Bible: Gospel of John

The Gospel of John is one of four gospels from the New Testament of the Bible. The gospels are those books of Judeo-Christian scripture that deal with the life and legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, also called Jesus Christ (c. 4 BCE – c. 30 CE). These first four books of the New Testament are all biographical records of the life and career of Jesus; they showcase the teachings that constitute the “gospel” or “good news” of the Christian message. This “good news,” which Christians regard as the crowning moment of Jewish prophetic history, is the revelation that Jesus Christ was God incarnate. Further, through his death at the hands of Jewish elders and Roman officials—and subsequent resurrection from the dead—he fulfilled a sacrificial promise and redeemed the world from its sins. The gospels, written by Jesus's disciples some decades after his execution, are the mainstay of the Christian faith.

The first three the gospels (the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke), are called “synoptic” gospels because they tell a fairly uniform (same-perspective) narrative of Jesus's life and teaching. The fourth, the Gospel of John, however, stands alone in its generic style and purposes. While the synoptic gospels were written largely as pedagogical texts for forming Christian Jews and new Gentile converts in the faith of Christ, the Gospel of John seems to be a text intended to cultivate a deeper sense of knowledge of the indwelling spirit of the mystical Christ. This gospel, written by the “disciple Jesus loved,” depicts the savior as the Logos, or informing principle of world knowledge and creation. John's gospel, written in the 90s CE, was the last of the four published, and it was received by a Christian community suffering persecution and reeling from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The present selection is the iconic opening of the fourth gospel, which links the life of Jesus/Logos to the foundation of the world (recalling the Hebrew Bible in Genesis), and asserts that the Logos is God acting as the fundamental source of life and creation in the universe.