John: A Series of Thematic Events

By Craig Davis

A thematic look at the Gospel of John. The idea that John's Gospel is constructed thematically is not new, but the approach to such studies has been relegated to academia. This study for the layman offers a look at John based on his main  theme - Life - broken into three great divide themes and then sub-themes. A Bible is a necessary companion text.

 

Craig Davis has been studying scripture for 40 years. He is an elder at Christ Community Church, and holds an advanced degree in communications. He has written several other Bible studies and scripture-based fiction, available as ebooks on this platform.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Davis
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224815661

Craig Davis

After earning bachelor's and graduate degrees at the University of Missouri, Craig Davis toiled for 20 years at newspapers, and has spent a lifetime in biblical scholarship. He wrote his first story while in Kindergarten, about King Kong. An amateur musician, he was once wrestled to the ground by a set of bagpipes.

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Contents

Introduction

The Logos

John Chapter I

The Prologue – Life

John Chapter I

God Intervenes in the Earth – Overview

John Chapter I

Moses and the Law – Overview

John Chapter II

The God-Man Finishes His Work – Overview

John Chapter III

God Intervenes in the Earth – Expounded

John Chapter IV

John Chapter V

Moses and the Law – Expounded

John Chapter VI

John Chapter VII

John Chapter VIII

John Chapter IX

John Chapter X

The God-Man Finishes His Work – Expounded

John Chapter XI

John Chapter XII

John Chapter XIII

John Chapters XIV-XVII

John Chapter XVI

John Chapter XVIII

John Chapter XIX

John Chapter XX

The Epilogue – The Great Shepherd

John Chapter XXI

(Roman numerals used to facilitate electronic search)

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Introduction

The idea of John’s Gospel being arranged in a thematic way, rather than the chronology apparent in the Synoptic Gospels, is by no means new. The hope of pursuing it as a means of discerning and studying the Gospel is a problem for the layman, because the written material exploring this approach is largely if not exclusively academic in nature. So I proposed to work this out myself, with the help of various commentaries and other written works, following what I thought to be apparent from the text. What came out follows, although I offer the caveat that this is and will remain a work in progress.

This study does not follow a verse-by-verse method, but it is chapter-by-chapter. Key verses are selected from each passage in order to illustrate the overall, sectional and chapter thematic approaches. John records events (John famously includes seven signs, which play a role in the themes) and attaches Jesus’ teaching about Himself to those events; their importance is not when they happened chronologically but when they appear within his Gospel narrative. Jesus’ words in 14:11 reflect John’s approach: Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. After all the signs are completed, John’s desire is that his readers would believe in Jesus by knowing Him, but if not at least through the works he records.

The overall theme of the Gospel is Life – Jn. 20:30-31. It is here Jesus proclaims He is Life itself: Jn. 14:6 is one of many times He equates Himself with some abstract reality (making it concrete). The word life is used 62 times, along with live and living.

Under this umbrella, the Gospel is divided into three sub-themes, each organized around a Passover, each connected with a sign, each sign being connected with a sacrament. These thematic sections then each contain a number of illustrative thematic passages. The three subthemes are as follows:

I. God Intervenes in the Earth

First sign: Turning water to wine – Eucharist element: wine

Second sign: Healing the nobleman’s son

Third sign: Healing the paralytic on the Sabbath

II. Moses and the Law

Fourth sign: Feeding the 5,000 – Eucharistic element: bread

Fifth sign: Walking on water

Sixth sign: Healing the man born blind

III. The God-Man Finishes His Work

Seventh sign: Raising Lazarus – Baptismal event

Here is an example of a sacramental theme: Read Jn. 6:51-58. The ancient Church saw Jesus’ teaching here to be clearly eucharistic. Rather than just reporting again the institution of the Lord’s Supper as in the synoptics, John used this teaching to reveal the significance and truth of it with Christ’s own words, presented in an early passage in his Gospel.

Before diving deeper into this approach, we must first ask a question: Exactly what is a Gospel? Gospel literally means good news; therefore a Gospel is an account of Jesus intended to communicate the Good News, nothing more, nothing less. It is not a history or biography, and the Gospel writers did not follow the historical disciplines of their time (such as they were), much less modern guidelines, and we should not expect to find those disciplines in their writings. John’s Gospel is Exhibit A for this approach.

First, he does not include many significant events that the other Gospels feature, though some are referred to obliquely. John assumes familiarity with these events, and to some extent uses the other Gospels as resources (as does this study, particularly the other first-hand witness, Matthew). Neither the baptism of Jesus nor the Last Supper, for instance, are narrated in the text, but the sacramental impact of both is essential to John’s structure. He also hints at ongoing connections to the Calendar of Feasts, John the Baptist, and the importance of Bethany and other locations. As noted before, John records events in Jesus’ ministry – which then inevitably meet with misunderstanding and conflict ­– and applies to them some teaching about Him. Jn. 9:3 is a telling statement applicable to more events in John than just the healing of the man born blind. The cause or even the effect of an event are secondary to what the event reveals about God.

Again, the book is organized around three Passover events; this is the only book of scripture to use the term Lamb of God, and so the whole book is illustrative of this role of the Christ. So to these Passovers is attached a triad of major themes – God intervenes in the Earth, Moses and the law, the God-Man finishes His work. The themes are laid out within the bookends of a prologue and an epilogue that each present the deity of Christ in different aspects of His being. (The graphic above is an attempt to illustrate the journey of the Gospel’s narrative, beginning and ending at the same high point. At the end of the study I include a second attempt at charting the themes using columns of text).

All this leads us here:

Resolved: John lists events in terms of developing themes rather than chronology to express truths about Christ and His mission, organized under three grand division themes:

1) God intervenes in the Earth – the mediator arrives

2) Moses and the law – their correct place in the revelation of the Messiah

3) The God-Man finishes His work – the redemption/glorification

The Logos

John Chapter 1

John opens his Gospel with the iconic message about the Logos, a Greek word meaning – and often translated in English Bibles as – Word, set in the language and tones of the beginning of Genesis. But John’s Gospel is not the genesis of the use of logos to mean more than a spoken word. It represents a concept arising out of Greek philosophy adopted by Jewish philosophers:

• In Platonic thought, the word came into use to communicate the archetypal idea within his Theory of Forms that held the idea or conception of a thing is truer than the realized thing itself.

• In Stoic thought, it was used to communicate the universal reason, the goal of becoming a clear and unbiased thinker.

• In the Targumim (a group of Jewish writings that arose out of the Babylonian captivity) the word "memra" occurs, used to express God revealing Himself. Memra is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek logos. In the Targumim writings it is not used as a substitute for any of God’s names, but for a personalized revealing of God. Neither is any connection made between the memra and the Messiah.

• In the apocrypha, the idea of wisdom as a special subsistence is extended from Proverbs 8, and is picked up by Paul in 1 Cor. 1:24. Much of this pre-Christian writing can then be applied to Messiah. For instance, The Wisdom of Solomon is a pseudo-canonical book dated between 10-30 BC, so whether one excepts it as scripture or not, it reflects Jewish thought just before the Incarnation. Wisdom of Solomon 18:14-16 reads – For while gentle silence embraced everything and night at its own speed was half over, Your all-powerful Word (Logos) leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of a doomed land, a relentless warrior carrying the sharp sword of Your irrevocable command, and He stood and filled all things with death and touched heaven while standing on earth. As Mediator, Christ indeed bridged Heaven and Earth.

Rabanus Maurus, a Church father from c. AD 800 wrote of this passage: "God’s word that arrives at midnight is God’s Son who acts in Egypt and at