The Gospel of Lazarus (The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved)

By Tobias Skinner

The story of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple is a beautiful and intriguing love story, well worth being treated as serious literature and appearing between covers of its own. For this version of the story, editor Tobias Skinner has chosen to believe, for reasons set forth in the preface, that it was Lazarus who first wrote this version of the gospel. Who would be more inclined to write of Jesus as God in the flesh, as the incarnation of Logos, as infallible, as a worker of miracles—something the author of this gospel does far more often than the authors of the other three—than a man who believes Jesus saved him from death and who is so comfortable in his love relationship with Jesus that he can confidently and repeatedly refer to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” and at the end as “the disciple whom Jesus sincerely loved”? Skinner here presents a readable alternative text for this ancient story of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watersgreen House
• Release date: Jan 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311070883

Book preview

The Gospel of Lazarus

(The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved)

Lazarus

With traditional text edited and new text authored By Tobias Skinner

London

© 2021 Tobias Skinner

All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

BISAC: Religion / Biblical Interpretation / New Testament

BISAC: Sexuality & Gender Studies

Cover art: Guido Remi, Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

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A Note on the Translation,

Deletions, and Additions

This translation of the Signs Gospel, commonly referred to as The Gospel According to John or just John, is based on the World English Bible translation (1997), which was based on the American Standard Version (1901), which in turn was based on the Greek Majority Text and the Hebrew Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Those texts were based on numerous fragments of chipped and tattered scrolls that sometimes included portions of the same text with inconsistencies. Minor adjustments were made to the World English Bible based on readings in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. All of these translations, by the very nature of the process, are certain to contain errors. This version has additional edits by myself, Tobias Skinner, made sometimes to reflect what I believe to be better accuracy and sometimes to provide a plausible addition that helps explain the claim made at the end of the gospel that the book was written by the man Jesus loved. To that end, I have also added a concluding paragraph.

It is believed the original documents did not contain chapters and verses. While the chapter and verse productions make it easier for parishioners to follow along with their pastors and make it easier for scholars to cite passages, the aim here is to present a readable story; for our purposes, the verse numbering just gets in the way. Thus, the verse numbers do not appear. The chapters, on the other hand, have been included and with one exception explained in the preface are the same as in standard versions of the Bible. The chapter breaks do not always make much sense, as some occur in the middle of a monologue. In these cases, I have introduced the new chapter with Jesus continued.

Material that is contradictory and possibly written by separate authors over a period of time has been left as is, for to fix all the contradictions would involve a complete rewrite of the book. For instance, in the third chapter it is written that Jesus himself was baptizing people, but in the fourth chapter a parenthetical statement appears saying that it was Jesus’ disciples, not Jesus himself, who were baptizing. The parenthetical statement has been left intact. Too, when Jesus says in the third chapter that God did not send him to judge the world, then says in the sixth chapter that God judges no one but sent the Son into the world to judge, then goes on in the same chapter to say that he does in fact judge but his judgment is righteous, then in the eighth chapter says I judge no one. Even if I do judge, my judgment is true… — how does one fix all that?

A word or two of additional explanatory text has been added in a small number of instances to aid the modern reader who is not overly-familiar with The Bible. Finally, because Lazarus appears out of nowhere in the original gospel yet readers are told Jesus loved him, hypothetical material has been added to account for a previous meeting of the two men. The World English Bible translation of The Gospel of John is not copyrighted. However, this version of that translation together with the material added by the author is and should not be reprinted without permission from the publisher.

Preface

Many people who have had near-death experiences have reported seeing an all-encompassing, beautiful white light. Is it any surprise, then, that the story of Jesus Christ ascribed to John the Disciple begins with the words, "In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and Logos was God"? While theologians generally choose to leave Logos untranslated, claiming it is a concept incomprehensible in human language, most English versions of The Gospel According to John translate Logos as the Word. Logos does encompass the word but also encompasses discourse and cosmic reason. Too, the author of the book, who was not John, makes it clear in context that Logos pertains to Jesus being God in Light, or self-revelation. That concept of God in Light is particularly interesting given the various accounts of near-death experiences.

Who did write the book, if not John? Scholars believe the testament has at least two or three authors writing at different times. The only authorship claimed by the manuscripts themselves—from the book’s concluding passages—is that of the unnamed Beloved Disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved. In the book ascribed to John, the only male of whom it is said Jesus loved him is Lazarus, the man Jesus raises from the dead in this and only this gospel (the word gospel simply means good news but over time has come to denote the teaching of Jesus or the record of his life and teachings). Raising Lazarus from the dead is a pretty huge miracle to go unreported in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but it is not surprising when one realizes how different John is from the other three gospels. Indeed, it is so different that theologians have sought to isolate it by referring to the other three as the Synoptic Gospels (the word synoptic indicates that the three are basically the same), while referring to the book ascribed to John as the Signs Gospel due to its emphasis on the signs, or reported miracles, of Jesus. It should be mentioned too that in the earliest surviving compilation of the four gospels and in