Studies in the Gospels (Part Ten)

 


Welcome to my 10th post on the canonical gospels.  Last time we started looking at the gospel of John and went over some basic information about it.  Now let’s look deeper. When compared to the three Synoptic gospels, what is different about the gospel of John?

 

 

Unique characteristics of the Gospel of John:

1.      Covers a three-year ministry period vs. 1 year period found in the Synoptics.

2.      Focuses on Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem rather than his ministry in Galilee.

3.      Puts the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry instead of during the final week.

4.      Very little overlap with the content of the Synoptics.  In fact, while 93% of Mark is found in Matthew and Luke, only 8% of John parallels the Synoptics (Kostenberger, 2009, 553).

5.      Gives a very different style of Jesus’ teachings.  In the Synoptic gospels Jesus teaches with parables and short wisdom sayings. In John, Jesus gives long discourses.

6.      Written in the framework of a dualistic philosophy of opposing pairs. For example, light/darkness, spirit/flesh, above/beneath, righteousness/wickedness, children of God/children of the devil.

7.      Presents Jesus as the Incarnate Word – a Divine being come to earth in human form.

8.      Emphasizes individual relationship with Jesus rather than his relationship with the corporate group of disciples.

9.      Gives a different chronology for the “passion week” than the Synoptic gospels.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus eats a meal with his disciples on Wednesday night and is crucified on Thursday.  Friday was the Passover holiday, and the day before Passover was called the “Day of Preparation.” The Passover meal would have been eaten on Thursday night, which was officially the beginning of the Passover day. John notes that early on Thursday morning the Jewish guard commissioned by the Jewish High Priest Caiaphas to take Jesus to the governor’s headquarters would not enter the building for fear of defiling themselves before eating the Passover later that day (John 18:28).  Jesus died by 3 pm that afternoon, well before the Passover meal was celebrated. Thursday afternoon is when the Passover lambs are prepared for slaughter and Jesus died at that time.  That seems to be one of John’s points of emphasis. John also notes in 19:31 that the day Jesus died was the day of Preparation for the Passover.  Confusion has arisen in the past from rest of the verse which says, “…so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away.”  Readers have often thought that the Sabbath was always a Saturday so Jesus must have died on Friday. The Passover holiday itself (on Friday that year) was a Sabbath day. Note how the text says “that Sabbath was a high day” meaning a special holy day.  The Synoptic Gospels suggest that the “last supper” meal was eaten on Thursday night (replacing the Passover meal), Jesus died on Friday afternoon, was buried that evening before the Saturday Sabbath and was raised from the dead on Sunday morning.  The chronology in John is probably more accurate. It clearly fulfills the Synoptic prophecy that Jesus was to be buried for three days and three nights – the same amount of time that the prophet Jonah spent in the belly of the great fish (Matthew 12:40).

Here is a graphic showing the chronology of Passion week that we find in John’s Gospel:


 

 

 

 

 

10.  Moves the focus from the “kingdom of God” as in the Synoptics to the King himself – the person of Jesus.  Jesus presents himself as the source of Divine Life and Salvation, something that he never does in the Synoptic gospels.  In the Synoptics Jesus points people to God as the source of Divine Life and salvation.  The exception to this is Matthew 11:28-30 where Jesus invites people to come to him to find spiritual rest. Another interesting point is that Matthew 11:27 is a very John-like statement from Jesus.  The entire gospel of John can be seen as an extensive development of this one statement in Matthew about Jesus as the Revealer of the Father.

11.  The Gospel seems to reflect a stage of development within Christianity in which Jesus himself has become the focus of prayer and worship.  Previously, Jesus was seen as someone who pointed people to the worship of God and gave us a model prayer to pray to God the Father (what is commonly called “the Lord’s prayer” in Matthew 6 and Luke 11). In the Gospel of John Jesus sometimes instructs his disciples to pray to him (14:14).

12.  Emphasizes Jesus as the Divine Son of God.  In Mark and Luke Jesus speaks of God as Father only three or four times.  In Matthew we find more than 30 such references and in the Gospel of John there are about one hundred references (James D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003 p. 708).  We see a developing theology there since the order of writing was Mark - Luke - Matthew - John.  James Dunn points out that originally the term “son of God” was used in the Old Testament in the plural for angels (Genesis 6:2, Deut. 32:8, Job 1:6-12, 2:1-6, 38:7, Ps. 29:1, 89:6, Dan. 3:25) collectively for the nation of Israel (Exod. 4:22, Jer. 31:9, Hos. 11:1), and as a title of the king of Israel (2 Sam. 7:14, 1 Chron. 17:13, 22:10, Ps. 2:7, 89:26-27).  In addition, the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran show that the expected royal Messiah was thought of as God’s human son (1QSa(1Q28b)2.11-12; 4Q174(4QFlor)1.10-12; 4Q246).  The Jewish idea of the promised Messiah and King as the son of God was always in harmony with the expectation that the Messiah was a human being. There is no indication that the Jewish prophecies expected a Divine Being from heaven. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is more than human – he is the embodiment of Yahweh – God in human form (John 1:14,18).

13.  The theology of salvation is very different in John than in the Synoptics.  In the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus is asked how a person can obtain eternal life (in Greek “the life of the age”) he replies that one should obey the Ten Commandments (Matthew 19:16-22).  However, in the Gospel of John, Jesus declares that to obtain eternal life people must simply believe in him as the Messiah (John 3:15, 18, 36, 4:14, 5:24, 40, 6:29, 40, 7:38, 8:24, 9:35, 10:28, 11:25-26).

14.  John presents Jesus as the fulfillment of the Jewish religious festivals and as the new Temple.  Many scholars believe that the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 CE was one of the key historical events that led to the composition of John’s gospel.  The author of the gospel was pointing to Jesus as the replacement for the Temple – just as the Temple had been the dwelling place of God for Israel, Jesus now assumed that role (see Andreas J. Kostenberger, A Theology of John’s Gospel and Letters, Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 2009, p.59-60).

15.  The Synoptic gospels teach an eschatology (teaching of last things) that predicts the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the return of Jesus to earth, the final judgment, and the resurrection (see Matthew 24 and 25).  In contrast, the Gospel of John presents the reality of “eternal life” as something already available to believers in the here and now and the final judgment has having already been rendered in Jesus’ first coming (see John 3:16-21, 5:24, 6:40, 54, 9:38, 10:27-28, 11:25-26, 12:31, 16:11, 17:3).  Theologians call this “realized eschatology”, since it has already happened. The Jesus in the Gospel of John also mentions a future day of resurrection and reward in a few places. Jesus calls this time of resurrection and judgment “the last day” which puts a temporal dimension on it. He promises to raise up those who believe in him on the “last day” (see John 6:39 for example, among other places). There is very little mention of this idea in John’s Gospel and almost no mention of a future coming of Christ. It is strange that we see both types of eschatology in the same gospel. To solve that problem some scholars have proposed that most of the gospel was written by an original author who believed in realized eschatology and parts were written by a later editor who believed in the more traditional eschatology of a present evil age and a future age of judgment/resurrection/eternal life.  That more traditional eschatology is reflected in the synoptic gospels.

Overall, one can see there is a very different theological perspective advanced in the Gospel of John when compared to the Synoptic Gospels.  In my next post I will focus on the many references to Jesus' Divinity in the Gospel of John.

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