The Gospel of John: Setting Expectations on the Authors' Terms

The Gospel of John is the last of the gospels in the "canonical" group -- the ones known and accepted as part of the Bible. It has long been considered by scholars as something recognizably different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Anyone scanning the prologue of John's gospel will notice not just its length, but its scope:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. ... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

For comparison, the early point in Mark's introduction of Jesus is John's baptism as grounded in Isaiah's prophecies of preparing the way for the Lord; the early points in Matthew's and Luke's are genealogies that are anchored back to the divine foundation of human history. John takes the scope to the next level and begins before the dawn of time, before the creation of the world in which we live. The context in which Jesus is introduced is eternal and pre-physical, as the Word of God.

Before long, the material moves to this world, to specific places and times and people and actions:

• Now this was John's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. ... This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan.
• The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said ...
• The next day John was there again with two of his disciples ... 
• Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.
• On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.

So after the prologue the material settles into a narrative framework. Still, that eternal, divine context which was introduced in the prologue occurs again within the main narrative. We find Jesus saying that "before Abraham was born, I am", that "The one who has seen me has seen the Father", and Jesus' prayer to the Father referencing "the glory I had with You before the world began".* Jesus is shown as teaching more at length about his own identity in sayings such as "I am the good shepherd", "I am the door", "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

There are strong contrasts in the Gospel of John. Along the explicitly religious elements we've seen above, we also see a very human Jesus sitting down to rest by a well when he is thirsty, and the disciples worrying about the cost of food for the crowd. Some elements of the narrative are familiar the world over: politicians having closed-door meetings and choosing scapegoats, leaders keeping up appearances of morality, and a public figure who is worried about his reputation arranging a meeting when he is less likely to be seen. 

The Gospel of John follows a narrative framework for the main part, with the action taking place in the Roman-occupied Jewish areas of the day, and neighboring Samaria. Still, the Gospel of John is sometimes looked on as an outlier of sorts when compared to Matthew, Mark, and Luke: it has much material not covered in the others, and a noticeably different approach in some of the cases where it records the same events. It includes an event (the woman caught in the act of adultery) which may have been incorporated from another early source. It has information on Peter, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael that is not known to us from the other Biblical accounts. Someone might make a case that the Gospel of John is something of an alternative gospel compared to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 

When we consider the prologue and epilogue, along with the call-outs embedded in the narrative to a more supernatural timeline, the Gospel of John has a slightly different scope than the other gospel accounts included in the Bible, leaving the reader with a more explicitly-drawn theological picture than has been the case in the works attributed to Matthew, Mark or Luke.

---

* I should mention that I am not mentioning these call-outs to a divine context in order to start some debate on the nature of Christ. If the Gospel of John contains the quotes that are taken as the most explicit claims to Jesus' divinity in the New Testament, it also contains the quote taken as the most explicit denial of it in the New Testament when Jesus references the Father as "the only true God". While those are worthy considerations in their own right, the topic here is how the author(s) present their own scope and set their readers' expectations about the content and context of their material. That is to say: one topic at a time.