Season 2 · Episode 21
Full episode description
Part 2 of John’s World reads the gospel through what its community produced. The Johannine Jesus of Part 1 was the Word made flesh. The community that read this gospel had to live with the consequences, and the consequences were extreme.
This episode walks:
- the Paraclete, the Greek word the Gospel of John uses for the Spirit promised after Jesus is gone, an advocate, a comforter, a continuing presence in the community
- the claim to oneness with the Father, John 10:30, where Jesus says "I and the Father are one," a claim no synoptic gospel makes
- the community’s experience of expulsion from synagogues, visible in passages where John’s Jesus warns that those who confess him will be put out
- the persecution narrative, where being hated by the world is built into the identity of the Johannine community
- the splintering in the second century, when the gospel was read in two opposite directions. The proto-orthodox read it as proof Jesus had come in real flesh. The Christian Gnostics read it as proof Jesus only seemed to be human, that the divine Word could not have suffered
- the first letter of John, written some years after the gospel, arguing furiously against fellow Christians who denied that Christ had come in the flesh
- the long argument over whether John was a safely orthodox text or a dangerously Gnostic one, which delayed its acceptance into the canon by decades
The Gospel of John shaped Christianity more than any other gospel. It also nearly produced the Christianity that lost.
Not from tradition. From evidence.