90s Vertigo Jesus (Transcript)

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'Chris Sims: For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. The Gospel of John, chapter 3, verse 16.

[Music: "I Won't Do What You Tell Me (Stone Cold Steve Austin)" by Jim Johnston]

C: Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers talk about the Bible, talk about Psalms, talk about John 3:16. We are your heavenly hosts. My name is Chris Sims. With me, as always, the other set of footprints, Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you today?

Benito Cereno: I'm good, Chris. You said you were going to surprise me at the top of this episode, and I was, but in retrospect I see that I shouldn't have been.

C: No you should not have been.

B: Yeah.

C: When I realized that there was no way we could do John without the top quote being John 3:16, I realized I had to make a change in what was previously established. But yes for those of you who missed it that is the entrance music of Stone Cold Steve Austin.

B: Yes, whose own gospel the 16th verse of the third chapter has become very popular.

C: Truly legendary. Give me a heck yeah.

B: Heck yeah.

C: So today we are gathered here to talk about the Gospel of John. This is, unless we go another two hours, this is the final installment in our five-part series on the Gospels.

B: On the Canonical Gospels.

C: On the Canonical Gospels.

C: [Sotto vocce] Hey everybody, it's Chris from the future here, just letting you know that we actually did go extremely long on this one and it will not be our final episode on the Gospels. We're going to have John part two next week.

B: To be honest, yeah, this has been it's been a really interesting look, but I don't know. Yeah, I'll be ready to look at a different thing soon. So...

C: There's a reason we did these and there's a reason that we did them all together because you kind of can't not. Right? Like you have to. You have to talk about the differences in each one and the best way to do that is to go through them one after another. I am very tired of parables

B: Yeah well, good thing John doesn't have any parables. One of the major differences between John and the synoptics

C: I will say this though we had the conversation about how the gospels sort of match up to different eras in superhero comics.

B: Right.

C: How we had golden age Jesus, and then expanded mythology silver age Jesus, and then kind of retcon-y bronze age Jesus. And you referred to this one, I believe friend of the show, Ben Rowe referred to this one as weird nineties Vertigo Jesus.

B: Right.

C: And I was a little disappointed when we did silver age Jesus, because there wasn't a dog.

B: Sure.

C: There wasn't a bottle city of tiny Jesuses.

B: yeah.

C: Nobody had to eat a million hamburgers.

B: Yeah, sadly.

C: Peter did not join the Legion of Superheroes as Elastic Peter, but this is a hundred percent weird 90s Vertigo Jesus.

B: It is! It's the invisibles! Right?

C: It's exactly 90s Vertigo Jesus in a way that I was kind of surprised by.

B: Yeah. It's the invisibles and Jesus's King Mob because he's God's fiction suit. And you weren't expecting that when you started reading.

C: No, I was not. No, I was not. Also, it's weird how much I didn't realize came from solely the gospel of John. Like we talked about a little bit last week when we were wrapping up Luke, that there are major miracles that everybody knows about that we haven't seen in the previous three gospels.

B: Right.

C: Water into wine being the most famous.

B: Yeah, sure.

C: There is so much that I recognize as super quotable Bible passages, even in the HCSB version. So there's probably more of it if we were reading through the King James, which I'm assuming you are going to point out. But I mean, we've got signs and wonders.

B: Yeah.

C: We've got so many in here that did not appear in the other gospels, but that are very much part of the fabric of what we know as of Jesus, which I think is very interesting.

B: Yeah, absolutely. One thing as I was reading through this, obviously rereading through John, I was really struck by how it's a mix of some of the most famous stories of Jesus ever. And then these weird bits that you never hear anyone talk about. And it just flip flops back and forth between the two.

C: Do you mean like the part where Jesus spends 30 verses telling people he is literally made of bread?

B: Sure. Yeah.

C: Because that one, I, you know, I always thought that was a metaphor and it is definitely not. He says I am literally made of bread.

B: Yeah. That's why people have been lining up to eat that bread every day for 2000 years.

C: Yeah, it's going to be, I feel like this is going to be a weird road to walk down.

B: Yeah, it sure is. It's a very weird one. And yeah, it's so accurate to look at it as, yeah, 90s Vertigo, absolutely. And like I say, the Invisibles and Jesus is King Mob. But for people who haven't read the Invisibles, think of it this way. It's the Matrix and Jesus is Neo or it's the Dark City and Jesus is whatever Rufus Sewell's character's name was.

C: Hey, quick question for you, Benito.

B: Yeah.

C: Do we need to explain what we mean by 90s Vertigo or do you think everybody's got it? Because if they didn't, they tuned out last week when we were talking about Roy Thomas.

B: Yeah, well, I think probably it's more likely people are familiar with Vertigo than Roy Thomas, I guess. But, you know, it's weird 90s British sensibility, dark English poetry 101 kind of gothy.

C: Gothy magic stuff. It's gothy magic stuff.

B: Yeah. And what's going on here that really draws the parallel between the Gospel of John and then the Invisibles or the Matrix or Dark City, all of which arguably have the same plot, is that we have Jesus as this spiritual Superman from an alien world or other dimension/level of reality who's sent down to this world and he's the only one that recognizes that we are secretly living in a world of darkness where everything is like They Live-style being controlled by demons and only Jesus has the magic sunglasses. I hope this is enough pop culture comparisons for people to understand. He's the only one who knows that the world is really controlled by the ruler of this world as it is referred to which might be the devil it might someone else, depending on your personal interpretation. We'll get back to that a little bit later.

B: And here we have a Jesus who absolutely works on a cosmic scale rather than concerning himself with just redeeming Israel like the synoptics are concerned with.

C: Yeah. And here's what got me about the difference between the Gospel of John and the three synoptic gospels. I talked about how, and I think this was mostly in Mark, right? That I find a lot of appeal in the very humanized Jesus that we see at times in the in the synoptic gospels. I like the Jesus who, you know, grew up poor and had a mom and dad and like gets hungry and gets mad at a fig tree when it's not in season. The Jesus that we have in the gospel of John is very unknowable.

B: Oh yeah.

C: He is very cosmic level Jesus. Like you don't understand him because you cannot understand him.

B: Right.

C: Like his concerns are not yours. He's about– like in the synoptic gospels he's talking about, you know, yeah you should pay your taxes, but you should also, you know, give your soul to God. And here he's talking about there's a secret world that you don't even know about.

B: Right. And like I don't– well I do kind of want things to keep coming back to Grant Morrison, but if you think about the idea of Grant Morrison and how he talks about his fiction suits which are... basically, it's a conceit by which a fictional character that he creates is his way to travel into another lower world from our three dimensional world to the two dimensional world of a comic. Right? He does that through King Mob.

C: It's an extremely pretentious way of saying my self-insert OC.

B: Basically. But I mean, the same idea. We see the same idea with Jesus here. He's from a higher plane, a different dimension who has to transform himself and become flesh in order to interact with our weird, lower, two-dimensional world relative to his.

C: Yeah, and the thing I said to you after I finished reading John yesterday was, I literally texted you and I said, what a weird book.

B: Yeah.

C: This is the fourth recounting of these events that we have read. It is by far the one that goes furthest afield.

B: Yeah, it does.

C: Like from, from jump street, from chapter one, verse one, we are dealing with a different kind of Jesus in this book.

B: Yeah, we absolutely are. And we, and yeah, we'll get to that when we jump into the text. We want to look at some background stuff first?

C: Oh, I want to start. I want to start this time.

B: You want to start? Okay, go for it.

C: Yeah. Because, all of the gospels that we have, all the synoptic gospels are named for the evangelists who wrote them, traditionally speaking.

B: Right.

C: Like, like we assume in the traditional view that Matthew wrote the gospel of Matthew, that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark. John does not seem to have written the gospel of John.

B: Okay. I see what you're getting at, but go ahead.

C: Well, it seems like there is a testimony of John the Baptist that is at a centerpiece in this in this narrative, but seems to be being given to us by an unnamed author who has collected and is commenting on the testimony of John the Baptist. Am I, am I wrong about this?

B: You mean John the Baptist or John the Apostle?

C: God, it's so confusing.

B: Okay, great. That segues into what I wanted to talk about. Hey, Chris, here's, here's a brief riddle for you. What do biblical literature and a town with a sex worker shortage have in common?

C: Benito.

B: Yeah.

C: There's too many Johns.

B: Too many Johns. Too many Johns. Here's what we got. Here are the Johns we have to contend with.

C: It's a family show.

B: Yeah I understand. It's fine. Here are the Johns we have to contend with: John the Evangelist, right? The credited author of the gospel. John the Apostle, that's John Thunderson, brother of James.

C: Right. John, son of Zebedee.

B: Yeah. Then we've got John the Presbyter, or John the Elder. Presbyter just means elder, who is the author of the epistles of John, first, second, and third John that are in the later part of the New Testament. Then we have-

C: Prester John

B: Prester John, yes. Not actually Prester John. Don't be confused about that.

C: Are you serious? Wait, John the Presbyter is not Prester John?

B: No, I mean prester does mean presbyter but Prester John is a different figure. He was like a European king that goes and has a secret christian kingdom in Mongolia. That's a whole other it's a whole other thing.

C: John 11:35, my dude. That's what I got to say to that.

B: All right, okay. Anyway.

C: So that's four, okay, so that's four. We got four Johns so far.

B: Yes.

C: We have John the Revelator.

B: John the Revelator who obviously is John of Patmos, also, as he is called, the author of Revelation. Then we have not a John, but the credited source. John is the only gospel that actually lays claim to a source for the gospel, and that would be the beloved disciple. And so we have to figure out also the identity of that. We'll discuss the beloved disciple when he comes up. He or she comes up.

B: Anyway, so setting aside John the Baptist, who is clearly a separate guy, how do we account for all of these Johns? Well, if you subscribe to the traditional view, if you go to a church, chances are good that it's very easy for you to just say they're all the same person. John the Evangelist, John the Apostle, John the Presbyter, John the Revelator, and the Beloved Disciple are all the same person. Easy peasy.

C: Oh, well, okay. That is, John the Revelator is definitely not John the Apostle.

B: Well, that's not how a lot of churches teach it. That's not how I was taught growing up. I was taught that they were all absolutely the same person. And a lot of churches do teach that. No, probably not. If we're looking from a historical perspective, if we compare the writing styles of one book to another, probably not. The most likely overlap is between John the Evangelist and John the Presbyter. The theological concerns and the vocabulary and the styles of the Gospel of John and the epistles of John are very similar. So if they aren't by the same person, they're probably written by people in the same community. And we haven't really addressed the fact that the Gospels were maybe kind of sort of probably not actually really written by any one individual person, but rather came from communities, kind of in the same way that we credit the Iliad and the Odyssey to Homer, but Homer wasn't really a person, you know what I mean? But rather a tradition.

C: I'm sorry?

B: Homer's not a person. Sorry if you learn it this way. It's a terrible way for you guys to find this out. But there wasn't actually a blind poet who sat down and composed the Iliad. That's not a thing.

C: There's a statue. We have busts.

B: Yeah, that are hundreds of years more recent than the composition of those poems. Yes. It's a tradition arises about Homer, but those poems were written through oral tradition by a community in the same way that there's really a Matthean community, a Markan community, a Lukan community, and now a Johannine community who are really the collective authors of these different things, most likely, rather than a single individual. That's one way to look at it. If you want to prefer, you prefer to think it's a single person who sat down and wrote these things, that's fine. If you want to think that someone, there was an author, but then they were edited and, and worked on and redacted over time, that's cool too. Nobody can say a hundred percent for sure. Nobody really knows. It's, it's all just theories.

B: But anyway, my point is: too many Johns. So John the Baptist, at least we know is not the same person as any of these other guys. But yeah, this is the one gospel that does have someone who is credited with being the source. And that's the beloved at the end. They say the beloved disciple, "This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true." And so either the beloved disciple is the source or the beloved disciple is the actual evangelist. So it depends on how you interpret that last line, whether that's an editorial comment added later by the Johannine community, which it could be. There do seem to be a number of editorial inserts throughout.

C: Okay, because there's also in John 19:35, "He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true and he knows he is telling the truth."

B: Right.

C: Which I highlighted because that comes in the middle of a narrative.

B: Right.

C: That comes in the middle of a story about Jesus' side being pierced while he's on the cross. And that seems like a weird aside for a guy to just come in and be like, this is true, by the way, by the way, this is true.

B: Right. It does seem likely that that would be an example of one of these kind of parenthetical editorial asides that would have been added later by members of the community who used this gospel.

B: How many of these guys are the same people? Hard to say. You can choose to believe what you want. Obviously, we're going to cover some of these other books later. We're going to hit the Epistles of John. We're going to hit the Revelation. We can discuss the likelihood and possibility that there's overlap. But again, the association of the gospel having been written by the Apostle John is one of those things that's from the early church fathers. Not Papias this time, I don't think. He's the one who gave us Matthew and Mark. But I think, you know, it's still same general time period, first century, late first century, early second century when you have somebody saying like, who wrote this?

C: I have a question.

B: Yeah.

C: When you say we had a Markan community, a Lukan community, et cetera, were those isolated like splinters of the early Christian church? Like before the council kind of codified what was scripture and what was Apocrypha?

B: Yeah, pretty much.

C: Is it just that like if you were in the Lukan church, you only had Luke. You didn't have Matthew, Mark, or John.

B: Right. That's part of why when we were talking about why you keep Mark when Mark's just a source for Matthew or Luke. And it's because, like we were saying, these individual gospels would have been very important to separate communities within the church, right? Mark would have been very important to the church at Rome. Matthew would have been very important to more ethnically Jewish Christians and so on, right?

B: So each community has their own pet gospel. But yeah, it would have been before everyone kind of came together and said, here's what everything really is. Yeah, you'd have these different communities who had different ideas about different things before finally you start having these ecumenical councils where people are coming in and saying, okay, here's what's orthodox, here's what's heterodox, here's what's outright heresy, etc. And so, yeah, that's what it is. And that's why you get these different perspectives and different viewpoints from each gospel is because they represent different communities and different audiences.

B: So yeah, this particular gospel is the last chronologically, probably written between around 90 and 110 CE.

C: So it really is 90s. It's the 90s gospel.

B: It really is the 90s gospel. Yep, it really is. Part of the reason we can suppose that is because 90 would have been around the time that Jewish Christians were expelled from the synagogue. And that does seem to be a bitter point of contention for the author of John. And so that's probably a turning point for the community behind this gospel.

B: Whereas the synoptic gospels use Mark as their main source and also possibly Q, see our Matthew episode for– the first Matthew episode for that discussion. John uses a different source, another hypothetical source that we don't have, but that we can find evidence of by examining the text. that is called the Signs Gospel. The Signs Gospel would be probably the first narrative gospel, and maybe one of the first gospels. It may even be earlier than Q, hard to say. But it would have been structured around seven miracles, or as they're called in John, they're called signs rather than miracles. John still uses that framework for the first half of his book. The first half of the book is framed around seven miracles, and then the second half is the passion and resurrection narrative. There's some debate now about whether John is or is not independent of the synoptics. That is to say, did the author of John, was the author of John aware of Matthew, Mark, or Luke? They used to say, the 20th century, the consensus was John is completely independent and that the overlap is only because of various oral traditions that would have spread. But now people are not so sure. They think maybe John had a copy of Mark that he might have used as a source as well.

C: And by the way, if you're curious, the Signs Gospel is reprinted in a book that we both have, The Complete Gospels. Now, is that like Q where it's reconstructed? Or is that like some...

B: Yeah, it's absolutely lost, but it's reconstructed by picking at these seams in John. You can find the literary seams, the places where the language starts changing, where the grammar starts changing, where it contradicts other parts. And you can pull those parts out and you can reconstruct them. And that's what the people of the Jesus Seminar, that is the authors and editors of the book that we have, the Complete Gospels that we have occasionally been using whenever we reference the Scholar's Version of the translation, that's the book we're talking about. They have a reconstruction of the signs gospel that they put just before John in their collection. And so if you wanted to check it out, It's there, but it is basically just verses from John excerpted and rearranged into what would have probably been their original order.

B: All right, Chris. So we've done this every time where I ask you about like, what kind of author do we have and who's the intended audience? I'll ask you, but I will say this is the hardest one of the four to figure out. But I do, I am interested in your thoughts on this.

C: Mostly up to this point, we have been talking in context of Jews and Gentiles, Jews and Romans, basically. The audience is definitely not Jewish.

B: Okay.

C: This is not for a Jewish audience. I am confirmed in that. I am confident.

B: All right.

C: As for John himself being a Jewish writer, that I'm a little less clear on. He does take some time to explain certain things about the Jewish traditions, but definitely does not seem to consider himself to be of the chosen people.

B: Okay. That is pretty close in my estimation to what is believed to be the case. Obviously, all of these things that we've talked about, who the author is, who the audience is, that's all conjecture, right? Nobody knows 100% for sure. What seems likely about the author of John is that he would be Jewish, but a Jewish Christian at this real crisis point where there's absolutely starting to be a real break in the Jewish and Christian communities. Even more so than Matthew, where we were looking at the difference in two Jewish traditions, rabbinic tradition and then prophetic tradition, where Matthew is siding with the prophets versus the rabbis, which is the new emergent method of Judaism.

C: I noticed there's a hard turn in this book where John is– specifically, I believe Jesus even says, "oh, that's why the Jews are trying to kill me."

B: Yes, yes.

C: Like there's a lot of that in here.

B: Here's the evidence that John is ethnically Jewish: uses the Jewish scripture extensively, references Jewish festivals more than even the other gospels, right?

C: And makes a point to explain what things like Passover are to his audience. So that tracks.

B: He has a better grasp of the topography of the area of Galilee and Judea than even some of the other synoptics. Luke we talked about would just add cliffs where there definitely are not cliffs, for example. But also so much of the imagery in John, that very dualistic light versus darkness symbolism is very based in Jewish mysticism.

B: But the flip side is John, the book of John, is also virulently anti-Jewish in a way even more than Matthew was. Right? John is was the basis of a great deal of anti-Semitism in the centuries that have followed. This is the this is the book where Jewish people are spoken of monolithically as the Jews. Right? We saw in the other books, they're not referred to that way, at least not until– Matthew doesn't ever use the phrase the Jews until after they have officially rejected Jesus and Pilate starts using it. And it's used after that. However, in John, they're referred to that way throughout. Right? In Matthew, we saw they're the Israelites. They're the people of Israel until they reject Jesus. And now they're the Jews. But for John, they're that way throughout.

B: And yes, the book is very hostile towards the Jewish people. And another piece of evidence that it's a little bit later is that the only group of Jewish leaders that are spoken of are the Pharisees. There's no Sadducees, there's no Zealots, there's no scholars anywhere to be found in John. And those groups would have been gone by 90 CE, pretty much. The Sadducees certainly would have been gone by that point. So there's just Pharisees in John.

B: And the Book of John is just constantly dunking on Moses in a way that seems really unfair.

C: It really is. It really is.

B: So, yeah, the community of John is probably a group of ethnically Jewish people who were recently expelled from the synagogue. We can see a piece of the kind of bitterness there in chapter nine, verse 22. This is the bit about I believe it's the guy who was blind and he was healed. And yeah, here we go.

B: "His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, since the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed Him as Messiah, he would be banned from the synagogue."

B: So yeah, we can see what is really being discussed here. These are people who were kicked out of the synagogue for proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah.

C: And I mean, and that starts even in chapter one.

B: Yeah.

C: Because after we get this, the prologue that's written in verse, the first thing that happens is the Jews start going after– and I'm saying it like that because that is how it is said in the book. Apologies, but the Jews go after John the Baptist, who, as we know, is like, he's like 009 to Jesus' 007. He's the guy who's going to get it in the intro.

B: Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So the audience from this book would have probably been a bilingual group. Part of the reason why things are translated. It would be in a place that has a substantial Jewish presence, but the Jews are still a minority. And it's one that would not be physically far from Galilee or Judea. So it seems most likely that John, the community of John would have been probably a small city in Syria. Although the longstanding tradition is that John was written in Ephesus, which is in Asia Minor, modern Turkey.

B: So, yeah, so John's very different book. There's no parables. We don't see Jesus chilling with the poor and sinners. There's no exorcisms. No demons get driven out.

C: In fact, we kind of get the opposite of that.

B: There's not much in the way of...

C: By the way, can I just get you to once again confirm that you said this was the hardest one to figure out and I crushed it?

B: Yeah, you did. It's true. Good job. Absolutely, you did.

C: Thank you.

B: Great job. But yeah, John also doesn't have much in the way of ethical teaching, right? We don't get much in the way of how we should treat each other. He barely mentions the kingdom of God, which is a major thing in the synoptics. There's practically no eschatology, no talk about the end of the world. And again, yeah, only Pharisees as they're the only religious party.

B: And so the book instead is framed around signs that prove Jesus's divinity. Then you have long discourses and allegories. So there are seven miracles, seven signs. Then you have seven discourses. And importantly, you have seven statements with I am. Jesus saying, I am the truth and the light. I am the living vine. I am...

C: Bread.

B: ...the bread of life, right? And those statements very seriously and very intentionally echo the identification of God as the great I am, right? Which we'll see when we eventually hit Exodus. But the fact that Jesus is saying this would have been almost, it would have been blasphemous really for the Jewish people. you're not supposed to talk about God by name, right? That's why you have so many names for God because you're trying to avoid saying the one, or you might even just call him, a lot of Jewish people will just say Hashem, which means the name. You just say that instead, right? You don't say God, you don't say the Lord, you just say the name will provide for us or whatever, right? And so it's so powerful when Jesus says the word I am, which in Greek is one word, eim. When he says it, it's so powerful, it knocks people over. If you remember, at his arrest they say, "are you Jesus?" "I am." [Sound: "Fwah-boosh"] And it's like they get hit with a psychic wave and everybody falls down. So.

C: Also very 90s Vertigo.

B: Yeah and also very Matrix. You could see Neo doing that absolutely. And so, yeah, that's the structure. We've got the prologue in chapter 1, then we have what's called the Book of Signs which are the seven miracles that's chapters 2 through either 11 or 12 depending on how you break it down. Then what's called the Book of Glory. Traditionally, that's the half that's got the procession into Jerusalem, the trial, the crucifixion, the resurrection, all that stuff. That's chapters 12 or 13 through 20. And then you have the epilogue, which is chapter 21, where Jesus comes out and they have a big fish party. But yeah, that's enough structure. Let's hit one last time our art history minute.

B: And if I look into the Guess-o-tron 5000, by process of elimination, we had said that the symbol for John, the evangelist, has to be the what? Chris?

C: The eagle.

B: The eagle. And of course, yes. So John's the eagle. The symbol there is the ascension, right? We saw that the lion is the sign of resurrection. The man is the symbol of incarnation. The ox is the sign of passion. And the eagle is the sign of the ascension. And so what we have is Luke [John], the evangelist, whose book soars towards heaven to bring to earth revelation of sublime and awful mysteries. So he's the eagle.

B: Let's get into this very weird book, please.

C: It's weird: 1:1.

B: It sure is. Yeah. And there's problems off the bat and people are going to fight right off the bat. But go ahead.

B: So you've heard this. This is probably one of the most famous, I guess, non-instructional passages of the Bible, if that makes sense.

B: Yeah.

C: John 1:1, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

B: Yeah. And guess how much fighting there has been over that one verse? The answer is a lot. Because here's one thing. For one thing, the Greek word for word...

C: Logos, right?

B: ...is logos. which you probably know, I don't have to tell you this, but maybe some people listening don't know, that there's much more to that word than just the meaning word, as in like a meaningful phoneme, as we might think of. The word logos implies reason, logic, which is a derivative of the word logos. The word logic comes from it. Conversation, the word dialogue also comes from logos. It's thought in action or thought made manifest, I should say, rather than action, but thought made manifest through speech, right? And so logos is a big deal. So calling it, saying "the word" doesn't quite get everything across.

B: And you can see that a little bit in terms of debates over the translation from the Greek into Latin. In the Vulgate translation, that's the one by St. Jerome. That's the most commonly known Latin translation. That's what vulgate means. It's the common. It's the one for the common people, right? It doesn't mean it's vulgar, although that's what vulgar means also. Vulgar means for the common people. So there they say, "in principio erat verbum." And verbum is just the word for word. We get verb from that. It's V-E-R-B-U-M, verbum. And that's the traditional, common, best-known translation of this verse into latin.

B: However the greatest humanist who ever lived Desiderius Erasmus, rest in peace, controversially, he translated John 1:1 as "in principio erat sermo" which doesn't mean "word" but rather it means "in the beginning there was discourse"...

C: [Laughter]

B: And, yes, and Tumblr people all just passed out when they heard that, I know, but that was so controversial. But it does get a little bit more of that flavor of what logos is. It's more than just a word but the idea of an exchange of ideas, and yeah, Erasmus got roasted for that in the 1500s, but it's really something that's very interesting to think about.

C: Well now I'm curious about what the Scholar's translation says, because I just popped it open...

B: I will tell you what they have, because they try to get across more than words, they apply a little bit more. So they say, "in the beginning there was the divine word and wisdom." So their logos they translate as "divine word and wisdom," because those words are not there. The greek... heaven help me, I'm going to try and do Greek from memory on the show. "En arkhêi ēn ho Logos," I think is all it is. And so it's just, you know, the logos was, was there in the beginning. And so yeah, scholars version, they try to zhuzh it up a little bit with "the divine word and wisdom."

B: And the other tricky passage is yeah, the end, "the word was God," right? You have to be careful with that because in the Greek, it uses, it says, "ho teos," which is literally "the God." But Greek, the trick is Greek uses articles a little bit differently than we do in English. They use them more commonly than we do. And so even though it literally says "the word was the God," it doesn't necessarily mean that in the same sense that it would for us. And so what happens is if you just look at this line, like "the word was God," if you make it into "the word was the God," you've hit the heresy of Sabellianism in which you say all three elements of the Trinity are the same. They're not three persons, but they're just all the same. That's a heresy. If you translate it as "the word was a God," you've hit Arianism and Santa Claus is going to punch you in the face.

B: The traditional translation that is going to be in 90 plus percent of Bibles is "the word was God." Some Bibles will say "the word was divine," which is a handy little one. And the Scholar's Version says "the word was what God was," which true, handy, tidy and neat, as is usually true of the Scholar's Version. So, yeah, a lot of controversy just about this one opening verse.

C: I'm asking, but I'm sure it is. This is a deliberate callback to the opening of Genesis.

B: Yeah. Oh, for sure.

C: Like in the beginning, et cetera, et cetera. And also the idea that God speaks things into existence. Like it is the word made manifest. And so Jesus is that divine power of, you know, Fiat Lux made into a person who is now with us. He is Emmanuel. He is God with us. Correct?

B: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the idea that's generally been accepted is that the logos is that power, the power of God when God speaks, right? When he says "fiat lux," right? When he says, let there be light, that the power of his speech, that's the logos. And so the idea is that Jesus is that power, the power of creation that came out when God the Father spoke at the moment of creation. And that introduces the new person of God in the form of the Son, right?

B: The other thing that's interesting about this prologue is it represents for us now the final shift in the divinity of Jesus, which we've seen not just in the gospels, but actually if we jump back to another New Testament book that we've already done. If we jump back to Romans, which we know, if you guys have been paying attention, is the earliest chronological book that we've covered so far. Romans is going to be one of the earliest Christian documents, not the earliest of Paul's letters. And the opening of Romans, chapter 1, verse 4, and this is Paul's greeting, right? So, well, let's start with 3: "concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was a descendant of David according to the flesh and who has been declared to be the powerful Son of God by the resurrection from the dead according to the Spirit of holiness."

B: So in Paul's time, when did Jesus become God? At the moment of resurrection, right? What did we see in Mark? We see Jesus become God at the moment of his baptism. God descends like a dove and fills the body of a Nazarene carpenter, and he becomes the miracle worker of God.

C: And he becomes anointed. He becomes the Christ.

B: Right. He is literally anointed and becomes the Christ. Matthew and Luke, they move it to the moment of birth. The virgin birth makes Jesus divine from his birth. Even though Luke is a little inconsistent with that, he does occasionally slip into Jesus divine at resurrection. And some places like in Acts and such. But now we have, no, Jesus has been God since the literal beginning of time. But what's interesting about this is that John doesn't care about the birth stuff. He doesn't hit it at all, right? Mark didn't care about it for different reasons. Mark didn't care about it because that's not important to his message of "the kingdom of God is at hand, be ready." For John, it's a more theological choice.

B: And so somebody asked on our Tumblr, "is there a name for the heresy or the idea that Jesus didn't become God until the baptism?" The answer is yes, there is, of course. It's called adoptionism. It's got some other names, but adoptionism is the most common one. And yeah, the idea is that Jesus was not always eternally God, but rather he was chosen by God. He was adopted by God to become divine at some point in his life. And an adoptionist interpretation of Mark is not unreasonable. And what I would argue is that setting aside the fact that the idea of the logos as eternal, I don't think an adoptionist view of John is incredibly unlikely either. That the idea that the spirit of Jesus is eternal and has been there since the beginning of time, but he was made flesh. He was put into the flesh. I would say almost that same way we see, there's just a guy named Jesus and then the spirit of God descends on him like a thunderbolt. And suddenly he's doing signs and wonders. Maybe, maybe I think it's, I think it's possible.

C: Speaking of the baptism of Jesus, before we started doing this podcast before I called you and I was like, "Hey, I think I want to read the Bible."

B: Yeah.

C: I did not realize what a major character John the Baptist was going to be.

B: Yeah.

C: Because in verse 6 of like, like we get the word. So presumably the, the tiger force that becomes Jesus. Yeah. But the first person that is named in the book of John is John.

B: Right.

C: And that's John the Baptist.

B: Johnny Bapto. Yeah. Who's never actually, he's never called John the Baptist in John. He's only just John.

C: Yeah, he is:

C: "There was a man named John who was sent from God. He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but he came to testify about the light. The true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world."

C: And that makes a lot of sense if you have read the other gospels and you know that John the Baptist was a voice in the wilderness proclaiming the coming of the Messiah. And it's in Matthew, right? Where he is like, "oh, this is the last prophet."

B: Yeah. Yeah. Part of the reason for that is the followers of John the Baptist would have been basically a rival group to early Christians. And we see that in John because they have a baptism fight. They're like, "oh, this guy, Jesus, he's showing up and he's taking your thing, Johnny Bapto, what are you going to do about it?" And he has to be like, "no, man, I'm not good enough to tie his shoes, actually. And it's fine if he wants to baptize people because he invented it." And so that's really John's way of saying he has to subordinate John without discrediting him. Right. He wants he wants the followers of John the Baptist to be like, "oh, OK, so John the Baptist is still cool, but he's not the coolest. He's not ice cold."

C: It's like when you introduce a new character in your story and the main character is like, "hey, you're going to be even better than I am, Kyle Rayner."

B: Yeah.

C: And then sometimes people buy that and sometimes they don't.

B: Yeah, they bought it real hard on this one. I'd say Jesus got over pretty well.

B: So this whole prologue, which is the first 18 verses of John, is very interesting. Like this is where we get, "The Word became flesh and took up residence among us." As you may have heard.

B: Yeah.

C: We get the "One and Only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." And that's another thing. Like we're going to see this throughout this chapter: John is the first gospel in which salvation and redemption are mentioned.

B: Right. Well we talked, Luke talks about Jesus as a savior. We did talk about that, which would have been a...

C: We talked about him as a savior and belief. But like, this is when Jesus is dying on the cross for the sins of man.

B: Right. It's where it's made explicit, right? What you have to understand is the implicit comparison in Matthew and Mark. I mean, here we actually, we get the famous saying, if you guys have been to mass, "lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," right? Have mercy on us. Miserere nobis. "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi." There it is. We get that phrase in John, but the implication is there in Matthew and Mark. The idea that Jesus is a sacrifice made for atonement, right? The comparison of Jesus to a lamb that you might sacrifice to absolve sins. Jesus is there. He's that propitiatory sacrifice. And so the implication is there, but in John, it's very explicit. Yeah.

C: I've been waiting for that one to show up. I feel like we could just talk about these first 18 verses for another hour.

B: Probably.

C: But we should probably move on. Maybe we can revisit that one day. Also in chapter one, we do get the Lamb of God. That's right up at the beginning. We get Nathaniel.

B: Yeah.

C: So you want to talk about Nathaniel, the secret apostle I didn't know about?

B: Yeah. So Nathaniel. Well, one thing that's interesting is we see here that Simon the Rock Peter, we see him get his nickname here, and his brother Andrew, they were followers of John the Baptist before they switched over to Jesus. We don't get that in any other gospels. In all the other ones, they're just out fishing one day. And Jesus is like, "what's up? Come with me." And they're like, "cool."

C: Oh, this is another John, by the way, because he calls you. He says "you are Simon, the son of John."

B: Right. Yeah. Simon's father.

C: He's Simon the rock, Peter Johnson.

B: Yes. Oh yeah. He sure is. Yeah. His, his father's name is Jonah in the other, in the other gospels, which similar, similar sounding names. Yeah. Who knows?

B: But yeah, Nathaniel, not mentioned in any of the other gospels. Typically, he is considered to be the same as Bartholomew, who's named in the other list of apostles. John also, by the way, never lists all the apostles the way the other gospels do. So it's just like he'll say a name every once in a while and you're like, who is this? Why is he here? But yeah, it's generally –

C: You cannot just tell me, oh, this guy Nathaniel, that's actually Bartholomew.

B: Well, here's why. The justification for that is Bartholomew is not a personal name. When you see Bar for a Jewish or Aramaic name, that's usually a sign that that means the son of. So if you see Ben, B-E-N, that's son. And Bar, as in Bar Mitzvah, is son or boy. And so Bartholomew would actually as a name mean son of Tholomaios. So it could be that his name is Nathaniel, son of Tholomaios, if that makes sense.

C: So with that, we get the first sign, turning water into wine. Boom. Number one, big miracle.

B: Yeah.

C: You know how this works. Jesus is at a party. They run out of wine. Jesus is like, "hey, go get some water. Boom. That's wine now."

B: Well, he does it because his mom makes him. His mom makes him do a miracle.

C: He's so rude to Mary in this. I don't know if this is an HCSB problem or not, but this is chapter 2, verse 3. "When the wine ran out, Jesus’ mother told Him, 'They don’t have any wine.' 'What has this concern of yours to do with Me, woman?' Jesus asked. 'My hour has not yet come.'"

B: No, there's no way to translate that where it doesn't sound like he's being rude to Mary. Who, by the way, I'll mention, Mary plays a bigger role in this book than any of the other Gospels, and she is never, ever mentioned by name. She's only ever Jesus' mother. Let me see.

C: Why is he so rude to Mary?

B: Yeah, here's the SV version. "Jesus replies to her, 'woman, what is it with you and Me? It's not My time yet."

C: Also, Jesus is very fond of saying "My time has not yet come." Referring to his impending death on the cross. Why would he bring that up when Mary is like, "oh, hey, they're out of wine."

B: "It's not time for me to die yet! Get off my back!"

C: I do not mean to insult the Lord. Did he mishear her?

B: I don't know.

C: Is she like, "oh, they're out of wine." And he thinks she said, "oh, it's time for you to die."

B: Yeah. No, I think he just, you know, it's not time for his ministry and his, I don't know. Yeah. It is strange. And it is a passage that people have had trouble with trying to understand why Jesus is so rude to his mom.

C: He snaps at his mom.

B: Yeah.

C: This is the part of the story that you might not know that I think is hilarious that it is made explicitly clear. He doesn't just turn the water into wine. He turns it into that good, good wine. He turns it into that choice stuff.

B: Yeah, it's a very good moment when they bring out the magic wine and people are like, "wait a second. Normally you put the good wine first so that no one notices that you put the crap out at the end because you're drunk. But this is the best wine I've ever had. What is going on?" And Jesus is just like buffing his fingernails like, " yeah, you know, whatever. I'm okay. Pretty deece mixologist, I guess."

C: I mean, I'll tell you why that's in there.

B: Yeah?

C: Because it's to head off, "well they just put the water in the wine bottles and shook it up."

B: Yeah, yeah. Could be, yeah.

C: "And you thought it was wine because you're already drunk and it was just like watery wine left in there," and they're like. "oh no-no-no this was full-bodied with a delicious nose. Notes of current and chocolate, even."

B: Yeah, you thought it was the purple stuff he brought out the Sunny D.

C: So we also get the cleansing of the temple complex.

B: Yeah, which is at the beginning! That's like...

C: Right, right at the top.

B: In the synoptics that's at the end. It's the reason Jesus gets arrested. It's because he because he busted up the temple. But John's like, "let's just put him in Jerusalem at the top and then he'll even come back later," and he's just furious. But yeah for John, you know, yeah, he's like, "synagogue sucks." That's his message: he wants to get that out.

C: John kinds of Dukes of Hazzard's him, right?

B: Yeah.

C: Where Jesus is all the time going around like messing stuff up for the establishment and then they try to go arrest him and he just like teleports, because his time has not yet come."

B: Yeah.

C: Yeah, he jumps the river, he gets out the bow and arrow with the dynamite on it, and boss Pilate just can't bring him down.

B: Yep. "Oh, looks like looks like Jesus and the Sons of Thunder are in a real lick of trouble this time!"

C: God, they would be they would be those rednecks in the Dodge Charger wouldn't they?

B: If you don't absolutely believe that James and John got into their car via the window, we are not on the same page.

C: I don't remember: is this the first time it's mentioned that Jesus like makes a weapon to use in this? Cause this is a... "after making a whip out of cords, he drove everyone out of the temple complex with their sheep and oxen." I don't remember him- I've seen it in art, obviously like it's a very, you know, Jesus kicking out the money changers is a very common inspiration for art.

B: Right.

C: And I've seen him with the whip before, but I, I feel like this is the first time we've read about it.

B: I think so too. Yeah. I think you are correct on that.

C: Are there any stories coming up in the Apocrypha about what happened to that whip?

B: Ooh, that's a good question that I do not know the answer to. I have not seen that listed among Relics of Jesus, but it doesn't mean it's not out there. We'll keep an eye out.

C: Do you want to hear the most frustrating thing in the world?

B: I do.

C: The Castlevania games have done three separate games trying to explain why you can kill Dracula with a whip.

B: Yeah.

C: They've never gone for this one.

B: It could have been this. It could have been one of the churches from the crucifixion, that would have been it. What are y'all doing, Castlevania?

C: Come on, Castlevania. Get it together.

B: Get it together.

C: Tell me about Nicodemus.

B: Yeah man. So Nicodemus, he's the good pharisee.

C: Tell me about nicodemus asking the most ridiculous question in the Bible.

B: The one where he asked about crawling back up in his mother's womb?

C: Yeah that's the one

B: Yeah, so back on the theme of people in olden times don't understand metaphors. Yeah, there it is, Jesus says you got to be born again. So yeah. So nicodemus is a pharisee, but he secretly loves Jesus. So they have secret nighttime meetings where Jesus lays out his own concepts of Christianity for him. And he's like, "what I gotta do to be saved?" He's like, "you gotta be born again" and Nicodemus goes, "interesting I don't think I could fit up there, probably" and Jesus is like, "that's gross and also not what I mean."

B: Yeah, I mean, of course, it's in this discourse that we get probably the most famous verse in the New Testament, the one that we read at the top of the show, as he explains about being born again. Of course, a very common phrase now.

C: Yeah, John 3.16. And it does continue, by the way. There is like a clarification through 17 and 18.

B: Oh, yeah. Like that stuff is important there. "God did not send His Son into the world that He might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. Anyone who believes in Him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the One and Only Son of God."

C: That's a huge shift from the synoptic gospels, at least from Mark and Matthew, where Jesus was absolutely like, "hey, what's up, everybody? I'm coming back. Not a generation will pass before I throw this place in the trash fire."

B: "Look into the clouds. I'll be up there bringing fire down."

C: We also get an explicit reference to Jesus being from heaven.

B: Right. He's the one from heaven.

C: "The One who comes from above is above all. The one who is from the earth is earthly and speaks in earthly terms. The One who comes from heaven is above all."

B: Yep.

C: [Inaudible.]

B: Oh really? Okay, yeah. Well that's a famous story, and actually just as a quick aside: we keep talking about samaritans I don't think I've explained what one is, right? Like, and why they're important, why the Good Samaritan is an important story, right? Why it's important that that person in that parable from Luke, why it's important that he's the good person.

B: I'll preface this by saying that I believe that we are and do our best to be a pro-Semitic podcast, right? I understand things have not been easy for Jewish people since the beginning of time. And I do not want to add any more suffering or trouble or problems for anyone who is ethnically or religiously Jewish or both. And I apologize, but I think it is fair to say that one of the defining characteristics, certainly within the scripture, Old and New Testament, is that Jewish people are very xenophobic. They do not like non-Jewish people. That's the reason why anyone who's not one of them is one of the nations and you can't go into their house during Passover. That's a thing that happens later in John or else you will be unclean. They're very concerned about ritual purity, being clean, not being touched by the Gentiles.

B: And so Samaritans are people who are considered ritually unclean. Samaria, if you guys will recall back from our Isaiah episode, was the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel after the division of the two kingdoms into north and south, Israel and Judah, right? Judah goes on to eventually become Judea, which is the one that becomes the Roman province, which is where a lot of our action takes place. The northern one eventually more or less becomes Galilee, where a lot of stuff also happens, but which is not a Roman province. That's the division between Galilee and Judea, right? The distinction there. Jerusalem is in the south. But Samaria would have been the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And if you'll recall, they fell to the Assyrians.

B: And what the Assyrians did is much like what the Babylonians would do later to the Southern Kingdom is they kidnapped all of the good noble people of Samaria and exiled them into Assyria. And then they filled the city up with people from another place. And so the city of Samaria would subsequently have intermarriage and interbreeding between the Jewish people of Samaria and then Gentile people of various other nations that would have been part of the Assyrian Empire. And so as a result of this intermarriage, since the fall of the Northern Kingdom, Samaritans would have been considered not pure, not clean, not ritually pure people. And so they were kind of treated like trash by the Jewish people of Judea.

B: And other reasons for that are the Samaritans did not follow rabbinic interpretation. They didn't follow the legalistic interpretation of the Torah that people like the Pharisees preferred. And they also had another temple. Their temple was on Mount Gerizim, which is mentioned by the Samaritan woman here in this bit. It's visible from the well where they're sitting. And so there was contention about which is the real temple. For the Jewish people, the temple is the temple and anything else is not a temple. And so for the story of the Good Samaritan, that the Samaritan is the one who helps the Jewish person who is mugged on the road, it's– this is a simplistic, reductive comparison. It's not unlike a story in which a black person was helping a beat up white person in 1960s America. It's kind of that level of antipathy between the groups, if that makes sense.

C: So yeah, we have this Samaritan woman and there's this really weird moment where he's talking about water and he's talking about how he's going to fill you up with alive water so that you're not going to be thirsty anymore. And the lady is like, "yeah, I would actually really like to never be thirsty again. So if you can hook me up with some of that alive water, that would be great." There's this weird thing where, again, I do not want to– I'm not here to like poke holes in the Bible.

B: Right. Right.

C: Right? Like that's not a thing we want to do. But there is this weird moment that seems like Jesus is like doing a read on this woman and messes up and then fixes it. Like then has to turn on his real psychic powers because he says, "all right, go get your husband." And she goes "I don't have a husband." And he's like, "oh, right. That's right. You've been married five times."

B: Right. Of course. You know, the traditional view is that he did that on purpose so that she would confess. And that he could then reveal to her, her sins to show that he, God, knows what her sins are and thus has the authority to forgive them. Right?

C: It's a weird moment though, right?

B: It does seem a little bit like a flubbed cold read, maybe.Yeah. If you look at it that way.

C: Then I also like I have said before the Jesus that I really identify with is hungry Jesus.

B: Yeah.

C: And I really like that. This is in chapter 4, verse 31: "In the meantime the disciples kept urging Him, 'Rabbi, eat something.' But He said, 'I have food to eat that you don’t know about.'”

B: Yeah. So this to me, I marked this one too, because this to me, absolutely: this is angsty goth Jesus, right? He's just like, eat some food. And then Jesus is like, "I have food. You wouldn't understand it." And then he takes a long drag on a clove cigarette.

C: I just, I, I know this is a metaphor because he does go on to say like, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work." So yeah, like, which is also a buck wild thing to say when the disciples are like, "Hey, do you want to get lunch Like, it's like, you look like you might be hungry. We saw what you did to the fig tree back in Jerusalem. Do you want to stop and get a sandwich?" And Jesus's like, "food? It's okay, I guess. But have you heard about the will of God, my father?"

B: "You couldn't eat the sandwich that I have in my soul."

C: I also like Jesus going, "don't worry about it. I've got secret food."

B: Yeah.

C: He's keeping them under his pillow.

B: Yeah. Secret eating. I've gotten so many tweets about that, by the way. Y'all can stop now, by the way. Just...

C: Don't stop. Do not stop. Keep it alive. The best tweet about that was someone saying that they hate that freaking Mark fellow.

B: Yeah.

C: Which I didn't get until you pointed it out to me.

B: Yeah, it's beautiful. That's very choice. Very choice play on words. You guys did it.

C: The second sign: Jesus heals someone's son who has died. He brings a a dead kid back to life. And I also like... this is where we see "signs and wonders" – "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe" and then he performs a sign/wonder.

B: Yeah, so you know he was rolling his eyes like, "I guess i guess i'll heal this dying child."

C: Yeah, he's a really unrelatable figure in this, where, people are asking him for things and like trying to talk to him and he's not even giving them parables anymore he's just being like, "yeah. I guess." Like you know it's such a hassle for him to even be here.

B: Some scholars actually refer to the Jesus of John as "the elusive Christ," because he's...

C: That's like– that's a very good way to put it.

B: He's hiding, he'll slip away, Including one of my favorite stories coming up. Not favorite stories, but a bit that blew my mind that we'll get to in a little bit. But yeah, he's sneaking around reluctantly doing miracles. Yeah.

C: Then we get something that was mind-blowing, because I have never heard about this. This is the third sign. This is healing the sick. Now, you've heard of Jesus healing the sick. Almost assuredly. If you have not, then thank you for engaging with our culture for the first time through the medium of this podcast.

C: Jesus heals the sick. But Jesus is not the only one around who can heal the sick, because chapter 5 verse 4. Well there's a pool called Bethesda, and there's some water in there, and a bunch of sick people liked to go there because chapter 5 verse 4: "because an angel would go down into the pool from time to time and stir up the water. Then the first one who got in after the water was stirred up recovered from whatever ailment he had."

B: Yeah! Yup.

C: Just every now and then one of those six winged covered in eyes on fire boys would just come down and like jacuzzi it up a little bit.

B: Yeah.

C: But it only lasts in about five seconds. So you gotta be quick.

B: This is being referenced in the famous spiritual Wade in the Water, right? Wade in the Water, children, because God's gonna trouble the water? That's it. God troubles the water and you'll be healed if you're the first one in it. There's a race. A race to be healed.

C: Okay, but that's weird, right?

B: Yeah. It is.

C: This is like, it is just dropped on us: oh yeah an angel comes down here every now and then from time to time.

B: You're not the only one that thinks this is strange, because it feels this bit feels much more like superstition than religion, right? This is folk religion, it's not church stuff, and a lot of manuscripts leave out that bit, verses 3 and 4, or the the part with waiting for the movement of the water and into "recovered from whatever ailment he had." That part is cut out of a large number of manuscripts. So you're not the only one who thought that was weird and doesn't sound like what we know. It absolutely feels much more like a folk story than, uh, than a religious thing.

C: So is that why it's in brackets here in the HCSB?

B: Yeah. The brackets there indicate that that's omitted from a large number of manuscripts.

C: So there's a guy there who's been sick for 38 years.

B: Yeah.

C: That's, that's a rough one, buddy.

B: Yeah, man.

C: Jesus heals him, but he heals him on the Sabbath. And that's, according to this, again, the very, very anti-Semitic language. "Therefore, the Jews began persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things on the Sabbath."

B: Right.

C: Then we have the fourth sign. This is where he feeds the 5,000. We've discussed that before. But he does it this time, and then:

C: "When the people saw the sign He had done, they said, “This really is the Prophet who was to come into the world!”Therefore, when Jesus knew that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king, He withdrew again to the mountain by Himself."

C: Very unknowable, very elusive, elusive Christ.

B: And John refers to the Sea of Galilee as the Sea of Tiberias, which is another sign that it was written later because that was a change that was made later in the by the end of the first century. And also I should– The See if Galilee is not a sea, but I guess people probably know that. It's a lake, but you know, that was not always as precisely distinguished back in ancient times. It was a large body of water. So good enough to be a sea.

C: We get a walking on water again, but there's a big change here.

B: Yeah. I was hoping you would, I know you've got to be talking about what I was talking about–what I'm thinking of because I marked it...

C: I wrote it in the margins.

B: Yeah. What did you write down, Chris?

C: Peter's not getting called out anymore.

B: That's true. This does not have the bit where Peter walks on water, which was only in Matthew, if I recall correctly. But instead, there's a much bigger, weirder, different magic trick that happens in this one.

C: Talk about the boat-eportation?

B: Yeah, how Jesus teleports the boat.

C: Yeah, why not?

B: Yeah, man. Yeah. Why not? Why not teleport the boat? Sure, you could make another person walk on the water for two steps, or you could teleport a boat. And then talk about bread.

C: And then Peter doesn't have to look like such a dork anymore.

B: True. Peter's barely in this one, it feels like, right?

C: Peter is not mentioned like he was in the others. He does deny Christ. And we actually get a much more detailed version of Peter denying Jesus. That also makes it more excusable. Kind of keeping watch while Jesus is running an undercover op.

B: And he gets a redemption arc as well, which he doesn't get in the others. So that's true. Peter does come up more at the end.

C: He is done being the complete dweeb of the apostles. Like this is the Peter that we see in Acts.

B: So it is closer. Yeah, for sure.

C: Chapter 6 versus 22 through 59, I summed up in the margins where I wrote a quote attributed to Jesus of Nazareth: "I'm bread!"

B: Eat me.

C: Yeah. He starts talking about how he's bread. He says, "Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the real bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the One who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." And then the people, much like they have before– there's so many people not understanding bread metaphors. But these people are like, "sweet, where's this bread? We're very hungry, Jesus." And then Jesus goes, "I'm the bread," which is where that story should stop. Because Jesus is now explaining his metaphor. Instead, it continues with Jesus going, "no, I am literally bread. My blood is literally wine. You should literally eat me."

B: Yeah. And you'll never be hungry or thirsty again. And I should point out, this is the closest we're going to get to the Last Supper in this book. Kinda. We have a gathering before the crucifixion, but there's no, like, "do this in remembrance of me, take and eat," all of it. Like, that doesn't happen in this gospel. So this is the closest that John gets to discussing the sacrament of the Eucharist, right, or communion. It's this bit right here.

C: If you think I am kidding or exaggerating, chapter six, verse 55, "because My flesh is real food and My blood is real drink."

B: Yeah. Maybe you can see why Romans believed that Christians were cannibals in the early days.

C: I mean.

B: Yeah.

C: It's.

B: Can you imagine your, let's say your porky party and your job is to watch over the Jewish people and the newly emerging Christians? Obviously, this doesn't line up chronologically, but let's say you're in his job, and your job is to watch over them and then report to the Romans what they're doing. And then someone brings you a scrap of paper that has this on it. How would you not say, "Dear Caesar, Christians are eating a person's blood in a cave. Please send help"?

C: That's super wild. Like, and again, it is absolutely why our good friend Portius Festus was like, "I'm sorry can you please explain to me what's going on and why this man Peter is saying that a dead man is alive again?"

B: Yeah.

C: "I'll get to the blood drinking in a minute, I just need to know the context."

B: Yeah.

C: Then we get a part that I wrote down. This is still in chapter 6 verse 60: "Therefore, when many of His disciples heard this, they said, 'This teaching is hard! Who can accept it?' Jesus, knowing in Himself that His disciples were complaining about this, asked them, 'Does this offend you?'"

B: Does this offend you?

C: Are you offended?

B: Are you offended?

C: Yeah who knew that Ricky Gervais had been spreading the word of Christ this entire time?

B: If we told Ricky Gervais that we explicitly compared him to the Lord Jesus Christ on this podcast, his head would explode like Judas in the field of blood.

C: He's always literally and directly quoting the Lord Jesus Christ. His faith must be powerful.

B: Yeah, he must be a very strong Christian.

C: He is full of the Holy Spirit.

B: It's the only conclusion that I can reach.

C: Then, we do get a line from Peter who is, you know, "hey, we've come to believe and know that You are the Holy One of God." And Jesus said, "hey, I chose you guys for a reason. By the way, one of you is the devil."

B: P.S. One of you is the devil. You guys are great. I love you. Love you. Love you. One of you is the devil. That will be revealed later through a hilarious bread-related prank – we'll get to it, but I love you, except one of you – you'll figure out who it is.

C: If you were hanging out with your friends and one of your friends... If you and me were at a con and we're hanging out and all of our mutual friends: Matt's there Erica,

B: Yeah, Kyle Starks.

C: Chris Haley, Kyle Starks. And I and I was like, "guys, I love you. One of you is Satan: the devil, the adversary, the author of all lies," and then I left, you would at least have a discussion about that.

B: Yeah.

C: That is a weird thing to drop on someone and then leave.

B: It's true! Chapter 7. So here's the thing about chapter 7: chapter 7 is buck wild to me. I feel like I was reading this, and it just felt so utterly alien to me going through this bit. I was just like what is this story? What is happening? It starts with Jesus' brothers. Here they are again, and I– look, I gotta come down on it: they're his brothers, right?

C: They're his brothers.

B: They're his brothers. Sorry.

C: He's got brothers.

B: Sorry, Francis. I know we're trying to get you on the show. You probably don't care for that, but like. I gotta say they're his brothers. Half brothers minimum. But...

C: I mean, well, I mean like maximum.

B: Well yes, half brothers maximum, you got me.

C: Joses missed out on that one.

B: Yeah. So they come to him and they don't understand what's going on. It's at the Festival of the Tabernacles. So this is Sukkot. This is a jewish holiday still celebrated. John names several different jewish festivals. Here's an element that's interesting from John. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus's ministry really only lasts– it seems to be a year basically. Like everything happens in the span of a year, whereas if you go to a church or sunday school and you say, "how long was Jesus's ministry" they'll say it was three years, and where does that figure come from? It comes from John. Why? Because there's three Passovers. Passover is celebrated three times in the course of the Gospel of John.

B: And a number of different festivals get mentioned, including Sukkot here, which is the Feast of the Tabernacles, the Festival of Tabernacles, or of the Booths is also called, which is, it's celebrated in, because of the lunar calendar, it can fall anywhere from late September to late October. And it's a week-long festival. And it's got a two-fold purpose. One, it's a harvest festival, which it's fall, makes sense. And the other half is to remember the Exodus and you are remembering the kind of flimsy, temporary, ramshackle kind of shelters that you would build if you're trying to escape someone in a hurry or you're just traveling, say, through a desert. And so what these tabernacles are is they're basically little four walled tents that you build. And then for a week, you just eat and sleep inside of those tents. And that is what Sukkot is. And that's what's going on in this chapter. Just a little bit of background flavor.

B: The other part of it is it's one of the festivals for which you're supposed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And so that's why his brothers are like, let's go to Jerusalem. And Jesus says, no. He says, "'My time has not yet arrived, but your time is always at hand. The world cannot hate you, but it does hate Me because I testify about it—that its deeds are evil. Go up to the festival yourselves. I’m not going up to the festival yet, because My time has not yet fully come.' After He had said these things, He stayed in Galilee." And after his brothers had gone, Jesus puts on a disguise and goes to the festival anyway. And that is weird.

C: Can we both agree?

B: Yeah.

C: As human beings.

B: Yes.

C: That if someone's like, hey, why don't we go to the festival? Your response probably should not be, you could die at any minute.

B: Yeah.

C: That's a weird thing to say.

B: But Jesus goes in disguise. He puts on a fake mustache or something. And he goes to see what people are saying about him in Jerusalem. So he "went up, not openly but secretly. The Jews were looking for Him at the festival and saying, 'Where is He?' And there was a lot of discussion about Him among the crowds. Some were saying, 'He’s a good man.' Others were saying, 'No, on the contrary, He’s deceiving the people.' Still, nobody was talking publicly about Him because they feared the Jews." And so Jesus goes to the temple and dramatically rips off his disguise and starts preaching to people in the temple. It is wild. I don't think I ever heard the story in Sunday school.

C: It's pretty bonkers.

B: Yeah.

C: To be honest with you.

B: And then they accuse each other of having demons in them. It's... yeah. Woo! Chapter 7.

C: Chapter 8 gives us another extremely famous moment in Jesus' life, that again, I am I feel like a real rube for not realizing all the things that you were talking about last time. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" because there's an adulteress they bring her to Jesus and they're like, "hey we should stone her right" and Jesus's like, "if you're free from sin then that should be the first one to throw it," which is a boss move.

B: But it's even more boss because what he does is he squats down and starts drawing on the ground. And there's–

C: That's the part that I never have heard about is Jesus like kind of laying on the ground drawing pictures.

B: So there are a lot of questions like why is he doing that? And there's many interpretations. One is he's stalling for time. Another is he's just like, this is scorn for them. He's like, "look at how little I care about what you're talking about then I'm just drawing that like pointy S that everyone does in middle school or like I'm drawing that dog with four circles or whatever. Like, there's that.

B: But my favorite one, my favorite interpretation of what Jesus is doing is that when he's saying, let those of you without sin cast the first stone, what he's doing is he's writing everyone's name and listing their sins in the dirt.

C: That would be super boss.

B: It's the bosses of all possible moves.

C: Uh, chapter 8 versus 1 through 11 are pretty unimpeachable peak rad Jesus.

B: What did you also notice looking at? If you look at the texts that we have, what do you notice about 8 or actually 7:53, honestly, 7:53 through 8:11? Do you notice anything that we've just were talking?

C: Yeah. It's also in brackets, which means some people have taken this out.

B: Right. So this bit is called the Pericope Adulterae. And pericope is one of those terms I've tried to avoid using so far on this podcast because I don't want to add in a bunch of complicated jargon. But on the other hand, it's a teaching podcast. So pericope is just a word that means a passage, a little self-contained chunk of story or of text, right? And so you use the different pericope to compare the synoptic gospels, right? Which ones do Matthew and Mark have that Luke doesn't have, right? So this is called the Pericope Adulterae, which just means the pericope of the adulteress. And it is probably not original to John. It probably has been stuck in here. Some manuscripts even put it in Luke instead of John, but this is the most common place for it. It doesn't match the style and vocabulary or the philosophy really, honestly, of the rest of John. And so probably doesn't belong here, but nobody knows where it really goes. The complete gospels text puts it in an appendix of what they call orphan sayings. They put it together with the shorter and longer endings of Mark. They don't belong. They're probably not original to the text, but they are worth holding onto and looking at.

B: Yeah. This is a great story wherever it belongs. I think it's better than a lot of stuff that is original to John, you know?

C: Yeah, I would rather have this than anything in chapters 4, 5, 6, or 7, honestly.

B: I want to talk about 8:44 because this is another contentious verse. This is where Jesus, he says, "You are of your father the Devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires." So friend of the show, king of the Gnostics, Jonathan Stewart, sent me a very interesting article that looks at the gospel of John from a Gnostic standpoint, because of course it does, because that's what Jonathan does. And it's very interesting and compelling. And there is no denying that John is certainly the most Gnostic of all of the canonical Gospels, because it's very much about a spiritual world versus a corrupt material plane.

B: That's also the article that explicitly compares the Gospel of John to Dark City, which is part of where I got that from and remembered that Rufus Sewell was the name of the main actor in that. One of his key arguments that the Gospel of John is Gnostic is an interpretation of chapter 8, verse 44. It also reveals to me that the author of that article was probably not a Greek scholar because his argument is based on some grammatical stuff that doesn't track for me. What he argues is that the original Greek says not "you are of your father the devil," but rather "you are of the father of the devil." At best, the Greek there is ambiguous. I would have to explain a lot of things about Greek and morphology to you guys that I'm not going to do. But if you guys can take my word for it, that it could theoretically be interpreted as "you are of the father of the devil," but probably not. That would not be the most likely interpretation of that.

B: But what that means for a Gnostic point of view is John is talking about the Demiurge, right? The evil God of the material world. And that's who the ruler of the world that's constantly referred to throughout the Gospel of John is. It's not Satan, as would be the common and most obvious interpretation. But rather, Jesus is here as the son of the true God, the true positive God, the fullness. And he's here to represent that God and do away with the Demiurge who Gnostics viewed as the God of the Old Testament. The creator of the material world is an evil or at least corrupt God, right? And the law was sent by him in order to frustrate and aggravate humanity. And so Jesus is here to free people from the law and to free people from the material plane. And so his enemies are sent by the father of the devil, i.e. the angry Old Testament God, i.e. the Demiurge. That's the Gnostic point of view. That's it. That's what I got about that.

C: So in chapter 9, we get the sixth sign again, healing a blind man. Hey, it's time for the return of spit magic.

B: Yeah.

C: "After He said these things He spit on the ground, made some mud from the saliva, and spread the mud on his eyes." And then when the guy washes it off, he can see.

B: Yep.

C: So that that managed to get into John somehow.

B: Yep.

C: Let's see. We've already talked about the testimony of the blind man who is called before the Pharisees. Chapter 10, I just want to point out maybe my favorite single verse so far.

B: Okay.

C: Chapter 10, verse 7. "So Jesus said again, 'I assure you: I am the door of the sheep.'"

B: Yeah.

C: He's a sheep door. He's bread and a door.

B: Yeah, he's bread and a door and he's a vine. He's does all things well. He doors well. He breads well. He vines well. Jesus's vine has many followers.

C: He did it for the vine. He goes to another festival and once again the Jews show up and they try to stone Jesus this time.

B: You know what this festival is?

C: The Festival of Dedication.

B: Yeah, you know what festival that is?

C: What is that?

B: That's Hanukkah, boy. Jesus goes to Hanukkah.

C: Happy Hanukkah, everybody!

[Music: "8 Days (of Hanukkah)" by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings]

B: Yeah.

C: They tried to give Jesus eight rocks thrown very quickly at him.

B: Yeah, they did. Yeah, the Festival of Dedication is Hanukkah because it celebrates the rededication of the temple. And so, yeah, they call it Festival of Dedication here. But yeah, it's Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.

C: Oh, that's wonderful.

B: I like it. I like that that's there because that's one of those things where it kind of takes you out of it a little bit. It makes you go, oh, yeah, this was written by a person who lived in the real world that interacts with stuff that we know from outside of the Bible. You know, a lot of people had that realization when we were doing Acts and we got to the bit where Paul and Barnabas are compared to Zeus and Hermes. And a lot of people went, wait, Zeus and Hermes are in the Bible? Like Greek people interacted with Bible people? And of course they did, right? They lived in a Roman province. They went to Greece. They went to Greek places. And so the things they were dealing with were Greek people. They were trying to spread a new religion in a greek society that's not going to be super welcoming to them but at the same time there's a weird cognitive dissonance where it's like seeing one of your friends at work right it's just like spheres are colliding.

C: It's running into a teacher in the grocery store.

B: Exactly! That's exactly what it's like. Yeah, and so to see Hanukkah here in the middle of something that we think of is like, yeah, Hanukkah – that's what it's what jewish people do now. Like it's other different Christmas. And that's what people think of it. But to see like, oh yeah, Jesus went to Hanukkah, y'all. Like he went to Hanukkah. He went to Sukkot. He celebrated Passover three times. Yeah. So it's kind of weird. But yeah, there it is.

C: So these particular Jews do not have the holiday spirit.

B: They do not.

C: Because they try to stone Jesus.

B: Yeah.

C: And then Jesus, this is like the other major boss move.

B: Yeah.

C: That Jesus pulls out. Like people are picking up rocks, getting ready to stone them. And Jesus is like, "Okay, so let's see here. I made a blind man see. I gave him the gift of sight. I resurrected a dead child. I fed a bunch of people who didn't have food. Which one of those am I getting stoned for? Just like real quick, could you explain to me which one of those you have the problem with?"

B: Yeah.

B: That is a choice move from Big J.

B: And we have, either this time or one of the other times, they try to stone him. He predicts his own death with a sweet pun about how he's going to be lifted up, right? Which is a pun both about how he'll be crucified, but also about how he'll be taken up into heaven at the same time.

C: [Sotto vocce]Hey, everybody. It's Chris from the future here again. That is our show for this week. We hope you enjoyed the first part of our look at John. We will be back next week with a lot more. But until then, if you have liked what you have heard, you can always head over to ko-fi.com/apocrypals and kick in three bucks or any multiple of three dollars to help support the show. You can also find us. You can go to the-isb.com for all the stuff that I do. And you can find Benito on Twitter as Benito_Cereno. That's it for this week's episode. For Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Peace be with you. Oh, oh right, he's not here. And also with you.

[Music: "I Won't Do What You Tell Me (Stone Cold Steve Austin)" by Jim Johnston]