John: Volume 2A

By Craig S. Keener

An image rich, passage-by-passage commentary that integrates relevant historical and cultural insights, providing a deeper dimension of perspective to the words of the New Testament

Discoveries await you that will snap the world of the New Testament into new focus. Things that seem mystifying, puzzling, or obscure will take on tremendous meaning when you view them in their ancient context. With the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary, you'll:

• Deepen your understanding of the teachings of Jesus.
• Discover the close interplay between God's kingdom and the practical affairs of the church.
• Learn more about the real life setting of the Old Testament writings to help you identify with the people and circumstances described in Scripture.
• Gain a deeper awareness of the Bible's relevance for your life.

In this volume, detailed exegetical notes are combined with background information of the cultural setting that will help you interpret the Gospel of John.

THE ZONDERVAN ILLUSTRATED BIBLE BACKGROUNDS COMMENTARY SERIES

Invites you to enter the world of the New Testament with a company of seasoned guides, experts who will help you understand and teach the biblical text more accurately. Features:

• Commentary based on relevant papyri, inscriptions, archaeological discoveries, and studies of Judaism, Roman culture, Hellenism, and other features of the world of the New Testament.
• Hundreds of full-color photographs, color illustrations, and line drawings.
• Copious maps, charts, and timelines.
• Sidebar articles and insights.
• "Reflections" on the Bible's relevance for 21st-century living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780310528852

Craig S. Keener

Craig S. Keener (PhD, Duke University) is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, and commentaries on Matthew, John, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Revelation. Especially known for his work on the New Testament in its early Jewish and Greco-Roman settings, Craig is the author of award-winning IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament and the New Testament editor for the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.

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ABBREVIATIONS

1. Books of the Bible and Apocrypha

2. Old and New Testament Pseudepigrapha and Rabbinic Literature

Individual tractates of rabbinic literature follow the abbreviations of the SBL Handbook of Style, pp. 79–80 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999). Qumran documents follow standard Dead Sea Scroll conventions.

3. Classical Historians

For an extended list of classical historians and church fathers, see SBL Handbook of Style, pp. 84–87. For many works of classical antiquity, the abbreviations have been subjected to the author’s discretion; the names of these works should be obvious upon consulting entries of the classical writers in classical dictionaries or encyclopedias.

Eusebius

Josephus

Philo

Apostolic Fathers

4. Modern Abbreviations

5. General Abbreviations

JOHN

THE SEA OF GALILEE

THE SEA OF GALILEE

Author

Classicists place heavy weight on external testimonies for authorship.¹ External evidence (i.e., ancient writers starting in the generation immediately after this Gospel) attributes this Gospel to John the son of Zebedee. Indeed, early tradition is almost unanimous that the apostle John wrote the Fourth Gospel. Scholars have plausibly proposed various other names, most often a distinct John the Elder, or a school of disciples recording John’s message (disciples were expected to pass on their teachers’ teachings). But while tradition sometimes blended figures with two names, more often writers distinguished them more clearly than does the earliest second-century tradition about John, and sometimes they created two persons based on a single one.² Based on its Judean emphasis and identification with Lazarus as a beloved disciple (John 11:3), some also make a plausible internal case for Lazarus, although this suggestion finds no support in the external evidence.

John

IMPORTANT FACTS:

AUTHOR: Internal evidence and ancient Christian memory point especially to the apostle John, son of Zebedee.

DATE: A majority of scholars date John in the 90s, consistent with ancient Christian tradition.

SETTING: After the Judean-Roman war of AD 66–73, many Jewish communities were at pains to demonstrate their loyalty to Rome. Some were thus quick to repudiate Jesus’ followers, since Jesus was executed for treason (see John 19:19), and Rome was suspicious of messianic and prophetic movements.

PURPOSE: Led by the Spirit and drawing on his memory of Jesus (14:26), John reinforces the faith of believers in Jesus’ identity, providing them with information to help them in their own conflicts with their critics (16:7–11; 20:31).

CENTRAL THEMES:

1. Jesus is the divine Lord (John 1:1, 18; 20:28).

2. Jesus models relationship with the Father (10:14–15) and one another (13:34–35).

3. The Spirit empowers believers to continue to represent Jesus (15:26–27; 20:21–22).

Scholars widely debate who wrote this Gospel. The apostle John, however, remains the dominant view in the longer history of interpretation. Internal evidence is consistent with this claim. The Gospel claims to come from an eyewitness (19:35), the beloved disciple, whose role most closely fits that of John, son of Zebedee, in the other Gospels. This perspective fits the respect that classicists often accord to external attestation.

Sometimes scholars object that an original disciple of Jesus would have been in his nineties when the Gospel was written. Typical disciples were in their teens, however, making eighties likelier than nineties. Moreover, we know of other ancient thinkers in their eighties and nineties with sharp memories and wit.³

More often scholars object based on differences from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Defenders of John as author, however, point out that he writes as an independent witness to Jesus, using his own style and with his own interests. Flexibility in the ways ancient biographies were written allows John to pursue a distinctly different approach from Mark and those that followed him.

RUINS AT EPHESUS: The town council building (the prytaneion).

RUINS AT EPHESUS

The town council building (the prytaneion).

The internal evidence supports an eyewitness author, and this evidence should be accepted. Although pseudonymous works existed in antiquity, they stated their purported author rather than implied him. We would accept an eyewitness claim in most other ancient biographies or histories, so why should skeptics be biased against John?

Date

Tradition holds that the Gospel was written in the 90s of the first century. Although some skeptical scholars once dated John instead in the late second century, the discovery of a fragment of this Gospel from the first half of the second century laid that skepticism to rest. Allowing time for the work’s circulation pushes the probable date of composition back into the first century.⁴ Johannine language also was circulating in the early second century.⁵ Some propose a date in the 60s, but most scholars maintain a date in the mid-90s, which best fits the setting described below and the probable setting of the book of Revelation, which claims authorship by John (Rev 1:1).

Where John Was Written

Because John focuses (even more than Matthew) on the Pharisees as opponents, some suggest that he wrote in Galilee or Syria. Ancient sources, however, strongly suggest that John settled in Ephesus in Asia Minor, although he had originally come from Galilee and then Judea (cf. Gal 2:1, 9) and probably maintained awareness of issues there. John probably shaped his account through repeated retellings in Judea⁶ before massive numbers of Judeans settled elsewhere (including Asia Minor) after the devastating war of AD 66–73.⁷ Other Jews already lived in and viewed themselves as part of their communities in Asia Minor.⁸ Two of the seven churches in the book of Revelation grapple with precisely the issues that his Gospel tackles: Smyrna (Rev 2:9–10) and Philadelphia (3:7–9). One of John’s disciples led the church in Smyrna in the next generation and faced the sort of situation most scholars find in this Gospel.

Setting

Archaeological discoveries have demonstrated the appropriateness of the Fourth Gospel’s accounts for a Judean and Galilean milieu—that is, the setting of both Jesus and the beloved disciple. The Gospel reapplies these accounts to preach to a new situation. The temple’s destruction in AD 70 and the scattering of many Judeans afterward, for example, fit the emphasis on the new temple in John.

John also expresses concern for conflict with synagogues (16:2; cf. 9:22; 12:42). The Judean war of AD 66–73 shattered many Judean religious groups. Pharisees became the dominant voice of Judean leadership, and Jewish Christians may have provided their main competition (cf. earlier Acts 21:20). Many scholars argue that, around this time, Judean leaders even added a line to a standard prayer that cursed sectarians, among whom they included the Jewish Christians. (Alternatively, some locales may have redeployed an existing curse for this purpose.) John’s specialized concern with the Pharisees in his Gospel (other groups are mostly limited to his passion narrative) may suggest that their opposition is somehow related to the opponents his readers face in their own communities.

After the Judean war, many Jews in the Roman Empire wanted to distance themselves from sects emphasizing messiahs, the kingdom, and prophecy. Some Jewish communities probably also perceived a threat to their special exemptions and privileges in Christians’ acceptance of gentile followers into their Jewish heritage without circumcision and Jewish rites.⁹ Some believers were made unwelcome by local synagogue authorities, treated as if their very Jewishness was held in question because they believed in Jesus as Messiah and kingdom-bringer (cf. perhaps another response in Rev 2:9; 3:9, also addressing western Asia Minor). The Roman authorities were also suspicious of non-Jews who did not worship the emperor,¹⁰ which could have become an issue if others accused gentile Christians of disloyalty to the state. John writes his Gospel to encourage these Jewish Christians that their faith in Jesus is genuinely Jewish and that it is their opponents who have misrepresented biblical Judaism.

Genre

In the period of the early empire, biographers were free to praise or comment on their subjects, but they were expected to depend on prior information, not to invent events.¹¹ Although all four Gospels fall into the general ancient category of biography, they adapt it in a special way for their unique subject—Jesus. Moreover, the biographic genre was broad enough to allow considerable differences of style. For instance, Luke writes like an ancient Greek historian; Matthew’s heavy use of the Old Testament shows his interest in interpreting such history in particularly Jewish ways. But early church fathers recognized John as the most interpretive of all. Yet even when the more flexible biographies elaborated some material to provide a more cohesive narrative, they needed to remain true to the character they sought to depict.¹²

The style of Jesus’ discourses in John differs from Jesus’ words in the first three Gospels, but ancient writers were trained to practice paraphrasing speeches in their own words. Some compare John’s lengthy speeches to the interpretive speeches often found in ancient historiography, which usually developed real information about speeches and attempted to depict them in the way they most likely happened. Christian readers add the extra confidence in the inspiration of the Spirit, who guided John (John 14:26; 15:26–27; 16:13–15). In any case, John remains a Gospel—an ancient biography about Jesus.¹³

Message

One emphasis in the Fourth Gospel concerns God’s law and word. The Pharisees claimed that God’s law supported their positions, but while John fully endorses the authority of Scripture, he also emphasizes that Jesus himself is the Word (1:1–18) and the appointed messenger of the Father. To reject him is thus to reject the Father.

Another area of emphasis is the Spirit. The Pharisees did not believe that the Spirit, which they associated especially with the ability to prophesy, was active in conventional, biblical ways in their own day; thus they did not claim to have the Spirit. By contrast, John encourages believers to argue not only from the law but also from their experience of the Spirit. The Pharisees claimed to know the law through their interpretations and traditions; the Christians claimed to know God personally and therefore claimed to understand the law’s point better than their opponents did. Scripture spoke of Israel’s covenant faithfulness to God as knowing him, and various Jewish traditions valued seeing his glory, whether mystically or in the time of the end; in Jesus, however, believers can know God intimately and see his very heart.¹⁴

One recurrent set of characters in the Gospel, identified with these opponents of Jesus, is the Jews. Although Jesus and the disciples are clearly Jewish, John most frequently uses the label Jews in a negative sense for the Judean authorities in Jerusalem, whom he sometimes identifies (perhaps at times to update for the language of his own day) with the Pharisees. Anti-Semites have sometimes abused the Gospel of John to deny Jesus’ Jewishness, ignoring the situation in which John writes.

But John often uses irony (a common ancient literary technique),¹⁵ and by calling the Judean authorities Jews he may ironically answer these authorities’ charge that the Jewish Christians were no longer faithful to Israel. John concedes the title to them ironically, but everything else in his Gospel is meant to argue just the opposite: that the genuine heirs of Israel’s ancestral faith are these Jewish followers of Jesus, even if they have been expelled from their Jewish communities. Moreover, far from John’s associations of customs with the Jews undermining his own Jewish identity, similar language appears among observant Jews during a later Judean revolt.¹⁶ Such language does not make him a gentile.

John uses many images common in his culture, especially contrasts between light and darkness (common in the Dead Sea Scrolls), above and below (common in Jewish apocalyptic literature), and so forth.

What Is the Background for the Word?

Following the lead of Proverbs 8, Jewish sources often personified God’s Wisdom (e.g., Sir. 1:14–19), usually figuratively but sometimes more literally. Thus, for example, Wisdom praises herself in Sirach 24. Further, she lives with God and God loves her (Wisd. Sol. 8:3), like Jesus in John 1:1–2 and 3:35; she sits by God’s throne (Wisd. Sol. 9:4), like Jesus in Rev 3:21. Other NT writers before John use Wisdom language for Jesus (1 Cor. 1:24, 30; 8:6; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3).

The Greek term translated word was also used by many philosophers to mean reason, the force that structured the universe; the early first-century Jewish philosopher Philo combined this image with Jewish conceptions of the word. Thus Philo closely identifies the Word with Wisdom: the divine Word, which is the fountain of Wisdom (Flight 97); the divine Word flows down like a river from the spring of Wisdom (Dreams 2.242). He also speaks of the Word as the mediator at the boundary between creator and creation (Heir 205). The Word is God’s image, through which the entire world was formed (Spec. Laws 1.81).

Other Greek-influenced Alexandrian Jews may have offered the same connection. In a book praising Wisdom, an author describes the angel of the Lord slaying the firstborn of Egypt in these terms: Your almighty Word leaped from heaven, a severe warrior (Wisd. Sol. 18:15). None of these sources imagined the Word becoming flesh, and most saw the Word as created (contrast John 1:1: in the beginning the Word was) or as simply a metaphor for an aspect of God. But they help us understand why this language could make sense to John’s audience.

Although Greek conceptions undoubtedly did have some influence on how John’s hearers understood his phrase, his primary audience was not philosophically trained. (Statistically it is likely that most could not even read.) The most relevant background is background that all of them shared, at the very least from what they heard read in synagogues or churches each week: God’s word was Scripture (e.g., Ps. 119:25, 42, 81, 89, 105, 114). God promised that in the future his law would go out from Zion and his word from Jerusalem, even to the Gentiles (Isa. 2:3). The personification of this word makes sense. Pre-Christian Jewish thinkers also sometimes identified personified Wisdom with the law (Sir. 24:1, 23; Bar. 3:28–4:1; 4 Macc. 1:15–17); later rabbis identified them further, and frequently personified the law.A-1

By calling Jesus the Word, John calls him the embodiment of all God’s revelation in the Scriptures and thus encourages his Jewish Christian hearers, marginalized from some of their synagogues, that only those who accept Jesus truly honor the law fully (John 1:17). Jewish people considered Wisdom/Word divine yet distinct from God the Father, so it was the closest available term John had to describe Jesus; to communicate, we normally take the best available language and then adjust it as needed (e.g., the Greek and English words for God were applied to other deities before being applied to the true God).

The Structure of John 1:1–18

Scholars have offered various proposals for the structural design of the prologue, sometimes arguing that John interspersed the parts about John the Baptist after designing the opening praise of Jesus. There is no scholarly agreement on the design, but one possible proposal is as follows: a three-stanza structure omitting the Baptist verses (1:6–8, 15). Each stanza is exactly twelve lines, the first of two sets of six lines (each in thoughts of four lines followed by two lines); the second in sets of five and seven lines (three plus two and three plus four); and the third again in five and seven lines (five together or three plus two, and two plus two plus three):A-2

One element of structure, at least, is clear. This prologue, or introduction to John’s Gospel, begins and ends by hailing Jesus as God and as intimate with God the Father (1:1–2, 18).

The Word Became Flesh (1:1–18)

Other Jewish thinkers would have agreed with most of what John says about God’s Word in 1:1–5—certainly that God created everything through his Word and that light and life were in the Word. They would protest especially when John reveals in 1:14 that the Word became flesh.

In the beginning (1:1). Beginning like Genesis 1:1, John alludes to the Old Testament and Jewish picture of God creating through his preexistent wisdom or word. According to standard Jewish doctrine in his day, this wisdom existed before the rest of creation but was itself created; but see v. 2.

Was the Word (1:1). By declaring that the Word was in the beginning and especially by calling the Word God (v. 1; also the most likely reading of 1:18), John goes beyond the common Jewish conception to imply that Jesus is not created (cf. Isa. 43:10–11). (See the sidebar, What Is the Background for the Word?)

All things were made (1:3). Developing Old Testament ideas (e.g., Ps. 33:6; Prov. 8:30), Jewish teachers emphasized that God had created all things through his Wisdom/Word/Law and sustained all things because the righteous practiced the law. For example, Wisdom is the crafter of all things (Wisd. Sol. 7:21–22). (Some even pointed out that Gen. 1 declared and God said ten times when he was creating, and this meant that God created all things with his Ten Commandments.)¹⁷ Ancient Jewish teachers would have agreed with verse 3. Influenced by the Greek thinker Plato, the early first-century Jewish philosopher Philo also believed that God created the world through his logos (word), as a sort of pattern in God’s mind. The background for creation through God’s word, however, is already present in the Old Testament. (See Gen. 1:3; Ps. 33:6; 148:5; see further the sidebar, What Is the Background for the Word?)

Life (1:4). Jewish teachers often associated life with Wisdom (e.g., Wisd. Sol. 8:13, 17; Sir. 4:12; 17:11). More importantly, developing Old Testament promises of long life in the land if Israel obeyed God (e.g., Ex. 20:12; Deut. 5:16; 8:1; 11:9), Jewish teachers emphasized that the reward for obeying God’s word was eternal life:

• Baruch 4:1: She is the book of God’s commands and the law that exists forever; everyone who keeps hold of her will have life.

• Psalms of Solomon 14:2: the law, which he commanded us for our life.

• 2 Baruch 38:2 (OTP): Your Law is life, and your wisdom is the right way.

John declares that this life had always been available through God’s word, which is the same word that he identifies (in 1:14) with Jesus.

Light (1:4–5). Jewish teachers called many things light (e.g., the righteous, the patriarchs, Israel, God), but this title was most commonly applied to God’s law (a figure also in the Old Testament, e.g., Ps. 119:105). Jewish tradition continued to identify God’s Wisdom (Wisd. Sol. 6:12; 7:26, 29–30; 4 Ezra 14:20–21) and God’s law (Bar. 4:1–2) with light. Thus, for example:

• At Sinai God promises in Ps.-Philo L.A.B. 11:1 (OTP), I will give a light to the world and illumine their dwelling places . . . I will bring out the eternal statutes that are for those in the light but for the ungodly a punishment.

• In 2 Baruch 59:2 (OTP), For at that time the lamp of the eternal law which exists forever and ever illuminated all those who sat in darkness.

Philo also identifies the Word with light (Dreams 1.75). Some passages associate God’s law with both life and light:

• Baruch 4:1–2 (NRSV): She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever. All who hold her fast will live, and those who forsake her will die . . . walk toward the shining of her light.

• Ps.-Philo L.A.B. 23:10 (OTP): I gave them my Law and enlightened them in order that by doing these things they would live and have many years and not die.

Overcome (1:5). Ancient speakers and writers often used wordplays. That darkness did not apprehend the light may be a play on words (it could mean understand [NIV 1984] or overcome [NRSV; NIV 2011]).¹⁸ Similarly, in the Dead Sea Scrolls the forces of light and darkness were engaged in mortal combat, but light was predestined to triumph. For example:

• 1QS 3.19: Generations of truth are in the fountain of light, but generations of perversity in the spring of darkness.

• 1QM 1.1: The hand of the children of light will begin against those allotted as the children of darkness, the army of Belial.

• 1QM 1.11: The children of light and those allotted for darkness will wage war together.

MENORAH: The seven-branched Jewish candelabrum.

MENORAH

The seven-branched Jewish candelabrum.

Witness (1:7–8). Witness was traditionally a legal concept in the Greco-Roman world and in Jewish circles, and it appears often in this Gospel. It did not connote a legal setting all the time, but some scholars suggest such a background for the wider or more figurative use in John’s Gospel, given the often judicial settings of synagogues that could expel wayward members of the community (9:22; 12:42; 16:2; cf. comment on 14:16; 16:8). Isaiah used it in relation to the end time, when the people God delivered would testify to the nations about him before his tribunal (Isa. 43:10; 44:8). On John the Baptist himself, see 1:15.

World did not recognize him (1:10). Jewish tradition lamented Wisdom’s rejection among the Gentiles (Sir. 24:6–7). Jewish people usually expected Gentiles to be sinful and recognized that they lacked the light of the law. A later Jewish tradition even declared that God had offered the law to all seventy nations at Mount Sinai but lamented that they had all chosen to reject his word; only Israel had accepted it.¹⁹ In the same way, the world of John’s day has failed to recognize God’s Word among them.

His own did not receive him (1:11). Here John breaks with the image in Jewish tradition, according to which Israel alone of all nations had received the law. Some emphasized that only Israel proved suitable to receive the law;²⁰ when even Israel defied God’s law, God was ready to destroy the entire world.²¹ Jewish people expected that the faithful of Israel would likewise accept the revelation when God gave forth the law again in the end time (Isa. 2:3; Jer. 31:31–34). (In most Jewish tradition, the law would, if changed at all, be more stringent in the world to come.) They realized, of course, that in many generations even Israel disobeyed God.

Children of God (1:12). John 1:12–13 emphasizes spiritual rebirth over ethnic descent (v. 11); see comment on 3:3, 5 for details on how ancient Judaism might hear the language of rebirth. Jewish tradition applied the title children of God to Israel (cf. Ex. 4:22; Deut. 32:19–20). Believing in Jesus’ name probably implies that Jesus is divine, recalling Jewish emphasis on the name of God; one may compare, for example, 1 Enoch 43:4: the holy ones who . . . believe in the name of the Lord of Spirits (OTP).

Not of natural descent (1:13). Being born only of the flesh (natural descent here is literally the will of the flesh) was insufficient without birth also from the Spirit (3:6). Wisdom of Solomon 7:2 describes such natural birth as being made from blood, from the seed of a man and the pleasure of uniting in bed.

The Word became flesh (1:14). Human effort could not make anyone children of God (1:12–13); God had to bridge the gap and come in flesh so that humans could be born from him (1:14). Yet neither Greek philosophers nor Jewish teachers could conceive of the Word becoming flesh. Since the time of Plato, many intellectuals had emphasized that the ideal was what was invisible and eternal; for such thinkers, God was uncontaminated with matter.²² Most Jews so heavily emphasized that a human being could not become a god that they never considered that God might become human.

We have seen (1:14). Authors sometimes noted their own participation, as here. Ancient historical usage shows that the same writer could describe himself in first or third person or both (cf. 19:35).

Glory (1:14). In Jewish tradition, sin banished God’s glory,²³ and merit invited it.²⁴ But unmerited grace brings God’s revelation here.

Dwelling . . . glory . . . grace and truth (1:14). That John had in mind one particular passage, which addresses God giving the law to Israel, is confirmed by the