The first meeting you will need to bring pizza/ food to draw people in and make them feel comfortable. Do an Icebreaker while everyone signs their name and phone # & email. Make sure to explain InterVarsity and what our purpose is on campus and for studying the Bible. Have fun and relax, make the study part shorter and well structured. Be directive and firm in what the group is doing (act like you know what you are doing), so there is limited confusion.
This is a guide for you throughout the semester. The purpose of studying scripture is to be transformed by Jesus in “real” ways. This can be done in an intimate Bible study where the Holy Spirit has room to affect our lives while we respond to His love. The reason for breaking up John is because there is too much material to be “intimate” within a one hour Bible study.
Each passage is an original for you to copy for every Bible study. I suggest that we don’t steal copies from our work places unless we have permission from our managers. Staples and Office Depot have copies for 5 cents per copy.
The purpose for the background commentary is to enhance your understanding of the passages and the insights are for mere guidance throughout the semester. You may also copy this if it is conducive to your group’s study of scripture.
Pay attention to the “announcements” inserted under the insights. Call me if there are any questions, problems or you need to talk. (813.215.5636)
Authorship. Early tradition is almost unanimous that “John” wrote the Fourth Gospel. The Gospel itself claims to come from an eyewitness (19:35), whom the internal evidence suggests is the “beloved disciple,” whose role best fits John, son of Zebedee, in the other Gospels.
Archaeological discoveries since Westcott have further demonstrated the appropriateness of the Fourth Gospel’s traditions to a Palestinian Jewish milieu—that is, the place where both Jesus and John had lived. The two strongest objections to Johannine authorship of this Gospel are its date and its differences from the other extant Gospels. The argument based on date objects that the son of Zebedee would have been in his eighties or nineties when the Gospel was written. This challenge is not particularly cogent, however; although most people did not live that long, mortality was highest in early childhood. That one of the Twelve should have survived into his nineties and would then be pressed to record his experience of Jesus is not inherently unlikely. The other objection, based on differences from Matthew, Mark and Luke, is more persuasive but would lose most of its force if John represents an independent tradition or witness to Jesus, writing in his own style (see the discussion of genre).
Although pseudonymous works existed in antiquity, they stated their purported author rather than implied him; unless we want to argue for John’s implicit pseudonymity, the internal evidence supporting an eyewitness author should be allowed to stand. For this reason, I believe the Fourth Gospel’s claim to authorship by John is stronger than the claims for the other Gospels, which are ultimately dependent only on Christian tradition external to the text itself.
Date. Tradition holds that the Gospel was written in the 90s of the first century; that it could have been written no later (against some nineteenth-century scholars’ views) has been confirmed by a manuscript fragment of the Gospel dating to the early second century. A date in the 60s has also been proposed, but most scholars hold to the mid-90s, which best fits the setting described below and the probable setting of the book of Revelation, which stems from the same Christian circles as the Fourth Gospel.
Where John Was Written. Because John is preoccupied with the Pharisees as opponents, it is reasonable to suppose that his Gospel is written in Galilee or Syria, where conflicts with the Judean Pharisees would be most easily felt in the 90s of the first century.
Tradition strongly holds, however, that John lived in Ephesus, although he had originally come from Palestine and probably maintained awareness of issues in Palestine through contacts there. Two of the seven churches in the book of Revelation grapple with precisely the issues that his Gospel tackles: Smyrna (Rev 2:9–10) and Philadelphia (3:7–9). The church in Smyrna, a center of Johannine tradition in the next generation, might be his main audience. It is possible that the Gospel circulated in different forms in both Galilee and these churches in Asia Minor (western Turkey).
Setting. After a.d. 70, the strength of many Jewish religious groups in Palestine was broken; the Pharisees began to take more leadership in religious matters, and the influence of their successors eventually became felt throughout Mediterranean Jewry. They engaged in conflicts with their main competition, the Jewish Christians, and (according to the most likely reading of the evidence) even added a line to a standard prayer that cursed sectarians, among whom they included the Jewish Christians. John’s antagonism toward the Pharisees in his Gospel suggests that their opposition is somehow related to the opponents his readers face in their own communities.
After the war of a.d. 70, many Jews in the Roman Empire wanted to distance themselves from sects emphasizing Messiahs, the kingdom and prophecy. The Johannine Christians (John’s readers) had been made unwelcome by local synagogue authorities, treated as if their very Jewishness was held in question because they believed in Jesus as Messiah and kingdom-bringer. The Roman authorities were also suspicious of people who did not worship the emperor but were not Jewish (see the discussion of setting in the introduction to Revelation). John writes his Gospel to encourage these Jewish Christians that their faith in Jesus is genuinely Jewish and that it is their opponents who have misrepresented biblical Judaism.
Genre. For the genre of Gospels in general, see the introduction to the Gospels. Although all four Gospels fall into the general ancient category of biography, that genre was broad enough to allow considerable differences of style. For instance, Luke writes like an ancient Greek historian; Matthew’s heavy use of the Old Testament shows his interest in interpreting such history. But John seems to be the most interpretive of all, as has been recognized since the early church fathers.
Jesus’ discourses in this Gospel also require special comment. The style of Jesus’ speaking in John differs from his words in the first three Gospels; it may be helpful to observe that ancient writers were trained to practice paraphrasing speeches in their own words. Some scholars have also argued that John applies Jesus’ words to his readers’ situation under the Spirit’s guidance; Jewish teachers and (more thoroughly) storytellers often developed different kinds of Old Testament narratives by describing them in terms most relevant to their audience. Most of Jesus’ discourses in John 3–12 are conflicts with the Jewish authorities and thus bear some resemblances to the briefer rabbinic accounts of arguments with opponents. All in all, however, John remains a Gospel—an ancient biography of Jesus (see the introduction to the Gospels in this commentary).
Message. One emphasis in the Fourth Gospel concerns God’s law and word. The Pharisees claimed that God’s law supported their positions; but John emphasizes that Jesus himself is the Word (1:1–18) and the appointed messenger of the Father, and that to reject him is thus to reject the Father.
Another area of emphasis is the Spirit. The Pharisees did not believe that the Spirit, which they associated especially with the ability to prophesy, was active in their own day; thus they did not claim to have the Spirit. In contrast, John encourages the believers to argue not only from the law but also from their possession of the Spirit. The Pharisees claimed to know the law through their interpretations and traditions; the Christians claimed to know God personally and therefore claimed to understand the law’s point better than their opponents did.
One recurrent set of characters in the Gospel, identified with these opponents of Jesus, is “the Jews.” Although Jesus and the disciples are clearly Jewish, John usually uses the term “Jews” in a negative sense for the Judean authorities in Jerusalem, whom he identifies (to update for the language of his own day) with “the Pharisees.” Anti-Semites have sometimes abused the Gospel of John to deny Jesus’ Jewishness, ignoring the situation in which John writes. But John often uses irony (a common ancient literary technique), and by calling the Jewish authorities “Jews” he is probably ironically answering these authorities who say that the Jewish Christians were no longer faithful to Israel. He concedes the title to them, but everything else in his Gospel is meant to argue just the opposite: that the heirs of Israel’s faith are the Jewish Christians, even though they have been expelled from their Jewish communities.
John uses many images common in his culture, especially contrasts between light and darkness (common in the Dead Sea Scrolls), above and below (common in Jewish apocalyptic literature), and so on.[1]
John 1
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
The Greek term translated “word” was also used by many philosophers to mean “reason,” the force which structured the universe; By calling Jesus “the Word,” John calls him the embodiment of all God’s revelation in the Scriptures and thus declares that only those who accept Jesus honor the law fully (1:17). Jewish people considered Wisdom/Word divine yet distinct from God the Father, so it was the closest available term John had to describe Jesus.
1:1–2. Beginning like Genesis 1:1, John alludes to the Old Testament and Jewish picture of God creating through his preexistent wisdom or word. According to standard Jewish doctrine in his day, this wisdom existed before the rest of creation but was itself created. By declaring that the Word “was” in the beginning and especially by calling the Word “God” (v. 1; also the most likely reading of 1:18), John goes beyond the common Jewish conception to imply that Jesus is not created (cf. Is 43:10–11).
1:3. Jewish teachers emphasized that God had created all things through his Wisdom/Word/Law and sustained them because the righteous practiced the law.
1:4. Jewish teachers emphasized that the reward for obeying God’s word was eternal life. John declares that this life had always been available through God’s word, which is the same word that he identifies with Jesus. Jewish teachers called many things “light” (e.g., the righteous, the patriarchs, Israel, God), but this term was most commonly applied to God’s law ( Ps 119:105).
1:9–10. Jewish tradition declared that God had offered the law to all seventy nations at Mount Sinai but lamented that they had all chosen to reject his word; only Israel had accepted it. In the same way, the world of John’s day has failed to recognize God’s Word among them.
1:11. Here John breaks with the image in Jewish tradition, according to which Israel alone of all nations had received the law.
1:12–13. The emphasis is thus not on ethnic descent (v. 11) but on spiritual rebirth;
1:14. Neither Greek philosophers nor Jewish teachers could conceive of the Word becoming flesh. Since the time of Plato, Greek philosophers had emphasized that the ideal was what was invisible and eternal; most Jews so heavily emphasized that a human being could not become a god that they never considered that God might become human.
When God revealed his glory to Moses in Exodus 33–34, his glory was “abounding in covenant love and covenant faithfulness” (Ex 34:6), which could also be translated “full of grace and truth.” Like Moses of old (see 2 Cor 3:6–18), the disciples saw God’s glory, now revealed in Jesus. As the Gospel unfolds, Jesus’ glory is revealed in his signs (e.g., Jn 2:11) but especially in the cross, his ultimate act of love (12:23–33). The Jewish people were expecting God to reveal his glory in something like a cosmic spectacle of fireworks; but for the first coming, Jesus reveals the same side of God’s character that was emphasized to Moses: his covenant love.
1:18. Even Moses could see only part of God’s glory (Ex 33:20), but in the person of Jesus God’s whole heart is fleshed out for the world to see. “In the Father’s bosom” In John 1:1 and (according to the most likely reading of the text) 1:18, John calls Jesus “God.”