Who is Jesus?
This is the fundamental question which all four of the gospels help us to answer. They each record his life, ministry, death and resurrection but John’s gospel is very different from the other three. It has a more intimate feel than Matthew Mark and Luke and records a different collection of incidents from Jesus life. Of the eight miracles John writes down only two appear in the other gospels. Every chapter, however, adds to John’s central theme that Jesus is God revealed in human form, a theme which he develops using an intriguing variety of devices. For example the titles he gives to Jesus (the word, the light, the good shepherd, the Lamb of God etc.) often hark back to the Old Testament where the same images are used of God himself. The miraculous signs he records point to Jesus being more than just a moral teacher and the events of his death and resurrection show compellingly that God is at work on planet earth in the person of Jesus Christ.
This makes it an ideal book for someone who is approaching the person of Jesus with little or no previous experience. In John’s gospel we see him at close quarters through the eyes of a skilled writer who is at the same time clear and succinct while also being deep and profound.
John was one of Jesus’ closest friends and a member his inner circle along with two others, Peter and James. So of all the gospel authors who have attempted to unpack the character of Jesus and explain his enormous influence, John is arguably the closest to the action. So why did he write the book? John states his purpose explicitly in these words:
“[these accounts] are written 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 20:30-31).
Trusting Jesus and following him are consistent themes in this gospel and John often frames his narrative in such a way as to emphasise these points. The people we meet and the happenings John describes are carefully chosen to bring out the validity of Jesus’ claims with a wealth of supporting evidence.
As his intended readership John probably had in mind Jewish people who were less than convinced that Jesus was the messiah. Time and again Jesus’ words and actions point us in this direction and as readers we are left to draw our own conclusions from them. According to the Muratorian Canon (an ancient document which contains probably the earliest list of books in the New Testament) John was urged to write an account of Jesus by his fellow bishops in the earliest days of the church and began the task with three days of prayer and fasting. So here is a gospel writer who is highly committed to his task and who feels compelled to record what he has seen and heard.
The book has been compelling ever since.
