Joseph in John, Judas and Jewish Jokes: A commentary on John's Gospel

By Adam Bradford

The gospel of john has been subject to nearly two thousand years of scrutiny. The prevailing view has always been that Jesus' legal father Joseph was dead. In his extraordinary new book, Dr. Bradford brings out clear evidence that Joseph was alive and present in the background of Jesus' ministry. This is of first importance in understanding Jesus' temple interactions with the Pharisees, the jewish religious lawyers.

Dr. Bradford's book also reveals exactly who Judas Iscariot was and why Jesus chose him to be an apostle. As a jewish-christian scholar, Dr. Bradford also demonstrates Jesus and John's abundant use of Jewish humour found (but often missed by non-Jews) in this gospel.

The book has been described as 'brilliant' by a professor of theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Nov 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781456634070

Book preview

Signs

Author’s Note

Having researched and written ‘The Jesus Discovery’ in 2009 -10 and identified exactly who Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father was - the senior architect of Herod’s Temple - my interest in the various double meanings around his use of ‘father’ in Jesus’ teaching was piqued. Eventually, I realised that, like all Jewish teachers, Jesus incorporated these double entendres to illustrate a deeper level of meaning within his sayings.

For most of Jesus’ audience, such as the Jewish Pharisees that he regularly debated with, the issue with his ‘father’ was something that many of them understood, but they were unable to clearly identify personally with who Joseph was, because of the location of work, as a tekton-architect in Sephoris in Galilee. Separated from Judea to the north by hostile Samaria, and in days without public transport, the ability to go north and meet such an important Jewish tekton engaged in overseeing the important Roman defensive construction work there was severely limited. And so, the Jews, particularly in Jerusalem, were severely limited in their access to Joseph, Jesus’ legal human father.

Jesus was able to use double meanings to keep his audience, particularly the hostile members (such as the aggressive Temple Court Pharisees) guessing, as to whom exactly he meant, when he spoke of his ‘father’. Was it father Joseph, whom they knew mainly by his reputation for the Temple of Herod, or Father God?

For many of them the idea that God was in some personal way Jesus’ ‘father’ was alien and extraordinary. For them, Jesus’ use of ‘Patros’ meant ‘father’ as in Joseph.

The problem however with most translations of the Bible is that the translators usually rather arbitrarily decide to capitalise certain letters, such as putting a capital F at the beginning of the word father, thereby directly conveying the meaning that Father God is the person being referred to.

Yet throughout John's Gospel, there are references from Jesus’ enemies to  Jesus’ ‘father’, which could not possibly have meant Father God, but rather, meant father Joseph.

These indicate that Jesus’ audience were well aware of the fact that his father Joseph was still alive. And they use that fact to appeal a matter of Jewish law related to Jesus’ age. Being below 40 years old, the presence of the father was legally required to confirm or deny the authenticity of the remarks that Jesus was making concerning himself (his self-testimony).

Jesus’ Temple debates were often punctuated with Jewish humour, frequently involving evasive double meanings, much to the Pharisee’s annoyance!

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction to John’s Gospel

John Chapter One

The Prologue

Chapter 2

A Valuable Wedding Gift with Important Long-term Consequences

Chapter 3

Born From Above!

Chapter 4

Well water in Samaria

Chapter 5

Sick Sheep in Denial

Chapter 6

Bread from heaven and hungry bellies

Chapter 7

A Demonised Professor of Theology?

Chapter 8

Pharisees and Adultery

Chapter 9

The Blind Man and the Myopic Pharisees

Chapter 10

The Good Shepherd Of Ezekiel 34 And Winter Unbelief

Chapter 11

Wanted, Dead or Alive!

Chapter 12

More of Lazarus; Judas et al

Chapter 13

A Celibate Jew Performs a Gentile Slave’s Menial Task

Chapter 14

Worried Men With Worried Minds

Chapter 15

Grapes and Gardening

Chapter 16

Scandals, Advocates and Children

Chapter 17

Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer

Chapter 18

Betrayal and Arrest

Chapter 19

The Trials and the Torture

Chapter 20

The Triumph of Resurrection and of the Women’s Faith

Chapter 21

Fish, Sheep and Reconciliation

Other Titles By Dr A T Bradford:

End Notes

Introduction to John’s Gospel

John’s Gospel differs from the three other (synoptic) Gospels in some noteworthy ways. It was written later than the other gospels, c. 65AD, most likely in Ephesus. John was a first cousin of Jesus, and was formerly a disciple of John the Baptist. He deals, in common with the Book of Hebrews, with the question of John the Baptist’s standing in relation to the Messiah, seeking to emphasise Jesus’ divinity over and above John’s humanity.

John also presents Jesus’ teaching/debates in relation to the early rabbinic and Pharisaic scholarship prevalent at that time (as recorded in the Jewish Talmud and the Mishnah), clearly evidencing both Jesus’ supreme skill in Torah exposition and his (typically Jewish) sense of humour. For example, John does so by making use of the fact that Joseph, Jesus’ legal father, is still alive and present in the textual backdrop. These last points are aspects that appear to have eluded biblical scholars to date.

Having described in ‘The Jesus Discovery’ how Jesus had come to dominate Temple and Torah scholarship and exposition, and having written commentaries on Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, and prayed into a variety of other Spirit led insights, I now offer the following commentary on John’s Gospel. It is my prayerful desire that it should, by God’s grace, live up to Jesus’ saying about spiritual teaching recorded by Matthew (himself a scribe) in Matthew 13:52: Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

May God continue to illuminate his Scriptures!

Dr A T Bradford, Kent, UK. October 2019.

John Chapter One

The Prologue

1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of men.’

John’s prologue begins with an introduction proclaiming that a person called ‘Logos’ (Greek, meaning ‘word’, ‘thought’, ‘word from God’, ‘spoken word’ or ‘creative word’) was in fact God and that this ‘word’ was also with God. In other words, there has to be more than one person called God!

There is the ‘Logos’ and then also someone else called ‘God’ - we might perhaps call this ‘God’ the ‘Father’. This follows nicely on from Genesis 1:1’s use of ‘Elohim’. Because the word ‘God’ in this ancient Hebrew verse is expressed in the plural.

And, of course, Genesis 1.26 then says ‘let us make man in our own image.’ So both Genesis chapter 1 and John chapter 1 clearly point towards the dual plural and singular nature of ‘God’ in both being and essence.

1:2: ‘The Word (‘Logos’) was in the beginning with God.’

The Genesis symbolism continues, with the ‘Logos’ there with God, on day one of creation. In some mysterious tri-united way, the ‘Logos’ was present and was one with both God the Father and God the Spirit (the Holy Spirit who had hovered over ‘the face of the deep’ – Genesis 1:2).

1:3: ‘All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made’

Put another way, if it exists, then it exists because of the ‘Logos’. Within his creation nothing living happens without the ‘Logos’ being involved somehow, because he is Life.

Because as well as meaning ‘life giving word’, ‘Logos’ is described by John as containing ‘life’, and so this particular ‘Word’ is indeed life giving - one could equally well call ‘Logos ‘‘Life’! John is identifying this ‘Logos’ as fundamentally being the Creator first and foremost.

1:4: ‘In him was life and the life was the light of men.’

Light is what gives life – scientifically, without sunlight, there is little life - there is no green plant photosynthesis and therefore no vegetable life. In fact it’s also very, very cold and very, very dark; two things that are best avoided for long periods of time!

1:5: ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it!’

A question. Where was this light? Was it on its own somewhere, abstract in the universe? No, it was in a place where there was darkness, but the darkness could not understand it or, alternately, could not overcome it/snuff it out.

‘Overcome’ here is (in the Greek) ‘katelaben’, which has a dual meaning of being ‘overcome’ or ‘understood’. Darkness neither understands nor overcomes the light - in Greek, ‘phōs’ – because light has the power to destroy darkness!

With light and darkness, light overcomes darkness; you do not need a lot of light to make a room that is dark slightly less dark and hence be able to see in it. Light overcomes darkness every single time. It has both wave and pulse action and it always takes away darkness, even if there is just a tiny bit of light. Even a large amount of darkness (e.g. Nazism) cannot overcome light!

In fact, even a little light (e.g. from a mobile phone screen) will make a dark room light enough to see in; and even the very, very little light from the phone charger in the wall power socket will make a dark room light enough to see in. So now we no longer need to use candles to see where we are going in the dark and so can avoid risking burning the house down – a big advantage of mobile phones!

1:6. ‘There was a man sent from God whose name was John.’

John (the ‘Baptist’/‘dipper’) is now going to figure large in this passage. John was actually another of Jesus’ cousins. His mother, Elizabeth, was herself a cousin of Jesus’ mother Mary - a ‘kinswoman’ - a distant cousin at the very least. And this John, we’re told by our narrator the Apostle John, was sent from God and he was commonly called John the Baptist, John ‘the Baptiser’, John ‘the Dipper’ or John ‘the Immerser’ depending on which translation of the common Greek word ‘baptisma’ you choose to utilise. This John had came to be a ‘witness’ (Greek: ‘martyrese’) - another word that the Apostle John will use a lot in this passage. In other words, he was someone who bore testimony and pointed towards someone else – even to the cost of his own life! He didn’t bear testimony about himself, he bore testimony about another – the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

This ‘testimony’ is a major theme of John’s in chapter 1. John is saying that the ‘Logos/Light’ is far more important than its witness; and it was because of the Light that men would come to faith, but the witness was needed to point towards the Light, because sometimes people got confused about which was the true light - is it this light or that light?

This is later illustrated in Acts 19.1-4, where the Apostle Paul found disciples in Ephesus who had only heard of John the Baptist and had not even heard of the Holy Spirit. Paul was able to tell them which it was - it was this light, the ‘Logos Light’!

If you believe in the ’Logos Light’ you will have life and John’s mission was to point out the ‘Logos Light’ from all the other smaller lights that were around, because once, the ‘Logos Light’ was just a baby. He wasn’t always a big, (occasionally) scary, man at all; at one point he was a tiny little baby feeding at Mary’s breast, but he was still the Light of the world, God personified in vulnerable human flesh.

1:7-9: ‘He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him.’ He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light.’

John the Baptist was not the light, as verse 7 clearly tells us, but was sent to bear witness to the light, an important distinction that John repeats in verse 8. And he then repeats himself again when he says that the ‘Logos’ was the true Light. And, again in verse 9, we see that it is the ‘Logos’ which makes every man have light and that this Light has come into the world. The Apostle John is simply rephrasing verse 4. This Light came to his own people and so did John the Baptist, and his own people and most of the ‘Logos’’ own people did not receive them – in other words, ‘no thank you, please go somewhere else!’

The word for ‘true’ used here is another unusual Greek word (‘alethinon’), which means ‘original, true or unique’. So the true Light came to bring ‘photizei’ (‘spiritual light’, or ‘enlightenment’) to everyone. John the Baptist’s role was to act as his forerunner and witness.

1:10-11: ‘He was in the world and the world was made through him, but the world did not know him. He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him.’

The ‘Logos light’ came into the world through the Virgin Mary, as the Creator (necessary because Jews hold that the human sinful nature is passed down via the man, not the woman!), but the world decided not to ‘know’ him (Greek: ‘ginōskō’), which means ‘to recognise’ or ‘perceive’. Even his own people did not recognise him, a tragedy reflected and abused years later in Nazi Germany, where Jews were unjustly labelled as ‘Christ-killers’, for not having received God’s Messiah.

1:12-14: ‘But, as many as did receive him, to them he gave the power to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.’

As children of God he gave them the right to belong to God’s family. Those that believe in his name, in other words, those who have faith in the person of the ‘true spiritual Light’; or the ‘Logos’ (Jesus), receive the ability to become ‘sons’ of God, a term for children that includes women - something rabbinically extraordinary in that day and age.

Hence, if you have faith and trust in the ‘Logos’ and the Light, you are now a full member of God’s family! These members of God’s family are born (verse 13 tells us) not of blood, nor of the will of a human being, nor from some sexual desire, but from God; that is, a new birth that God gives you (see chapter 3), not the one your parents gave you. This ‘Word’ or ‘Light’ was made flesh - became human - and dwelt among us - ‘He lived with us’, in the manner that Rabbi and their disciples usually did.

To summarise, John the Evangelist is saying, I can hardly believe it because I thought he was simply my cousin Jesus, but it turns out he was actually the Messiah after all! I beheld his ‘glory’ - a radiant light at the summit of Mount Hermon in his transfiguration alongside Peter and also my brother James. Cousins John, James, and their friend Peter saw Jesus transfigured into a massive light on the peak of Mount Hermon. If you want to read about that you’ll have to go to Matthew chapter 17 to get the whole story.¹

1:15: (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’)

John (the Apostle/Evangelist) again brings in John the Baptist here, who, although being an older distant cousin of Jesus, and an ordained Rabbi himself recognised that Jesus was ‘before’ or ‘above’ him. John the Baptist was older than Jesus, but Jesus preceded him both in Talmudic scholarship as a more senior religious teacher (‘didaskalôs’ - see ‘The Jesus Discovery’) and finally, in the context of eternity, as someone who was also God incarnate!

1:16-17: ‘For of his fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.’

This Light was full of grace and truth (v.16); full of ‘charis’ - the ‘undeserved favour’ from God which means that you get something good that you don’t deserve; as opposed to mercy, which is where you don’t get something you do deserve - usually a punishment! Here you are let off, (often with a caution!), as it is in God’s nature to be merciful (as well as a Judge!).

This ‘Word’ or ‘Light’ is also full of truth; and it’s sometimes said that there are two rather important things in this world; humour and truth. You’ll find that this Gospel of John is full of humour just as it is full of truth. But because it is Jewish humour it is often missed by Gentiles.

1:18: ‘No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.’

Verse 18 introduces the concept that Jesus is the ‘one and only’ Son of God, or ‘only begotten’. This means that he was not created (unlike either of the Johns), but was one with/integrally part of God in the beginning, or ‘monogenous’ in Greek, i.e. the only part of the One God that became visible. In the triune God there is no hierarchy; it is not a case of the Father trumping the Son, who trumps the Spirit. Historically this was the basis of the Arian heresy, which brought in the idea that Jesus was somehow ‘subordinate’ to God the Father. The Trinity is not some sort of pyramidal hierarchy! Within it, all are one.

Unfortunately, because some Scripture translations are often incomplete, sometimes we miss this truth wrapped in humour, and because we may not understand or appreciate Jewish humour, sometimes we miss Scripture’s little ‘jokes’. This book will attempt to bring out some of the abundant Jewish humour in Jesus’ teaching, and especially in his various encounters with his religious enemies such as the Pharisees. It is hoped that it will make you smile because Jesus’ intention was that you should laugh regularly, because ‘laughter is the best medicine’ (after