Re: Gospel of John

Tina -- three questions:
1. where are you getting your information?
2. have you read scholarly counter responses to these assertions?
3. can you give me specific examples?

There's quite a bit of accurate or at least credible information about
Palestinian Jewish practice during the life of Christ in the Gospel of John.
Furthermore, there's quite a bit of irrelevant detail thrown in that you just
don't find in other Gospel accounts, which makes some connection between the
Gospel of John and an eyewitness account credible, although I think most NT
scholars don't think the apostle John wrote the Gospel of John.

Take a look at John 5. John describes a pool "near the sheep gate" (and gives
the Aramaic name for it), says it is covered by five (not four or three or six)
"covered colonnades." I don't think you see description with this kind of
detail in any of the synoptics. Immediately after this you have an account of
"the Jews" persecuting Christ for healing on the Sabbath. This particular
phrase is a bit disturbing to modern western ears, but in John's Gospel it's
usually (not always) a synonym for the Pharisees or Sadduccees -- who identified
themselves very strongly by lineage, something which Christ didn't seem to
respect too much (see John 8).

John 10 has similar detail. It doesn't just say Jesus was walking in the temple
area, but specifically in the part of the temple called Solomon's Colonnade (vs.
22). He accurately reports the celebration of the Feast of Dedication during
the winter. I could probably go passage by passage and list every description
of Jewish custom, and show that most if not all of them were right...so that's
why I'm asking for examples.

There's a great deal of concern at the end, for example, for getting the body in
a tomb before the Sabbath starts on sundown Friday, and no one returned to
prepare the body properly until sunrise Sunday, first light after the end of the
Sabbath, the first possible opporunity to do anything, actually. It's pretty
ironic that the Pharisees were constantly on to Christ for violating the Sabbath
(usually by healing someone), but the people who loved him most wouldn't commit
clear violations even when it came to preparing his body for burial. More
pretty accurate detail about Jewish practice, at any rate.

Anyway, have at me, but do provide specific examples where you can. Try to
distinguish between the interpretation of teachings and the bare description of
an actual practice.

Jim

tina carson wrote:

> allow me to correct. Jesus was born 4 to 6 BCE, died around 30-35 CE and
> unless John were a complete moron, he most CERTAINLY did not write the
> "Gospel of John", though he may well have written the "Secret Gospel of
> John". John was a Jew. The writer of John certainly was not, as evidenced
> by the repeated misstatements about how things happened, ie Jewish law.
> Also, very doubtful that any of the 4 traditional gospels were written by
> Jews, and certainly not by the followers of Jesus who almost certainly
> wqould not know Greek. We know that they were apparantly originally written
> in Greek because of word choices, and because they were written in Greek &
> Latin for fgoreign audiences and this was when the conspiracy took place to
> change the man's name to the Greek "Jesus" thereby seperating him from the
> Jews.
> tina

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Received on Thu Jul 24 23:21:55 2003