The Annotated John's Witness: Without Gethsemane There Could Be No Golgotha

By Ian R. Harvey

John’s Witness of Jesus in Gethsemane
Will you not watch with me but for one hour?

New Testament Gospel writers Matthew, Mark and Luke hint at the important events in Gethsemane, and yet details are completely absent from the Gospel account of the only disciple who was actually there. John’s Witness uses fragmentary scriptural evidence to piece together John’s unique perspective of Gethsemane in a storytelling novella that takes about one hour to read.

Originally published as John’s Witness—The Gospels’ Missing Pearl, this update tells the same story of John’s ruminating while dashing to Jesus’s empty tomb, but with extensive additional endnotes that contain the author’s personal reflections on the origins of John’s Witness, as well as the expanded deeper meaning he finds in its messages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665722940

Ian R. Harvey

Dr. Ian R. Harvey is a patented nanotechnologist who seeks reasonable answers from the scriptures to better understand the infinitely loving nature of God and simplify core religious jargon for heartfelt, personal meaning. These are my five loaves and two fishes lovingly offered to support the mission and Easter messaging of The Chosen, which uniquely relatable storytelling style chiefly inspired this book.

Book preview

IAN R. HARVEY

37390.png THE ANNOTATED 37390.png

JOHN’S

Witness

Without Gethsemane

THERE COULD BE NO

GOLGOTHA

FOREWORD BY THOMAS F. ROGERS

37429.png

Copyright © 2022 Ian R. Harvey.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This material is neither made, provided, approved, nor endorsed by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Any content or opinions expressed, implied or included in or with the material are solely those of the owner and not those of Intellectual Reserve, Inc. or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

PERELANDRA by C.S. Lewis Copyright © C.S. Lewis Pte.

Ltd. 1944. Extracts reprinted by license permission.

Author’s cover photo used by permission of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, Princeton University.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

Scripture marked (KJV) taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2293-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2294-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022908255

Archway Publishing rev. date: 06/23/2022

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

John’s Doubts

Keep Watch with Me

Behind the Tormentor’s Mask

A Merciful Ransom from a Just Claim

Total Victory

Epilogue

Endnotes

About the Author

ALSO BY IAN R. HARVEY

John’s Witness—The Gospels’ Missing Pearl (Archway Press from Simon & Schuster, 2022)

The Lineage of the Lie: Revealing Paul’s Man of Sin (Outskirts Press, 2018)

Satan Gets to Reign—BAD THINGS HAPPEN—God Gets the Blame (Outskirts Press, 2017)

Well, Dr. Nibley, I Do Have a Suggestion: Always Believe God; Always Disbelieve Lucifer, Sunstone 183, Winter 2016

Foreword

Besides his professional acumen as a materials scientist and nanotechnologist, Dr. Ian R. Harvey is a passionate and devout LDS believer. His new book imaginatively and brilliantly collates foundational scriptural events in two separate gardens, Gethsemane and Eden. Also consider how deftly he invokes C. S. Lewis’s metaphorical Edenlike scene from yet another created world.

The posited role of the versatile apostle, evangelist, revelator, and sole witness to Christ’s sacrificial suffering in Gethsemane, John, intriguingly emerges. Strikingly, while each of the other three evangelists recorded John’s experience at Gethsemane, in his own Gospel John says nothing. I elaborate in my published writings about this fact in a way that I think Harvey has honored in his understated telling of this story:

John tells us in his very last verse, "‘And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written’ (21:25, KJV). If John knew more, why didn’t he give us more? Did his stylus run dry? Did he lack the means to buy more ink and parchment? Possibly. But John’s style, we are told, was essentially gnostic, meaning that he wished in cryptic fashion to allude to the gospel’s deep mysteries without betraying their essence to the unreceptive or as yet uninitiated. These are the hallmarks of poetry too: brevity, compression of meaning, and obliqueness or indirection. So much is nevertheless given—intimated between the lines or in the form of pithy clues that, if we are sufficiently thoughtful and sensitive, conjure a wealth of feelings and associations. We are so engaged—given so much space to thinkingly, feelingly react—precisely because the text is so understated. Less is truly more. (T. F. Rogers, The Gospel of John as Literature, in Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand [Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2016])

What we might learn from Harvey’s depiction should prompt us to review and possibly reconsider the import of Christ’s atonement in our behalf and its implications for humankind’s mortal and post-mortal destinies. Through John’s eyes he asks us to consider reasons for the gulf between the justice meted to the damned and the mercy extended to the saved and proposes an ecumenical bridge between biblical scripture and complementary verses unique to LDS canon. By accepting the premise of his story, the reader’s sense for the concepts of ransom, sin (betrayal), perfection, justice, mercy, and grace greatly expands in surprising but personal and practical ways. Religious jargon becomes even more understandable and compelling.

As I know him, that is how Ian Harvey has always earnestly striven to apply his faith to immediate circumstances and encouraged others to do likewise.

What Harvey has written should provoke and profitably engage all readers, causing them to understand the events he discusses as more than merely descriptive or theoretical but all the more germane to the way we pursue our individual religious commitment.

Thomas F. Rogers

Author of Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand and the play Huebener

Preface

This is Jesus’s Gospel: that he was lifted up so that he could lift all unto him.¹ We all know the Easter story by heart—how Jesus conquered death. That’s the first pearl of Jesus’s Gospel. What’s not so clear—the missing pearl we seek to illuminate—is how was hell defeated?

Which of the four Gospel writers captured the events of Gethsemane? Where did Matthew, Mark and Luke get their information, since they were not physically present? John was the sole eyewitness to the events in Gethsemane, and yet his own pearl of the account is altogether missing from his New Testament Gospel.

The biblical record of Gethsemane is sparse, given the event’s obvious importance. We know from Matthew (26:36–46) that