Commentaries and Podcasts

On the Gospel of John, Part 14: True Signs and Wonders

In the first two presentations on our commentary on John chapter 4, we had spoken at length about the Samaritan woman, who was certainly a daughter of a remnant of the children of Israel which had escaped destruction or captivity at the hands of the Assyrians, and which had remained in Samaria throughout the seven centuries up to the time of Christ. It is quite possible that her and her kinfolk ultimately became Christians and could have remained in and around Samaria even until after the time that the Muslim hordes invaded and destroyed the Byzantine Christian culture of Palestine in the 7th century AD. However Shechem, and ostensibly, Sychar along with it, was destroyed by the Romans during the Judaean rebellion of 65-70 AD, and in 72 AD Vespasian founded a new city at the site, called after himself, Flavia Neapolis.

We hope to have illustrated how the encounter of Christ with this woman was a sort of parable representative of the ultimate reconciliation of the so-called “lost sheep” of the Northern Kingdom with Yahweh their God, which is indeed the very purpose and need for a Messiah in the first place. We then made several comparisons of aspects of this encounter with that of the later encounter which Christ had with the Canaanite woman, and by that we hope to have illustrated an example of the racial covenant aspect of the New Testament, where one woman had sought and received an earthly blessing but she was nevertheless excluded from communion, while the other woman being an Israelite had sought no blessing yet it was shown that she was fit for eternal life – in spite of the fact that she was apparently even a sinner.

I began this evening with a short discussion of Ten Years of Christogenea, which is found at the Christogenea Forum.

On the Gospel of John, Part 13: A Tale of Two Women

In our last presentation in this series, discussing the first 20 verses of John chapter 4, we gave some background into the history of Samaria from the time of the Assyrian deportations, in order to show that there were many Persians, Babylonians, Syrians and others who were resettled there by the ancient Assyrians at the height of their empire, and the Judaean historian Flavius Josephus generally referred to these new inhabitants as Cutheans. But, as we showed from the historical accounts of Scripture, there was also a significant number of remnant Israelites who had remained there, who had escaped the Assyrian captivity. Then in addition to these groups, there was also a large number of Levites and Judahites from Jerusalem who had relocated themselves to the area around Gerizim as early as the late 4th century BC, and who by this time could be called Judaeans. Many of these had mixed with the Cutheans, as Josephus had also explained. We also pointed out the fact that on at least a couple of occasions, Josephus certainly seemed to distinguish the inhabitants of Shechem and Gerizim from the peoples whom the Assyrians had imported. Then, around 330 BC, a second temple was built on Gerizim, and from that time a community of Judaeans and proselytes worshipped at Gerizim before that temple fell into disuse, over a period of about two hundred years. But even though the temple was abandoned, it is apparent that both remnant Israelites and the more recently introduced Judaeans had continued to inhabit the area.

On the Gospel of John, Part 12: The Parable of the Samaritan Woman

In the later portion of John chapter 3, after the discourse which Christ had with Nicodemus, John, the author of our Gospel, described the baptizing of the people by the disciples of Christ, the contention which John the Baptist was having with certain pharisees about baptism, and then the inquiry which the disciples of John had made concerning the baptizing conducted by the disciples of Christ. He then recorded John the Baptist’s testimony in response to that inquiry, that “a man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven”, which seems to have answered both the query of his disciples and the contention of the pharisees at the same time, and then in a clear reference to Christ he said “28 Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. 29 He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.”

On the Gospel of John, Part 11: Bride and Bridegroom

This is the fourth and, for now, the final presentation of our commentary on John chapter 3. In the three previous portions of this series we hope to have discussed adequately the conversation between Yahshua Christ and Nicodemus, the faithful but puzzled pharisee. We also hope to have established the Scriptural basis for what is “born from above”, which is the establishment by Yahweh of the ancient children of Israel into a peculiar and separate people living under His law. We saw that this was stated explicitly in the words of Solomon, in Wisdom chapter 19. However we also hope to have established that in the spiritual sense, the term is applicable to the wider Adamic race by the nature of their original creation, while Solomon used language that invokes the Genesis creation account to describe the establishment of Israel under the law at Sinai as a new aspect of God’s creation. So he wrote, as we may translate the Greek, “6 For the whole creation in its proper kind was fashioned again from above, serving the peculiar commandments that were given to them, that thy children might be kept without hurt.”

On the Gospel of John, Part 10: The Only-Begotten is Not the Only

In our last presentation in this series on the Gospel of John, which was subtitled The World of Salvation, among other things we had discussed were several aspects of the statement of Christ which is recorded in John 3:16. This is a favorite verse of the universalist denominational Christians, but it certainly does not mean what they imagine it to mean. They read this verse as if it says that Yahshua, or Jesus Christ, is the only Son of God, and had come to die in order to save the entire planet and everything, or, at least, everyone, dwelling thereupon. Of course, that is absolutely contrary to the entire body and context of the Scriptures. But with their interpretation of one verse, and only sometimes with imagined support from a couple of other verses, they would negate the entire meaning and value of all of the books of the prophets, as well as the complete substance of the epistles of the apostles and many of the other statements of Christ Himself.

So we began to address this particular passage by explaining that the Greek words translated as world were never intended to describe what we now know as the planet, and that even in the Medieval English of the King James translators, or in the German of Martin Luther, the concept of world did not imply the inclusion of the entire planet and everything on it, as the word is usually understood in modern times.

On the Gospel of John, Part 9: The World of Salvation

Ancient Gnostic influences adversely infected early Christianity with wrongful ideas that basic words such as seed, father, son, brother, and house, among others, had other than plain meanings when they appeared in Scripture in the prophets or in the New Testament writings, and modern adherents to the organized church institutions routinely cite those writings without giving thought to the actual and literal meanings of such words. This allowed them to accept another false doctrine, which we shall call replacement theology, because the words of all the prophets and apostles could then be corrupted and imagined to apply to “whosoever”, to anyone other than those who are expressly intended by the Scriptures, so that in that manner, anyone who would comply with the church institutions could be imagined to be a party to the covenants which Yahweh had made with Israel. So it is also with another word, world, which they now imagine refers to the entire planet and to every thing in it, yet that concept is relatively new, and nothing could be further from the truth.

One cannot be a Gnostic, and be a true Christian. In order to be a Christian, and truly accept the Word of God in the Old Testament, which is also manifest in Christ, one must accept the meanings of the words of Scripture as they were understood by the writers of Scripture or by those who had spoken those words when the Scriptures were written. Abraham would never have believed in any so-called “spiritual seed”, but rather he was told that his seed would come out from his loins, from where we may expect it to come. To Isaiah and Jeremiah and the other prophets, a son was a genetic descendant, a brother was a man of shared parentage, seed was the collective of a man’s offspring, a tribe was an extended family unit, a father a male ancestor near or remote, and the words never represented a mere group of disparate and unrelated believers. For example, a man who was a son was a son first, and then whether he was believing and acted accordingly so that he would be entitled to an inheritance was secondary to his being a son.

On the Gospel of John, Part 8: Origin and Destiny

When on September 21st, I had presented Part 7 of this series and my commentary on the second half of John Chapter 2, I had promised to continue with Part 8 in mid-October, after a short trip to Tennessee. But Yahweh had other plans, and the October 10th hurricane here in Florida disrupted our lives, along with my writing schedule, days after our return. Now that we are finally getting settled into our new home, I pray that I may resume this commentary without any further unplanned interruptions.

Presenting that last portion of John chapter 2, I chose to focus on the theme of Challenging Orthodoxy as we encountered Yahshua Christ confronting the errors of the generally accepted orthodoxy of Judaea in His Own time. I chose to focus on this theme because we ourselves should perceive that the presumably Christian and generally accepted orthodoxy of today is also in error. Here in John chapter 3, as Christ encounters the inquisitive Nicodemus, some of those errors will be brought to light. The so-called Orthodox and Catholic churches have followed the errors of Nicodemus for perhaps 1,800 years, and they refuse the correction which Christ offered to Nicodemus here in the discussion which is recorded in this chapter.

Our last segment of this series, titled On the Gospel of John, Part 6: The Wedding Feast at Cana, was presented here on July 6th. Now I shall resume with Part 7 before we travel again to East Tennessee in order to attend a League of the South event at Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park on September 29th. Yahweh willing, we will resume the series once more in mid-October, and stay with it through winter, hopefully completing it in early 2019.

On the Gospel of John, Part 7: Challenging Orthodoxy

Before commencing with our presentation and commentary on the Gospel of John, I have a short digression, and this will necessarily lead me to another and much longer digression. In our previous portions of this commentary I explained that some of the disciples of Yahshua Christ had at first been disciples of John the Baptist, and that they, namely Andrew the brother of Simon Peter and John himself, the author of this gospel, had sought Christ immediately after John the Baptist had declared Him to be the Lamb of God. Upon attaching themselves to Him, they introduced to Him Simon Peter. Immediately after that the small group returned to Galilee where Philip, Nathanael and the others – such as the younger James, the brother of John – were also introduced to Him. These opening chapters of the Gospel of John are the earliest records of the development of the association of Christ with His apostles.