The present work, in fact, owes its origin to those class notes, edited and improved through countless revisions and updates. One thing led to another, and the need to provide class notes for my students in this elective course, which has been offered about every two years since, led to the ever-growing file of information I have collected on John’s Gospel. Later, as a faculty member at Dallas Seminary, I taught an elective course in the Fourth Gospel for the first time in the spring semester of 1980. The Gospel of John has fascinated me for years, since as an undergraduate student I committed to memory the entire Fourth Gospel in the New American Standard Bible. As the characters in the narrative choose to follow Jesus Christ and thus choose eternal life (like the Samaritan woman and the royal official from Capernaum in chapter 4 and the man born blind in chapter 9), or reject him and choose eternal darkness (like the obtuse paralytic in chapter 5 or the Pharisees at the end of chapter 9), so the reader of the Gospel is also drawn to make this incalculable choice. At the same time the text engages the reader with a subtle pressure to adopt the viewpoint of the Evangelist about who Jesus is, forcing the reader to see the decision for or against Jesus Christ as an either/or which ultimately determines one’s eternal destiny. Any Bible student who has taken more than a superficial glance at John’s Gospel realizes it is filled with language, metaphor, and imagery which grips the readers and transports him or her to the world of the Evangelist. Historians who study the early Church have debated whether and to what extent the Johannine Christians formed an isolated community, and whether or not they differed substantially in belief and practice from early mainstream Christianity.Ībove all this, and sometimes in spite of it, the Fourth Gospel stands as a monumental literary work of incredible genius in its own right. Theologians have found in the elevated christology of John’s Gospel one of the highest and fullest expressions of who Jesus is in the entire Bible. Over the centuries of Christian history, individual followers of Jesus Christ have turned to the Fourth Gospel for encouragement, edification, and reassurance in their faith. It would be hard to overestimate the influence of John’s Gospel on the history of the Church.
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