and where the plot of John is moving. At times a monologue may even contain within it a brief dialogue between speaker and audience, reflective of the implicit dialogical nature of a monologue. The monologue brings meaning to Jesus’s person and work so that the listeners—and therefore the readers—are exhorted to take a particular action. For this reason each pericope containing a monologue is controlled by the linear movement and patterns of the monologue and not by scenes centered upon conflict and resolution. This is not a tangent for John; it is a necessary element in the developing story of Jesus.

Unlike Dodd, our concern is not with the “sayings” of Jesus as traditionally defined in Gospels scholarship but with substantial monologues that performed generic functions in the Gospel narrative. While there are several partial or informal monologues, there are only a limited number of substantial monologues in the Gospel that manifest the recognizable conventions and categories of the monologue genre proper. This commentary would like to suggest that there are four substantial monologues in the Gospel:

1. 1. The Identity of (the Son of) God (5:19–47)
2. 2. The Shepherd and the Sheep (10:1–21)
3. 3. “The Hour has Come” (12:20–50)
4. 4. The Farewell Discourse (13:31–16:33)

All four substantial monologues occur during the public ministry of Jesus, which includes Jesus’s final but private address to his disciples. As a whole, the monologues provide robust insight into the identity of Jesus and the work given to him from the Father. The monologues also serve the narrative by facilitating the Gospel’s plot, depicting in great detail God’s own argument and explication of his person and work in the world.

Origin: Date, Provenance, and Audience

The author of this Gospel is well aware of the historical conditions and context out of which his message was communicated. Like the formal anonymity of the author, however, the origin of the Gospel could also be described as formally anonymous. The dominance of the critical approach over the last few centuries has made the issues surrounding the Gospel’s origin the interpretive key to the Gospel. The confessional approach—the approach of this commentary—is also concerned with the historical situation in which the Gospel was created, but for different reasons and with different warrant (see above). For this reason our analysis below will not address these issues of origin as if they are the building foundation for the interpretation to follow. They are not for both methodological reasons as well as an important textual reason: the Gospel is formally anonymous in regard to its origin. At best the origin of the Gospel can only be implied (or reconstructed) from the narrative account.

Since the Gospel is only implicit in its account of its origin, we too should only be concerned with its historical and social-cultural context in a general manner; anything too specific goes beyond what the Gospel itself warrants. We would even argue that much of the discussion of this Gospel’s origin is more appropriately applied to apologetics, the defense of the faith and its Scripture, than interpretation, the explication of Scripture and its meaning. This is not to minimize apologetics in any way but to admit that it is not the concern of this commentary. Nor is our concern the history of discussion regarding the Fourth Gospel and its interpretation, as if the Gospel can be analyzed in a manner that distances the text from its communicative intention and subject matter.126 Rather, our goal is to interpret the Gospel as it demands to be received. For this reason it is necessary to locate the Gospel in its context of origin in order to allow for a conversation between the original record and the (contemporary) reader to occur in relationship to the subject matter. Most of the historical and social-cultural issues will be addressed in the commentary proper as needed, but a summary of some of the traditional origin issues in regard to this Gospel is in order.

Date

The Gospel gives the reader no explicit date of origin. In fact, its record is concerned with an earlier era, the life and ministry of Jesus, and not the life and ministry of its author. Ironically, most of modern discussion regarding date concerns the time period about which the Gospel does not speak. That is, the date is often in reference to the historical time and place of the author and not the subject about which he spoke, Jesus Christ. Much of this is driven by the methodological dogmas of the critical approach we discussed above.

The majority of scholars reconstruct the date of origin for the Gospel to be somewhere between AD 70 and 135; the former date because of the narrator’s mention of Peter’s death (21:19), which occurred around AD 65 or 66, and the latter date because a NT manuscript () containing part of the Gospel (18:31–32) was found that can be dated to around AD 135.127 Certainly the latter date is far too late. Based upon the use of terms and phrases in the Gospel, such as the designation “Sea of Tiberias” in explaining the “Sea of Galilee,” the best range of dates for the Gospel would be AD 70–95.128 But even then this is just an educated guess. It is also pressing the evidence beyond what is needed for interpretation, for not only is little precision gained by such a detail—a general first-century context is clearly sufficient—but the interpretive dates the Gospel itself is concerned with is in the first third of the first century, the context of Jesus’s ministry. That is, the context directly related to the content and subject matter of the text. This is not to deny that the Gospel author is writing after the events of record and with an interpretive perspective. It is simply to claim that the author is neither making his later date obvious or significant for interpretation nor overly assuming his matured perspective from the start. As we discussed above, since the Gospel is the record of an eyewitness, the Gospel narrative serves to merge the date of event and the date of the text’s origin into a united and singular witness that cannot be separated without doing damage to both.

Provenance

The Gospel also gives the reader no explicit place of origin. Its record is concerned with the location in which Jesus lived and ministered and not the location of its author, though most of modern discussion of provenance concerns the location of the author and not the locations about which the Gospel itself speaks. Evidence in the early church suggests that the Fourth Gospel had its origin in Ephesus. According to Eusebius, the apostle John went to serve in Asia (Hist. eccl. 3.1.1); according to Irenaeus, “John, the disciple of the Lord . . . published the Gospel while living in Ephesus in Asia” (Haer. 3.1.2). Modern scholars have challenged an Ephesian origin by preferring comparison drawn from internal evidence (e.g., affinities between John and Philo for a supposed origin in Alexandria) over and against the external evidence drawn from the early church.

While it is entirely probable that the Gospel had its origin in Ephesus just as Eusebius and Irenaeus report, there is nothing significant about this place or the tradition promoting it.129 Again, the Gospel is formally anonymous in regard to the place of its origin, and it would certainly be a mistake to place interpretive controls on the reconstructed social-cultural location of this proposal regarding the Gospel’s origin. Hoskyns is probably closer to the point: “The Gospel was assuredly written down at a particular time and in a particular place . . . and this cannot be irrelevant for our understanding of his book. . . . But the author has done his best, apparently with intention, to cover up his tracks. For his theme is not his own workshop but the workshop of God, and to this we have no direct access!”130 This is not to minimize a real place or origin but to claim that the subject matter of this Gospel can only be defined when God is viewed as a participating (if not primary) source of origin. The provenance of importance for the interpretation of the Gospel is the locations described and articulated by the narrative itself. And as we will see, at times the thematic importance of a location is what matters most to the narrative (e.g., the use of “garden” in chs. 18–20; see comments on 19:41).

Audience

The early church had several traditions regarding the origins of the Gospels, including the audience for whom they were written. Over the last century, however, those traditions have been developed so as to take on a life of their own. Gospels research has now considered it axiomatic that the four evangelists wrote for and in response to their own particular Christian communities. In the last few decades elaborate reconstructions of the four Gospel communities have been proposed, using technical reading techniques that attempt to get “behind the text” of each Gospel. The quest for the historical Jesus that occupied much of the nineteenth century largely gave way to the quest for the early church in the twentieth century. The basic assumption is that by discovering the identity of the audience and its social and historical location, the Gospel can be rightly interpreted according to its original occasion and intended purpose.

The Johannine Community

While all four Gospels have been interpreted through the lens of their reconstructed audience, the uniqueness of the Gospel of John has almost required that it receive the most robust and detailed reconstruction of its audience, what is now commonly called the “Johannine community.”131 It is impossible to separate the reconstructions of the Gospel’s audience from its authorship, source, and origin issues or in fact from the rest of the Johannine literature. Once the majority of critical scholarship held that John the apostle may not be the author, as was traditionally believed, then a wave of varying theories were presented in its place, leading to the current reconstructions of the audience. Initially it was believed that if it were not the apostle, at least one of his close companions completed the work from his memoirs. This thesis was held and adapted so that it was assumed that the apostle was not the author, but someone after him, a disciple of his most probably. Although it was C. Hermann Weisse (1838) who was the first to suggest that a group of followers or disciples of the apostle wrote the Gospel, using notes which the apostle left when he died, it was probably Ludwig Baumgarten-Crusius (1843) who first used the idea of a Johannine community or “circle” in defense of John’s authenticity. Later both Michel Nicholas (1864) and Carl H. von Weizsäcker (1901) argued that the Fourth Gospel was written by a pupil of John or a member of the Ephesian church, the location where it was assumed John originated. Thus, from as early as 1860, the disputed origin of the Gospel made the ground ripe for the establishment of a group of Johannine disciples out of which the Gospel found its origin.

The next century brought forth a growing consensus that the Gospel was in some way a creation of a Johannine community, that is, the work and ideas of the disciples of the apostle. In discussing the relation between the Gospel of John and the Johannine letters, James Moffatt’s 1918 New Testament introduction summarizes the current understanding of Johannine literature by stating the general position many scholars had come to agree upon: “Their relationship on the disjunctive hypothesis is accounted for by the common language of a group or school in Asia Minor. . . .”132 Thus, through the first six decades of the twentieth century, the discussion in NT scholarship focused on the enigma of the Gospel and its relationship to the other Johannine writings. The more “orthodox” defended the authorship of the apostle, the less “orthodox” assumed some type of Johannine group as the responsible party for some or, more probably, all of the Johannine writings. The Johannine oddities and the various proposals concerning the background of the Gospel presented by these causes, not unlike current Johannine scholarship, were certainly present. In the 1920s, the influence of form criticism and its picture of the origin of the Gospels also played a role. The uncertainty of the origin, authorship, and sources of the Gospel of John and its relation to the other Johannine writings made the audience reconstructions of the Gospel appear to many scholars to be a most plausible explanation.

Martyn, Meeks, and Methodological Precision

It was in the 1960s, in the high point of redactional activity in all four of the Gospels, that the face of Johannine community reconstructions was drastically affected. In 1968, J. Louis Martyn published the first edition of History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel.133 Martyn’s thesis became “a paradigm” in Johannine studies by combining two growing conclusions into this one work: the Jewish nature of the Gospel as its background and origin and the reality that John was a book of many compositional levels.134 Martyn himself states his purpose in his introduction:

Our first task . . . is to say something as specific as possible about the actual circumstances in which John wrote his Gospel. How are we to picture daily life in John’s church? Have elements of its peculiar daily experiences left their stamp on the Gospel penned by one of its members? May one sense even in its exalted cadences the voice of a Christian theologian who writes in response to contemporary events and issues which concern, or should concern, all members of the Christian community in which he lives?135

According to Martyn, the text of John needs to be read on two levels: one that reflected the tradition of the church and the other that was involved in the contemporary issues of the particular community.136 For Martyn, each writer in the NT handled these two issues and their relationship in different ways. This is in part because although each drew from a similar pool of tradition, each had unique social and religious circumstances which they faced. In this way Martyn can say, “Consequently, when we read the Fourth Gospel, we are listening both to tradition and to a new and unique interpretation of that tradition.”137 Methodologically, then, according to Martyn one could compare how different writers of the NT adapted the common tradition to their specific circumstances; thus, the different application denotes something of the historical circumstance in which each “community” lived and ministered. The Gospel text “presents its witness on two levels: (1) It is a witness to an einmalig [“back then”] event during Jesus’s earthly lifetime. . . . (2) The text is also a witness to Jesus’s powerful presence in actual events experienced by the Johannine church.”138 In this way, Martyn has not only assumed a Johannine “community” but has even provided a method by which interpreters may take a “glimpse” through a once-clouded window into the actual historical circumstances that were faced by the audience that authored, for itself and by itself, the text of the Gospel of John. The influence from Martyn’s first edition in 1968 to the current day is massive. Since then it has been the common assumption that the Fourth Gospel was written in and for a specific “community.”

Following in Martyn’s trail, there have been many and various proposals given to delineate the exact nature, circumstances, and historical development of the “community” in which the text of the Fourth Gospel was written. Two primary methodological approaches to the reconstruction of the audience of the Gospel can be briefly defined. The first approach is rooted in the traditional, historical introductory questions applied to the Gospels. Although Martyn had the earliest impact on “community” interpretation in John, he was not actually the first example of the more recent audience reconstructions. Two years before Martyn, Raymond Brown, in the first volume of his commentary on John, sketched as a “working hypothesis” his now famous five stages in the production of the document. He only hinted at different events or conditions in the community for whom the Gospel was intended.139 This initial publication of Brown’s view of the audience was to become much more explicit in his The Community of the Beloved Disciple (1979).140 This work is by far the most comprehensive and thorough explanation of the individual stages of the community and the many groups, for and against the authoring Johannine group, that were related in some way to the Johannine community. Yet like Martyn, Brown is performing a traditional historical-critical excavation of the Gospel text and its tradition, an approach wrapped up in the other introductory issues of the Gospel, growing from a desire to explicate the peculiarities of the Gospel in its historical situation.

The second approach to the reconstruction of the audience of the Gospel began shortly after Martyn. This methodological approach was initiated by Wayne Meeks’s article “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism” (1972).141 Using the methods of the sociology of knowledge, Meeks examines the descent/ascent motif in the Fourth Gospel and argues that it comprises a myth by which the Johannine Christians understood and strengthened their status as a sectarian counterculture “group.” Once the audience behind John was assumed to be a recognizable “group,” various approaches were then used to define its functional makeup. Meeks’s provocative article did much to fashion a view of the audience of John that dominated scholarship for years to come. While debate raged over the use of the term “sect” or “sectarian” to describe the “community,”142 the view of the Johannine Christians as a minority group in their culture and their emphasis on the in-group/out-group distinction became a basic assumption of later scholarship. Meeks’s proposal was a spark that ignited a plethora of social-scientific investigations in regard to the reconstruction of the Johannine community.

The Audience of the Gospel of John: An Evaluation

At the very end of the twentieth century, the methodological assumptions regarding the audience of the Gospels that had been growing in precision over the past generation were given a major challenge by the 1998 book, The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audience, edited by Richard Bauckham and contributed to by several other British scholars.143 This critique of what had been a general consensus has led to a methodological debate over the audience of the Gospels and an evaluation of the appropriate methods for interpreting the Gospels.144 Since the publication of that volume, each of the Gospels has received a level of evaluation regarding the warrant of reconstructing a particular audience, including the Gospel of John.145 As much as the old consensus (community reconstruction) has been given a sharp rebuke in regard to method and presupposition, it has hardly been outrightly rejected. If anything, the audience debate has simply brought a bit more balance to the use of the theories and approaches applied to the interpretation of the Gospels.146

The Gospels demand to be read in light of their original social-historical context and in a manner that facilitates the communicative intention of the Gospel according to its nature as both ancient text and contemporary Scripture. The assumption of this commentary is that the Johannine-community construct is methodologically a flawed category for interpreting the Gospel. Three reasons for this can be briefly summarized.147 First, the Gospel audience must be defined “relationally” and not territorially. The Gospel envisages a wide range of readers, not those confined to a particular space and time. Second, the Gospel audience cannot be reconstructed from a “mirror reading” of the Gospel, for this abuses the genre of the Gospel and assumes an overly narrow audience entirely foreign to this kind of genre. Third, the Gospel itself does not yield itself to be read by or intended for a narrow, specific audience. In contrast, the Gospel is written in such a way that its audience—its intended reader—is still unknown. It is better to assume that the Gospel was intended for a broad readership and was intended to cooperate with the general witness of early Christianity. This assumption matches well the confessional approach discussed above, which intends to take seriously the “humanness” of the Gospel and yet maintain that the Gospel, as part of Scripture, is also a “divine” communication.148

Structure and Outline

Scholarship on the Gospel of John has widely agreed that the Gospel should be divided into four main sections: Prologue (1:1–18), Book of Signs (1:19–12:50), Book of Glory (13:1–20:31), and Epilogue (21:1–25). One scholar even makes the remarkable claim, “The divisions are unquestionable,” though he is uncomfortable with the titles.149 While scholars are right to see a major section break between chapter 12 and chapter 13, the place at which the narrative transitions out of the public ministry of Jesus, there is no warrant for dividing the Gospel into only two major sections or “acts.” This two-part division of the Gospel is rooted more in source-critical theories (e.g., chs. 1–12 are part of the “Signs Source”) than in the synchronic presentation of the narrative itself. It was apparently Bultmann who was the first to suggest the hypothetical “Signs Source,”150 but Dodd seems to have been the most influential proponent of this two-part structure of the Gospel, without any substantial warrant besides the source-critical assumption of the conjoining of two sources (“signs” and “glory”) which were supposedly the original foundation for the Gospel narrative.151 Determining the literary structure of the Gospel is difficult and must be held loosely, but this division should be rejected by the narrative itself. For example, since the Gospel author describes the entire narrative as something like “a book of signs” (see comments on 20:31), certainly it is inaccurate to label only the first half of the Gospel with such a title.

One of the primary reasons why it is difficult to establishing the structure of the Gospel of John is because the narrative is crafted with several key themes that are repeatedly handled and developed throughout the progression of the narrative, which makes it possible to suggest all kinds of parallels, connections, and even chiasms. Without claiming that our proposed structure has correctly grasped this narrative, the analysis of this commentary has attempted to weigh the development of the Gospel as a narrative against the more formal considerations of literary structure. Our outline attempts to follow the movements and subject matter of the narrative, though it must be admitted that this structure is no more authoritative than the chapter and verse divisions, now common in all Bibles, which formed no part of the original text.152 According to our interpretation, the Gospel is best divided into ten major sections:

1. I. Prologue (1:1–18)
2. II. The First Week: An Introduction to the Narrative Proper (1:19–51)
3. III. The Beginning of Jesus’s Public Ministry (2:1–4:54)
4. IV. The Confession of the Son of God (5:1–8:11)
5. V. The Controversy over the Son of God (8:12–10:42)
6. VI. The Conclusion of Jesus’s Public Ministry (11:1–12:50)
7. VII. The Farewell Discourse (13:1–17:26)
8. VIII. The Crucifixion (18:1–19:42)
9. IX. The Resurrection (20:1–31)
10. X. Epilogue (21:1–25)

The narrative is framed by the significant functions of the prologue and epilogue, and the narrative proper is divided into distinct but developing sections which serve to form one unitary story. The titles are simply derived from the subject matter of those sections, befitting their place in the development of the narrative.

The ten major sections can be divided into forty-eight distinct pericopae, smaller units or episodes which make up the larger sections. These divisions are equally as subjective as the larger divisions, but are based on the narrative’s own boundary markers and change in subject matter. The commentary itself is divided into chapters based upon these forty-eight pericopae. While it is suggested that each pericope is a complete unit and therefore suitable for preaching, it must be admitted that some pericopae in this Gospel are complex enough or bear such a significant subject matter that a single pericope might be too much to exposit in one sermon or teaching session. For this reason we are providing a fuller outline of the Gospel that will show what our exegesis yielded to be even smaller episodes or units. The complete outline of the Gospel proposed by this commentary is the following:

1. I. Prologue (1:1–18)
   1. A. Introduction to the Word (1:1–5)
   2. B. Witness to the Word (1:6–8)
   3. C. Manifestation of the Word (1:9–14)
   4. D. Uniqueness of the Word (1:15–18)
2. II. The First Week: An Introduction to the Narrative Proper (1:19–51)
   1. A. The Witness of John (1:19–34)
      1. 1. John, the Voice in the Wilderness (1:19–28)
         1. a. “Not Me”: Jewish Authorities Question John (vv. 19–22)
         2. b. “But Him”: John’s Declaration of the Christ (vv. 23–28)
      2. 2. Jesus, the Lamb and Son of God (1:29–34)
         1. a. John’s Witness to the Lamb of God (vv. 29–31)
         2. b. The Spirit’s Witness to the Son of God (vv. 32–34)
   2. B. The First Disciples (1:35–51)
      1. 1. Andrew, the Anonymous Disciple, and Peter (1:35–42)
         1. a. “Come and See”: Jesus’s Invitation to the Disciples (vv. 35–39)
         2. b. The Naming of Peter (vv. 40–42)
      2. 2. Philip and Nathanael (1:43–51)
         1. a. The “Good” that Comes from Nazareth (vv. 43–49)
         2. b. The Revelation of the Son of Man (vv. 50–51)
3. III. The Beginning of Jesus’s Public Ministry (2:1–4:54)
   1. A. The First Sign: The Wedding at Cana (2:1–11)
      1. 1. Invitation to a Wedding in Cana (vv. 1–3)
      2. 2. Jesus, his Mother, and a Shortage of Wine (v. 4)
      3. 3. From Purification Water to Celebratory Wine (vv. 5–8)
      4. 4. The First Sign of Jesus’s Glory (vv. 9–11)
   2. B. The Cleansing of the Temple: The Promise of the Seventh Sign (2:12–25)
      1. 1. The House of God and a House of Business (vv. 12–17)
      2. 2. A Challenge of Temple Authority (vv. 18–20)
      3. 3. The True Temple, the Body of Jesus (vv. 21–22)
      4. 4. Jesus’s Witness to the Nature of Humanity (vv. 23–25)
   3. C. Nicodemus, New Birth, and the Unique Son (3:1–21)
      1. 1. Nicodemus’s Provocative Introduction (vv. 1–2)
      2. 2. First Verbal Exchange: “Born New” (vv. 3–4)
      3. 3. Second Verbal Exchange: “Born from Water and Spirit” (vv. 5–10)
      4. 4. Jesus’s Victory Announcement: The Cross (vv. 11–15)
      5. 5. Narrator’s Commentary (vv. 16–21)
   4. D. The Baptist, the True Bridegroom, and the Friend of the Bridegroom (3:22–36)
      1. 1. Introduction to the Baptism of Jesus (vv. 22–24)
      2. 2. Baptism Controversy (vv. 25–26)
      3. 3. The Bridegroom and the Friend of the Bridegroom (vv. 27–30)
      4. 4. Narrator’s Commentary (vv. 31–36)
   5. E. The Samaritan Woman, Living Water, and True Worshippers (4:1–42)
      1. 1. Jesus’s Return to Galilee through Samaria (vv. 1–6)
      2. 2. First Verbal Exchange: Jesus’s Provocative Request for Water (vv. 7–9)
      3. 3. Second Verbal Exchange: “Living Water” (vv. 10–12)
      4. 4. Third Verbal Exchange: Well of Eternal Life (vv. 13–15)
      5. 5. Fourth Verbal Exchange: The Woman and Her Husbands (vv. 16–18)
      6. 6. Fifth Verbal Exchange: True Worship and Worshippers (vv. 19–24)
      7. 7. Sixth Verbal Exchange: The Confession of Christ (vv. 25–26)
      8. 8. Interlude: Jesus’s Disciples, True Food, and the Harvest (vv. 27–38)
      9. 9. “The Savior of the World” (vv. 39–42)
   6. F. The Second Sign: The Healing of the Royal Official’s Son (4:43–54)
      1. 1. The Honorless Prophet Returns to Galilee (vv. 43–46)
      2. 2. Royal Official’s Dying Son (v. 47)
      3. 3. “Your Son Lives” (vv. 48–50)
      4. 4. The “Sign” of Life (vv. 51–54)
4. IV. The Confession of the Son of God (5:1–8:11)
   1. A. The Third Sign: The Healing of the Lame Man on the Sabbath (5:1–18)
      1. 1. A Man Lame for Thirty-Eight Years (vv. 1–5)
      2. 2. Get Up—Even on the Sabbath! (vv. 6–10)
      3. 3. Sin No Longer (vv. 11–15)
      4. 4. The Work of God, Father and Son (vv. 16–18)
   2. B. The Identity of (the Son of) God: Jesus Responds to the Opposition (5:19–47)
      1. 1. Like Father, like Son (vv. 19–24)
      2. 2. Life and Judgment of the Son (vv. 25–29)
      3. 3. Witnesses to the Son (vv. 30–47)
         1. a. The Insufficiency of Jesus’s Witness (vv. 30–32)
         2. b. The Witness of John the Baptist (vv. 33–35)
         3. c. The Witness of the Works of Jesus (v. 36)
         4. d. The Witness of the Father (vv. 37–38)
         5. e. The Witness of Scripture (vv. 39–40)
         6. f. The Insufficiency of Human Recognition (vv. 41–47)
   3. C. The Fourth Sign: The Feeding of a Large Crowd (6:1–15)
      1. 1. Jesus on a Mountain at Passover (vv. 1–4)
      2. 2. From Where Shall We Buy Bread? (vv. 5–9)
      3. 3. The Hospitality of Jesus (vv. 10–13)
      4. 4. He is the Prophet, Make Him a King! (vv. 14–15)
   4. D. “I AM” Walks across the Sea (6:16–21)
      1. 1. The Disciples Depart without Jesus (vv. 16–17)
      2. 2. Jesus Walks on the Stirring Sea (vv. 18–19)
      3. 3. The Encounter with (the Son of) God (v. 20)
      4. 4. The Disciples Receive Jesus (v. 21)
   5. E. The Bread of Life (6:22–71)
      1. 1. The Crowd Pursues Jesus (vv. 22–24)
      2. 2. First Verbal Exchange: “When Did You Come Here?” (vv. 25–27)
      3. 3. Second Verbal Exchange: The Work of God (vv. 28–29)
      4. 4. Third Verbal Exchange: God Gave You Bread, Not Moses (vv. 30–33)
      5. 5. Fourth Verbal Exchange: Jesus Is the Bread, Not Manna (vv. 34–40)
      6. 6. Fifth Verbal Exchange: “I Am the Living Bread” (vv. 41–51)
      7. 7. Sixth Verbal Exchange: Life in the Flesh and Blood of Jesus (vv. 52–59)
      8. 8. The Crowd Deserts Jesus (vv. 60–71)
         1. a. The Offense of Some “Disciples” (vv. 60–66)
         2. b. The Confession of the “Twelve” (vv. 67–71)
   6. F. Private Display of Suspicion (7:1–13)
      1. 1. The Feast of the Jews (vv. 1–2)
      2. 2. The Ridicule of Jesus by His Brothers (vv. 3–5)
      3. 3. The Response of Jesus to His Brothers (vv. 6–9)
      4. 4. The Reluctance toward Jesus because of the Jews (vv. 10–13)
   7. G. Public Display of Rejection (7:14–52)
      1. 1. The Authority of Jesus (7:14–24)
         1. a. Scene Introduction: Temple, Tabernacles, and Timing (v. 14)
         2. b. First Verbal Exchange: The Source of Jesus’s Teaching (vv. 15–19)
         3. c. Second Verbal Exchange: The Source of Jesus’s Miracles (vv. 20–24)
      2. 2. The Identity of Jesus (7:25–36)
         1. a. Third Verbal Exchange: The Nature of Jesus’s Origin (vv. 25–29)
         2. b. Narrator’s Interlude: Control in Confusion and Confrontation (vv. 30–32)
         3. c. Fourth Verbal Exchange: The Nature of Jesus’s Mission (vv. 33–36)
      3. 3. The Spirit of Jesus (7:37–44)
         1. a. Final Exhortation of Jesus: The Promise of the Spirit (vv. 37–38)
         2. b. Narrator’s Interlude: The Interpretation of Jesus’s Statement (v. 39)
         3. c. Final Reaction of the Crowd (vv. 40–44)
      4. 4. The Internal Divisions of Unbelief (7:45–52)
         1. a. First Verbal Exchange: Jewish Authorities Challenge the Temple Police (vv. 45–46)
         2. b. Second Verbal Exchange: Jewish Authorities Challenge the Crowd (vv. 47–49)
         3. c. Third Verbal Exchange: Nicodemus Challenges the Jewish Authorities (vv. 50–52)
   8. H. The Trial of Jesus regarding a Woman Accused of Adultery (7:53–8:11)
      1. 1. Teaching in the Temple (7:53–8:2)
      2. 2. The Law of Moses and Adultery (vv. 3–6a)
      3. 3. The Finger of God (vv. 6b–8)
      4. 4. The Law of Christ (vv. 9–11)
5. V. The Controversy over the Son of God (8:12–10:42)
   1. A. “The Light of the World”: The Accusations of Jesus the Judge (8:12–59)
      1. 1. First Accusation: The Charge against Inappropriate Belief (vv. 12–30)
         1. a. First Verbal Exchange: The Authority and Judgment of the Son (vv. 12–20)
            1. (1) Charge: “I Am the Light of the World” (v. 12)
            2. (2) Responses: The Witness of the Father and Son (vv. 13–18)
            3. (3) Verdict: “You Know neither Me nor My Father” (vv. 19–20)
         2. b. Second Verbal Exchange: The Origin of the Son (vv. 21–30)
            1. (1) Charge: “You Will Die in Your Sin” (v. 21)
            2. (2) Responses: “You Are from the World; I Am Not from This World” (vv. 22–27)
            3. (3) Verdict: “You Will Know That I Am” (vv. 28–30)
      2. 2. Second Accusation: The Charge against Illegitimate Origin (vv. 31–59)
         1. a. First Verbal Exchange: The Identity of the People of God (vv. 31–47)
            1. (1) Charge: True Disciples Abide in My Word (vv. 31–32)
            2. (2) Responses: Abraham and the Father (vv. 33–43)
            3. (3) Verdict: “You Belong to Your Father, the Devil” (vv. 44–47)
         2. b. Second Verbal Exchange: The Counterclaim by the Jews: Heresy! (vv. 48–59)
            1. (1) Charge: “You Are a Samaritan and Have a Demon” (v. 48)
            2. (2) Responses: “Before Abraham Was [Born], I Am” (vv. 49–58)
            3. (3) Verdict: The Attempted Stoning of Jesus (v. 59)
   2. B. The Fifth Sign: The Testimony of the Blind Man (9:1–41)
      1. 1. The Healing of the Man Blind from Birth (vv. 1–7)
         1. a. Blindness and Sin: “Rabbi, Who Sinned?” (vv. 1–2)
         2. b. Blindness and “the Works of God” (vv. 3–5)
         3. c. Jesus Heals the Blind Man (vv. 6–7)
      2. 2. The Judgment of Jesus In Absentia: Preliminary Hearing in the Sabbath Healing Case (vv. 8–34)
         1. a. First Verbal Exchange: The Blind Man and the Neighbors (vv. 8–12)
         2. b. Second Verbal Exchange: The Blind Man and the Jewish Authorities, Part 1 (vv. 13–17)
         3. c. Third Verbal Exchange: The Blind Man’s Parents and the Jewish Authorities (vv. 18–23)
         4. d. Fourth Verbal Exchange: The Blind Man and the Jewish Authorities, Part 2 (vv. 24–34)
      3. 3. The Confession of the Blind Man (vv. 35–41)
         1. a. First Verbal Exchange: Jesus Encounters the Blind Man (vv. 35–38)
         2. b. Second Verbal Exchange: Jesus Judges the Pharisees (vv. 39–41)
   3. C. The Shepherd and the Sheep (10:1–21)
      1. 1. An “Illustration”: The Door, the Shepherd, and the Sheep (vv. 1–5)
      2. 2. Narrator’s Commentary (v. 6)
      3. 3. The Interpretation of the “Illustration” (vv. 7–18)
         1. a. “I Am the Door of the Sheep” (vv. 7–10)
         2. b. “I Am the Good Shepherd” (vv. 11–18)
      4. 4. Narrator’s Commentary (vv. 19–21)
   4. D. The Son of the Father (10:22–42)
      1. 1. Narrator’s Introduction (vv. 22–23)
      2. 2. First Verbal Exchange: “I and the Father Are One” (vv. 24–30)
      3. 3. Second Verbal Exchange: Blasphemy or Belief? (vv. 31–39)
      4. 4. Narrator’s Conclusion (vv. 40–42)
6. VI. The Conclusion of Jesus’s Public Ministry (11:1–12:50)
   1. A. The Sixth Sign: The Death and Resurrection of Lazarus (11:1–57)
      1. 1. The Death of Lazarus, Belief, and the Glory of God (vv. 1–16)
      2. 2. “I Am the Resurrection and the Life”: The Dialogue between Mary and Martha and Jesus (vv. 17–37)
      3. 3. The Resurrection of Lazarus, Belief, and the Glory of God (vv. 38–44)
      4. 4. The (Prophetic) Response of the Jews to the Sign of Jesus (vv. 45–57)
   2. B. The Anointing of Jesus (12:1–11)
      1. 1. Gift for a King (vv. 1–3)
      2. 2. But What about the Poor? (vv. 4–6)
      3. 3. Preparation for a Corpse (vv. 7–8)
      4. 4. The Public Response toward Jesus (vv. 9–11)
   3. C. The Royal Entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem (12:12–19)
      1. 1. Preparations for a King (vv. 12–13)
      2. 2. The Royal Entrance of the King (vv. 14–15)
      3. 3. The True Nature of Jesus’s Kingship (v. 16)
      4. 4. “The Whole World Has Gone after Him”: Public Responses to Jesus (vv. 17–19)
   4. D. “The Hour has Come”: The Final Public Statement of Jesus (12:20–50)
      1. 1. Narrator’s Introduction (vv. 20–22)
      2. 2. The Glorification of the Son (vv. 23–26)
      3. 3. The Mission of the Son (vv. 27–36)
      4. 4. Narrator’s Commentary: The Unbelief of the People (vv. 37–43)
      5. 5. The Witness of the Son (vv. 44–50)
7. VII. The Farewell Discourse (13:1–17:26)
   1. A. Introduction: The Love of Jesus (13:1–30)
      1. 1. Jesus and the Washing of His Disciples’ Feet (13:1–20)
         1. a. Jesus Washes His Disciples’ Feet (vv. 1–5)
         2. b. Jesus’s Dialogue with Peter (vv. 6–11)
         3. c. Jesus Explains His Foot Washing (vv. 12–20)
      2. 2. Jesus Announces His Betrayal (13:21–30)
         1. a. The Prophecy of a Betrayer (vv. 21–22)
         2. b. Jesus’s Dialogue with the Beloved Disciple (vv. 23–26)
         3. c. The Entrance of Satan and Departure of Judas (vv. 27–30)
   2. B. The Farewell Discourse (13:31–16:33)
      1. 1. Prologue: Glory, Departure, and Love (13:31–38)
         1. a. The Glory and Departure of the Son of Man (vv. 31–33)
         2. b. A New Commandment: Love One Another (vv. 34–35)
         3. c. The Prophecy of Peter’s Betrayal (vv. 36–38)
      2. 2. I Am the Way and the Truth and the Life (14:1–14)
         1. a. “I Go and Prepare a Place for You” (vv. 1–4)
         2. b. Not Just a Place but a Person—The “I Am” (vv. 5–7)
         3. c. The Father, the Son, and “the Works” in the Name of the Son (vv. 8–14)
      3. 3. I Will Give You the Paraclete (14:15–31)
         1. a. An Introduction to “Another Paraclete” (vv. 15–21)
         2. b. Participation with the Father and the Son in the Spirit (vv. 22–24)
         3. c. The Peace of Christ in the Spirit (vv. 25–31)
      4. 4. I Am the True Vine (15:1–17)
         1. a. An Illustration of the Vine, the Farmer and the Branches (vv. 1–8)
         2. b. Remain in the Love of God (vv. 9–11)
         3. c. The Love Commandment (vv. 12–17)
      5. 5. I Have Also Experienced the Hate of the World (15:18–27)
         1. a. The Source of the World’s Hatred (vv. 18–21)
         2. b. The Judgment against the World (vv. 22–25)
         3. c. The Witness of the Paraclete (vv. 26–27)
      6. 6. I Will Empower You by the Paraclete (16:1–15)
         1. a. “An Hour is Coming” (vv. 1–4a)
         2. b. The True Object of Faith (vv. 4b–6)
         3. c. The Ministry of the Paraclete (vv. 7–15)
         4. d. The Paraclete’s Conviction of the World (vv. 7–11)
         5. e. The Paraclete’s Guidance of the Church (vv. 12–15)
      7. 7. I Will Turn Your Grief into Joy (16:16–24)
         1. a. Confusion regarding Seeing God (vv. 16–18)
         2. b. The Coming Transition from Grief to Joy (vv. 19–24)
      8. 8. Epilogue: Speaking Plainly, Departure, and Peace (16:25–33)
         1. a. The Christian Faith and the Coming “Hour” (vv. 25–28)
         2. b. The Misbelief of the Disciples (vv. 29–30)
         3. c. A Final Exhortation: “I Have Overcome the World” (vv. 31–33)
   3. C. Conclusion: The Prayer of Jesus (17:1–26)
      1. 1. Prayer for the Glory of the Father and the Son (vv. 1–8)
      2. 2. Prayer for the Present Disciples (vv. 9–19)
      3. 3. Prayer for the Future Disciples (vv. 20–26)
8. VIII. The Crucifixion (18:1–19:42)
   1. A. The Arrest of Jesus (18:1–12)
      1. 1. Betrayal in the Garden (vv. 1–3)
      2. 2. “Whom Do You Seek?” (vv. 4–9)
      3. 3. The Cup from the Father (vv. 10–11)
      4. 4. Jesus, Arrested and Bound (v. 12)
   2. B. The Jewish Trial and Its Witnesses (18:13–27)
      1. 1. Jesus Delivered to the Jewish Authorities (vv. 13–14)
      2. 2. The First Denial of Peter (vv. 15–18)
      3. 3. The Witness of Christ and His Disciples (vv. 19–24)
      4. 4. The Second and Third Denials of Peter (vv. 25–27)
   3. C. The Roman Trial before Pilate (18:28–40)
      1. 1. Jesus Delivered to the Roman Authorities (v. 28)
      2. 2. Pilate and the Jews: “What Accusation Do You Bring?” (vv. 29–32)
      3. 3. Pilate and Jesus: “What is Truth?” (vv. 33–38a)
      4. 4. The Negotiation of Jesus (vv. 38b–40)
   4. D. The Verdict: “Crucify Him!” (19:1–16)
      1. 1. Treatment for a King (vv. 1–3)
      2. 2. “Behold, the Man!” (vv. 4–7)
      3. 3. Authority “from Above” (vv. 8–11)
      4. 4. The Judgment Seat (vv. 12–16)
   5. E. The Crucifixion of Jesus (19:17–27)
      1. 1. “Place of the Skull” (vv. 17–18)
      2. 2. The Title of the King (vv. 19–22)
      3. 3. The Tunic of the Priest (vv. 23–24)
      4. 4. The Family of the Son (vv. 25–27)
   6. F. The Death and Burial of Jesus (19:28–42)
      1. 1. “It Is Completed” (vv. 28–30)
      2. 2. Testimony to the Perfect Sacrifice (vv. 31–37)
      3. 3. Buried in a Garden and a New Tomb (vv. 38–42)
9. IX. The Resurrection (20:1–31)
   1. A. The Empty Tomb (20:1–10)
      1. 1. The Location of Jesus (vv. 1–2)
      2. 2. Run to the Tomb (vv. 3–7)
      3. 3. Belief in the Resurrection (vv. 8–9)
      4. 4. The Location of the Disciples (v. 10)
   2. B. The Appearance to Mary Magdalene (20:11–18)
      1. 1. The Throne of Grace (vv. 11–12)
      2. 2. “Why Are You Weeping?” (vv. 13–15)
      3. 3. The Ascension (vv. 16–17)
      4. 4. “I Have Seen the Lord” (v. 18)
   3. C. The Appearance to the Disciples (20:19–23)
      1. 1. The Peace of God (vv. 19–20)
      2. 2. The Mission of God (v. 21)
      3. 3. The Spirit of God (v. 22)
      4. 4. The Ministerial Authority of God (v. 23)
   4. D. The Appearance to Thomas and the Purpose of the Gospel (20:24–31)
      1. 1. The “Absent Thomas” (v. 24)
      2. 2. The Witness of the Disciples (v. 25)
      3. 3. Not Unbelieving but Believing (vv. 26–27)
      4. 4. Belief in Testimony (vv. 28–29)
      5. 5. The Purpose of the Gospel (vv. 30–31)
10. X. Epilogue (21:1–25)
    1. A. The Mission of the Church: Jesus and the Fishermen (21:1–14)
       1. 1. Fishermen without Fish (vv. 1–3)
       2. 2. Disciples without Jesus (vv. 4–6)
       3. 3. “It Is the Lord!” (vv. 7–8)
       4. 4. Jesus’s Third Appearance to the Disciples (vv. 9–14)
    2. B. The Ministers of the Church: Peter’s Reinstatement and the Beloved Disciple’s Testimony (21:15–25)
       1. 1. The Love and Sheep of Jesus (vv. 15–19)
       2. 2. “You Follow Me!” (vv. 20–23)
       3. 3. The Origin of the Gospel (vv. 24–25)