Commentaries and Podcasts

On the Gospel of John, Part 6: The Wedding Feast at Cana

In John chapter 1 the apostle had made many bold statements proclaiming the deity of Jesus, or Yahshua Christ. The assertions that He is the Word made Flesh, the Light of the World, the Lamb of God, and the declaration of the purpose of the ministry of John the Baptist all assert that Yahshua Christ is indeed Yahweh God incarnate. He is THE Son of God because He is the manifestation of God Himself, as it was promised in the Psalms and the prophets. This is better understood once the many passages from the Old Testament which also refer to these things are examined and considered, even if they were not all explicitly cited by John himself. The New Testament cannot be properly understood outside of the context provided by the Old Testament, and we sought to elucidate many of those passages as we presented John chapter 1 over the first five parts of this series.

The gospels of Luke and Matthew open with accounts of certain events from the birth and early life of Christ. But in the third chapter of each of those gospels there is the testimony of John the Baptist. The gospel of Mark, similar to that of John, says nothing of the birth or early years in the life of Christ, and opens with the testimony of John the Baptist. So the testimony of John is the event by which all four gospels open their descriptions of the beginning of the ministry of Christ. Doing so, all four gospels cite Isaiah 40:3, attributing the words to John as they are spoken in reference to Christ, where it describes “3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God,” and explains that John the Baptist was that voice. If John was that voice, then Yahshua Christ must be Yahweh incarnate, the God for whom he prepared the way.

We apologize to the live listeners who did not hear the last 8 minutes of this podcast. Our streaming computer, which has been quite reliable these past few years, suddenly cut off and Windows 10 began updating itself. This behavior is, of course, contrary to the settings which are supposed to preclude it from doing that during a live program.

On the Gospel of John, Part 5: The Focus of the Disciple

All four of our Christian gospels are written in a very simple and forthright manner, and they describe very little outside of the interactions of Yahshua Christ with His disciples and the people who He had encountered directly, along with some of His teachings and the miracles which He had done, and, of course, His final clash with the authorities. While sometimes they mention a few significant historical figures or events which relate to the birth and life of Christ or the beginning of His ministry, little is described of the world outside of the immediate Gospel narrative. So there are no deep explanations or descriptions of history or current events, nor is there much concern for the political, economic or social conditions in Judaea or the greater part of the Roman empire.

On the Gospel of John, Part 4: The Lamb of God

Presenting Part 3 of this commentary on the Gospel of John, which was titled The Sons of God, we gave a full explanation of our translation of John 1:11-13, and we cannot sufficiently stress how important it is to understand the impact which one’s worldview can have upon one’s interpretation of Scripture. I also understand that these presentations may at times be very technical and hard to digest. However we must develop a scholarly basis for a proper understanding of the text before we can even begin to claim to understand the Bible. If one is persuaded by the commonly-accepted interpretations of the Jews concerning the ministry of Christ, then it is easy to accept the King James Version and other popular translations of these verses. So like a lamb being led to the slaughter, one may helplessly be led to believe that the universalist perspective of Scripture is true, and that all those who merely profess a belief in Jesus must therefore be accepted as having somehow become “sons of god” by a mere profession of their lips, and as if they could possibly even make that choice on their own.

On the Gospel of John, Part 3: The Sons of God

In the opening portions of this commentary on the Gospel of John, we hope to have sufficiently illustrated from Old Testament Scriptures, as well as from the Revelation and other sources, the meanings of the assertions that Yahshua Christ is the Word made Flesh and the Light come into the World, assertions by which the apostle had poetically and confidently attested that Yahshua Christ was indeed Yahweh God Himself, the God of the Old Testament incarnate as a man, and that He was the true Messenger to man sweeping aside all of the false claims of antiquity. So we saw that John, attesting that Christ is the light come into the world, had also made an assertion in reference to Christ which had formerly been claimed by the great kings of antiquity, those of the Hittites, Babylonians, Egyptians and others, who had made that same claim for themselves, even imagining for themselves to be the incarnation of the Sun on earth. Later, in John chapter 12, Christ Himself is recorded as having originated the assertions which John has made for Him here, as the event actually preceded the record.

Then coming to verse 10 of this first chapter of John, we contended with the King James translation of the passage, which reads “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.” The meaning of this passage clearly may have been different in the original understanding of the English of 1611, the word world now having a different meaning. Examining that word world, we came to the conclusion that the word would better be translated as society, since it does not refer to the entire planet and everything on it in the way that it is often interpreted today. There are passages in the classical Greek writings where the word appears in broad contexts and may be interpreted as universe, however that is not necessarily the manner in which it was used in the New Testament, and it was not always the manner in which the classical Greek writers had used the term...

On the Gospel of John, Part 2: The Light of the World

Introducing our presentation of the Gospel of John in the opening segment of this series, we gave evidence from the earliest post-apostolic Christian writers, the so-called Church Fathers, and from the texts of those books of our Bibles which are attributed to John, which is sufficient to demonstrate that one and the same John the apostle – the young man who of all the apostles had been closest to Christ – was indeed the author of the Revelation, the first epistle of John, and this Gospel. There was also circumstantial evidence given to help establish that John was indeed the author of the two shorter epistles which have been attributed to him from the earliest times.

Here we shall offer a brief summary of our discussion. Little is known of the life of John after the early chapters of Acts, and he last appears in Scripture in Jerusalem in 47 AD, in the events which are recorded in Acts chapter 15 and the early verses of Galatians chapter 2. Later in his life, ostensibly after the deaths of the elder James around 62 AD in Jerusalem and Paul of Tarsus about that same time in Rome, John is in Ephesus where he committed this Gospel to writing. Then during the reign of Domitian, some time after 81 AD John was exiled to Patmos on account of his Christian profession, which is where he received the Revelation. After the death of Domitian in 96 AD, John was able to return to Ephesus. If the Revelation was not already committed to writing, it certainly was after John’s return, which is indicated in the accounts of the early Christian writers. All of John’s three epistles were also written in Ephesus, and very likely around this late time, as John fulfilled the role of an elder and apostle to the Christian assemblies at Ephesus and the neighboring districts. This John had reportedly done until his death some time during the reign of Trajan, which began in 98 and ended in 117 AD. If John were 16 when the ministry of Christ began in 28 AD, he would have been no younger than 86 when he died.

On the Gospel of John, Part 1: The Word Made Flesh

Christianity is Divine Truth which stands opposed to worldly philosophies. Therefore the LOGOS cannot be described in accordance with worldly philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Anyone who attempts to do so, fails miserably.

Here we shall endeavor a presentation and commentary of the Gospel of John. This Gospel is unlike any of the others, which parallel one another in many ways and which are for that reason called the Synoptic Gospels. None of the writers of these other gospels were witnesses to the entire ministry of Christ, and therefore they also relied on accounts provided by others, in whole or in part. Before discussing John, we shall explain this briefly, but we must warn that the documentation or reasoning which supports these brief explanations is found throughout our other commentaries, and we can not repeat it all here. We will, however, see some of our evidence in the words of the early Christian writers as we cite them in our discussion of John.