Redacting John

John 1:29-34

Sometimes, I find John's Gospel confusing.

Photo by Alabaster Co on Unsplash

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, 'After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.' I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel." And John testified, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God." - John 1:29-34

Here is where I get pushback from the evangelists who love John, but let me explain what I find confusing.

Is this the version of the story you remember?

For me, Matthew 3:16 is what I remember. "And Jesus, when He had been baptized, went up straightway out of the water. And lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon Him."

And then there is Luke 3:22, "And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee, I am well pleased."

These two are slightly different. In Matthew, Jesus saw the Spirit and in Luke, it seems the people saw it and heard God speak.

Does it matter that in John's Gospel it is only John the Baptist who sees and hears?

It's the way John tells us that bothers me. He says that John declares that this is Jesus the Lamb of God approaching, but then he says that he did not know him. Jesus is his cousin.

Come on, John. You can do better than that.

John, the evangelist, is the gospel writer who focused on Jesus's spiritual signs. He set out to show us that Jesus is God, and many Christians swear by him (maybe that's a bad choice of words).

What if we didn't have John's Gospel and his Book of Revelation? Would there be as many religious zealots among Christians?

I don't know the answer to that, but the Church is battling itself on this issue today, mostly because it failed to do anything in the 1930s when a certain German Chancellor used Christianity to control an entire society.

So, maybe we should drop one of the Gospels.

That still leaves us with three, and though they are all based on the same source, they are far less controversial and less accusatory than John's.

Of course, a good deal of our Christian popular music is based on John's Gospel, so we would lose that, and all those musicians and singers/songwriters would be out of work, but we can live without them, right?

That brings us to this.

We will never drop the Gospel of John. People are swayed by literature all the time. We are an easily influenced lot, and it is up to us to know what we are reading and why it is written the way it is.

We are good at mentally redacting what we don't agree with, and that is the way I deal with John's Gospel. I deal with social media the same way. And people will extract a sentence or two from this and use it against me as well.

It is what we do, how we get attention for ourselves.

But if we want to educate people about Christ, we need to be prepared for pushback and have a way to explain the differences. It is not enough to say, "It's the Word Of God, so believe it."

We are smarter than that.

More to come...

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