Season 2 · Episode 19
Full episode description
Part 2 of John reads the gospel through the consequences of its theological choices. The Johannine Christ of Part 1 was the Word made flesh. The cost of that theology shows up in the calendar, at the table, and in the question of who wrote the book.
This episode walks:
- the Johannine timeline that moves the crucifixion to the fourteenth of Nisan, the day the Passover lambs were slaughtered, contradicting the synoptic chronology that places it the day after
- the symbolic logic, where John needs Jesus to die as the lambs die so the theology of substitution can land
- the Last Supper in John, where there is no bread, no cup, and no institution of the eucharist, only a foot-washing the synoptic gospels do not record
- the authorship question, where the gospel’s claim to be from "the disciple Jesus loved" was challenged from the second century onward
- the long argument that the author was not John the son of Zebedee, the Galilean fisherman from the synoptic gospels, but someone else entirely
- the verse near the end of the gospel, John 21:24, where an editorial hand introduces and authorises the work, an authorisation that has been read for centuries as undermining the very claim it tries to support
The Gospel of John is the most theologically influential text in the New Testament. It is also the gospel where the gap between historical Jesus and confessed Christ becomes widest. The author wrote a Jesus the synoptic tradition would not have recognised, and the church inherited that Jesus as the dominant one.
Not from tradition. From evidence.