The Gospel of John

The Gospel according to John is the fourth and most distinctive of the canonical Gospels — called by Clement of Alexandria “a spiritual Gospel” composed after the others had set down the bodily facts. It tells the story of Christ through a sequence of seven “signs” and long discourses, frames His identity in the great “I am” sayings, and reaches the highest Christology of the New Testament, opening before creation and closing with a claim of eyewitness authorship. This file sets out the Gospel’s character, structure, and self-witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

A Spiritual Gospel

Already in the early Church the Fourth Gospel was recognized as standing apart from the Synoptics. Clement of Alexandria reports the tradition that “John, last of all, conscious that the outward facts had been set forth in the Gospels, was urged on by his disciples, and, divinely moved by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel” (in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.7; trans. NPNF II/1). The contrast is exact. Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke proceed by short episodes, parables, and exorcisms, John proceeds by extended dialogues and meditations; where they keep Christ’s divine identity largely veiled until the Passion, John proclaims it from the first verse; where they move within a single year and a Galilean center, John spans several Passovers and dwells in Jerusalem and Judea. The Gospel itself names its purpose: “these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

The Gospel falls naturally into a great prologue (John 1:1–18; see The Logos and the Prologue) and two large movements that modern scholarship, following C. H. Dodd and Raymond Brown, calls the Book of Signs (chapters 1–12) and the Book of Glory (chapters 13–20), followed by an epilogue (chapter 21). The Book of Signs presents Christ’s public ministry through selected miracles and the discourses they provoke; the Book of Glory turns to the Last Supper, the farewell discourses, the Passion, and the Resurrection — the “hour” toward which the whole Gospel moves (Brown, The Gospel according to John, AB 29, 1966).

The Seven Signs

John does not call Christ’s miracles “powers” (dynameis), as the Synoptics often do, but “signs” (sēmeia) — acts that point beyond themselves to the identity of the one who performs them. The Gospel narrates a series of these signs, conventionally counted as seven: the changing of water into wine at Cana (John 2:1–11), “the first of his signs”; the healing of the official’s son (4:46–54); the healing of the paralytic at Bethesda (5:1–15); the feeding of the five thousand (6:1–14); the walking on the sea (6:16–21); the giving of sight to the man born blind (9:1–41); and the raising of Lazarus (11:1–44), the climactic sign that precipitates the decision to put Christ to death. Each sign opens into a discourse that interprets it: the bread multiplied leads to the discourse on the Bread of Life (6:25–59); the blind man’s healing to the teaching on spiritual blindness (9:39–41); Lazarus to “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). The Resurrection of Christ Himself is, in this scheme, the final and greatest sign to which all the others point.

The “I Am” Sayings

Woven through these discourses are the great predicate “I am” (egō eimi) sayings, in which Christ names Himself under figures: “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35); “I am the light of the world” (8:12); “I am the door of the sheep” (10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (10:11); “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25); “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6); “I am the true vine” (15:1). Beyond these stand the absolute “I am” sayings without predicate — “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58), at which the hearers take up stones — which the Church has always read as Christ’s appropriation of the divine Name revealed to Moses (Exodus 3:14). These sayings are among the chief reasons the Gospel was felt to proclaim the divinity of the Word more openly than any other, and so among the chief grounds of John’s title “the Theologian” (see The Theologian Among the Three).

The Farewell Discourses and the Paraclete

The Book of Glory opens with the washing of the disciples’ feet (John 13:1–20) and the new commandment, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you” (13:34), and unfolds across the longest sustained teaching in the Gospels — the farewell discourses of chapters 14–17. Here Christ promises “another Helper” (Paraclete), the Spirit of truth, who will be sent to abide with the Church and to teach it all things (John 14:16–17, 26; 16:13). The discourses culminate in the high-priestly prayer of chapter 17, in which Christ prays for the unity of His own “even as we are one” (17:11, 21–22) — a prayer that has become central to the Church’s understanding of its own communion. This material is unique to the Fourth Gospel and is among its deepest contributions to Trinitarian and ecclesial theology (on the Trinity, see The Holy Trinity).

The Self-Witness of the Gospel

Uniquely among the Gospels, the Fourth Gospel closes with an explicit claim about its own author. After the resurrection appearances by the Sea of Tiberias, and the saying about the Beloved Disciple’s “tarrying,” the Gospel states: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). The “we know” suggests the voice of a community or circle vouching for the witness of the disciple; and the body of the Gospel contains a scattering of details — the precise hour (1:39; 4:6; 19:14), the names and asides, the eyewitness touches at the Cross (19:35) — that have been read as marks of testimony. Richard Bauckham has built on these features a sustained case that the Gospel presents itself, and should be received, as the testimony of an eyewitness, the Beloved Disciple (The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple, 2007). The Orthodox tradition has always so received it, as the Gospel of John the Apostle written at Ephesus (Irenaeus, AH 3.1.1). The modern debates over the precise authorship and stages of composition are gathered in Section 09 (see The Authorship Debates).

The Gospel in the Church

No Gospel has shaped Orthodox worship and theology more. Its Prologue is the appointed reading at the Paschal Liturgy, the supreme feast of the year, so that the Church greets the Resurrection with “In the beginning was the Word” (see Reception and Legacy). Its Christology furnished the language of Nicaea; its discourses on the Spirit shaped the theology of Pentecost; its “I am the resurrection and the life” is sung at every funeral; and its account of the wounded side from which flowed blood and water (John 19:34) is read by the Fathers as the birth of the Church’s mysteries. The “spiritual Gospel” became, in the Church’s life, the most liturgically exalted of the four.

See Also

References

  • The Gospel according to John (cited throughout by chapter and verse).
  • Clement of Alexandria, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.7. Trans. NPNF Series II, Vol. 1.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.1.1. Trans. ANF Vol. 1.
  • Westcott, B. F. The Gospel according to St. John. London: John Murray, 1881.
  • Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel according to John. Anchor Bible 29–29A. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966–70.
  • Bauckham, Richard. The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.