Hello, friends.
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We're so glad that
you're able to join us
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in this Bible study,
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in this program
"Books of the Book."
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My name is Deyvy Rodriguez
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and we are
studying the Gospel of John.
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And with me is Dr. Jon Paulien,
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he is the dean of religion
at Loma Linda University.
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Welcome, Dr. Paulien. Thank you.
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It's good to be here with you.
All right, good to have you.
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You know, the last
program we were talking about
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how Jesus was
directing the disciples
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and He said to them,
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"I am the vine,
you are the branches."
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And earlier in
another program you said that,
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He referred to the
branches as the disciples.
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Now tell us a
little more about that.
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Well, I think obviously
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some people might
have questions about it.
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So I'm glad you
brought that back.
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Because I think even if
you look at some commentaries,
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people will say, "I am the
vine, you are the branches."
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That's talking to us.
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You know, about our
relationship with Jesus.
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And that's what I would
call the devotional reading
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and there's
nothing wrong with it,
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it's powerful, it's helpful,
but it's kind of related
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to what we talked
in the first program
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about a Hollywood
kind of Jesus where--
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where all you see about Jesus
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is what make
sense to us, you see.
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But if you don't take
that story out of its context,
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actually go
back into the context
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when Jesus says, "I am the vine,
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you are the branches." He
is talking to His disciples.
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They're having a
conversation back and forth.
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So the scholarly
approach to the book
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is not to undo the
devotional approach
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'cause that has its own value,
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but when you see the
original context of the story,
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when you read it
the way it was written
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and you realized Jesus is saying
something to these disciples,
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then you're
seeing something bigger,
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something different,
something additional.
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John has a story to tell
to and we miss it sometimes
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when we read it
only in the light
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of the other gospels and
read it only devotionally
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and we miss some
very powerful things.
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So I was pointing out
that in that story of the vine
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and branches was a
message to the second generation
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who never had a
physical contact with Jesus.
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That if they stayed
connected to the disciples,
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they would be the fruit.
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You see, if they stay
connected to disciples,
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then they would be connected
to Jesus through the disciples.
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So the words of the gospel,
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the words of John are
our connection to Jesus
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through the disciple John.
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So it can be viewed both
ways that the disciples today
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we are also the
branches, right? Yeah.
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You see scholars
in the last 50 years
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have more and more started
reading these Bible books,
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attempting to
understand the original context
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what actually
was happening there.
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And in doing that we
spot all kinds of things
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that we have missed before
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and things that could give
us fresh insights into God,
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fresh insights into Jesus.
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I don't want us to
miss those treasures
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by simply saying over and over
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what people have seen
through the centuries.
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So if some of
our viewers will say,
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"I never heard that
before." That's true.
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There was a time in my life I
hadn't heard it before either,
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but as you read the
gospel in the original language,
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understanding the
context in which it was written,
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some things emerged that
you would've missed before.
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And John has a lot
of depths in this gospel
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that people have
missed. Well, you know what?
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Are we studying today
in the Gospel of John?
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Well, this is the
third of three programs
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where we're looking
at the entire gospel,
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and just sort of asking
what's special about it,
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what's unique about
it, what's different?
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If you were to
take the four gospels
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and put them side by side
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and mark
everything that's similar,
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the unmark stuff is
what's unique to that gospel.
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And trying to
understand any of these gospels
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is good to start
with that unique stuff,
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and that's what
we've been doing here.
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Now who wrote John is
a question that comes up.
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It says, "John." Right?
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But that's a
title that's on there.
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If you actually read the text,
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it doesn't say
who the author is,
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it's kind of anonymous,
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but it does
suggests that the very end
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that the author of the
gospel was a beloved disciple.
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So it's somebody
who was one of the 12,
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he was with Jesus
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and he is often a companion
of Peter in the gospel.
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So there is a beloved disciple,
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not named who's
always wherever Peter is.
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When you get to the Book of
Acts which John didn't write,
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you get there,
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Peter is always traveling
around with John, you see.
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So John isn't mentioned here,
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but he is a
disciple that Jesus loved,
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who is always with
Peter, and so from that,
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we get the sense that John is--
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is the one that
wrote this gospel
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and that's what the
early church decided
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and they put
that on as the title.
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Around what time was
the Gospel of John written?
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Do we have any
information about that?
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Well, you know, it's
very, very interesting
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that scholars at one time,
particularly skeptical scholars
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thought it was
written as late as a 170 AD,
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which would be
several generations
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after the time of Jesus.
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And in doing that,
they basically said,
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the gospel is not historical,
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it doesn't tell us
a real story of Jesus,
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it's simply made up stories.
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Well, there's a
problem with that theory.
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They've
recently found a fragment
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of a manuscript about this
size that has John 18 in it
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and the date of that
manuscript is about 115 AD,
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in other words, 60 years earlier
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than what people thought.
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If you've got copies of
the Gospel of John in 115,
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it must have been
written even earlier.
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So scholars
today are pretty united
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that the Gospel
of John is probably
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the last book
written in the New Testament
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even after the
Book of Revelation.
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Not the last gospel,
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but the last book of
the New Testament. Right.
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Yeah, the other gospels
were quite a bit earlier.
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Yeah, they were
written sort of in the lifetime
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of most of the disciples,
but John outlives the disciples.
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And just before he dies,
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if you remember the
context from our last program,
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just before he dies,
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he writes his gospel
to first all the rumor
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that he was gonna live
till Jesus comes, you see.
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So Gospel of John is
probably the last gospel
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written maybe 95, 180 AD,
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which is 70 years
after the crucifixion.
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John was an old man there.
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And so the Gospel
of John comes to us
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within the lifetime
of one of the disciple,
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so it still has that
memory of the actual Jesus.
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So John writes the
gospel just before he dies.
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Where does he write the gospel?
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Well, that's an
interesting story
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because some of the
early church fathers
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talked about that and
they suggest that John
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and his
community were in Jerusalem
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for decades after
Jesus died on the cross.
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But then, just before
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the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans.
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You may remember the
Romans came around the mid '60s,
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35 years or so
after the crucifixion,
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they surrounded Jerusalem
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and then one
night they just left.
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And people
remember that Jesus had said
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when you see the
cities surrounded by armies,
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know that its
destruction is near.
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So when the Romans left, a
lot of the Christians escaped
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remembering the words of Jesus.
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And John and his community
went across the Jordan River
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into what we
would call Jordan today
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and they stayed
there for a while
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and then the community
left and went to Asia Minor.
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So we have evidence
that John lived in Ephesus
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at the latter end of his life.
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We know that he was
on Patmos for the time,
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an island off the cost
there that can be visited today.
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And Ephesus can
be visited today.
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It's a remarkable ancient ruin.
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So it was probably
written from Ephesus.
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Now John did not only
write the gospel, right?
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He wrote 1st, 2nd
and 3rd John. Right.
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He wrote Revelation. Yeah.
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Can you give us maybe the gospel
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where along that
period that he write it or--
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We don't know exactly.
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I mean, it's
possible-- it's generally felt
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that the gospel is
written after he left Patmos.
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We know that in 96 AD,
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the emperor that
imprisoned John on Patmos died
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and was replaced
by a new dynasty.
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And so it's
usually assumed that in 96,
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he was released to
go back to Ephesus.
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And just felt that those
three letters in the gospels,
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the gospel was
written at that time.
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I personally think the gospel
is the very last one written
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because its very context is
the impending death of John.
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But this John while
he writes from Ephesus,
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he knows Palestine very well.
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And here's an
interesting piece of it.
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Luke doesn't know Palestine.
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When you read
the Gospel of Luke,
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he doesn't know the relationship
of all these things.
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He's not a local. He is
getting the second hand.
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He is interviewing people.
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He is reading gospels and
he's putting this together.
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So in Luke, Jesus sets
out from Galilee to Jerusalem,
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his first stop on
the trip is Bethany,
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two miles out of Jerusalem.
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Then he travels
for eight more chapters
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and ends up in Jericho
27 miles from Jerusalem.
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You see, clearly
some things are mixed up
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in terms of the geography.
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That was not Luke's strength,
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was the geography
'cause he had never lived there
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except maybe for a short time
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with Paul on one
of the visits there.
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So John on the other hand,
he knows it back and forth.
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He knows where Jacob's Well is.
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You can visit
Jacob's Well today.
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Many scholars doubted
the Bible because they said,
00:10:46.43\00:10:48.93
"It's a story of the Pool
of Bethesda in Jerusalem."
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There is no Pool of Bethesda.
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Well, guess what? We found it.
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And it's 100
meters by 70 meters.
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It's huge, but it just was
forgotten and they thought,
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"Oh, John doesn't know
what he is talking about."
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He is talking
about Pool of Bethesda.
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Well, it's actually there.
So John writes those details?
00:11:07.85\00:11:11.30
Yes. Which is good.
00:11:11.33\00:11:13.02
Yeah. Yeah.
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There are little historical
details in the Gospel of John,
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no other writer has
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and they're
proven to be accurate.
00:11:19.58\00:11:21.33
For example, he says
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that Jesus in John 10
was in Solomon's portico
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and it was winter.
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Well, what does that
have to do with anything?
00:11:31.42\00:11:34.08
Solomon's portico is
the part of the temple
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that got sun at
the end of the day
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and was sheltered from the win
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which in winter time
came the other direction.
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If it's winter, that's the
one part of the temple court
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you want to be as it's nice.
00:11:48.80\00:11:51.16
Yeah, 20 degree Celsius in there
00:11:51.19\00:11:53.22
even though it's
freezing everywhere else,
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you can have classes there,
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there's no wind,
there's no chill,
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the sun is beating in
00:11:59.72\00:12:01.09
and warming that
little portico there.
00:12:01.12\00:12:02.92
So there is a little detail
00:12:02.95\00:12:05.95
that could only be
here if the guy knew
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what he was talking about.
00:12:08.81\00:12:10.38
He was sharing
actual events with details
00:12:10.41\00:12:13.24
that prove that
they actually occurred.
00:12:13.27\00:12:16.50
And so when he
says, for example,
00:12:16.53\00:12:20.30
that Peter gestures
to John at the table,
00:12:20.33\00:12:23.77
it's kind of like, you know,
00:12:23.80\00:12:25.26
please John, hey,
ask him a question.
00:12:25.29\00:12:27.79
And when he does
that, we take them seriously
00:12:27.82\00:12:31.96
because those details
are all through the gospel.
00:12:31.99\00:12:35.36
John has a number of
these little details,
00:12:35.39\00:12:37.71
no other gospel writer has
and they connect with archeology
00:12:37.74\00:12:41.68
and with history,
00:12:41.71\00:12:43.08
so we find that to be
a very believable gospel.
00:12:43.11\00:12:46.25
Tell us about John
the person? Who was John?
00:12:46.28\00:12:51.82
What was different about him
00:12:51.85\00:12:53.32
that perhaps the
other 11 disciples?
00:12:53.35\00:12:57.31
Well, John was probably
the youngest of the disciples.
00:12:57.34\00:13:00.50
I mean, he lived
long, long time afterward,
00:13:00.53\00:13:03.35
so he may have
been just a teenager
00:13:03.38\00:13:05.98
when he was following Jesus.
00:13:06.01\00:13:08.57
And one other things
is mentioned about him
00:13:08.60\00:13:12.39
is that he was a son of
thunder, you know. Okay.
00:13:12.42\00:13:16.46
Now that suggests somebody
who is kind of loud and noisy,
00:13:16.49\00:13:21.44
you know the big
mouth and stuff like that.
00:13:21.47\00:13:24.58
Perhaps he
mellowed out a little bit
00:13:24.61\00:13:26.96
as he got older
'cause he seems more,
00:13:26.99\00:13:28.71
you know, gentler and humble
00:13:28.74\00:13:30.58
at the time the
gospel was written.
00:13:30.61\00:13:31.98
But when he was following Jesus,
00:13:32.01\00:13:33.88
he was bit of a
troublemaker, you know.
00:13:33.91\00:13:35.79
He and his
brother came to Jesus,
00:13:35.82\00:13:37.54
you know, and the
mother is asking for them,
00:13:37.57\00:13:40.05
you know, can they
sit at your right hand
00:13:40.08\00:13:41.69
and left when you
get into the kingdom.
00:13:41.72\00:13:43.09
So even while being
the disciple of Jesus.
00:13:43.12\00:13:44.55
Oh, yeah. He was mischievous.
00:13:44.58\00:13:45.95
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:13:45.98\00:13:47.56
And there was one time
00:13:47.59\00:13:49.66
when they are passing
through a Samaritan village
00:13:49.69\00:13:52.02
and the people
refused them hospitality,
00:13:52.05\00:13:54.02
they says, "Hey, shall we
call fire down from heaven
00:13:54.05\00:13:56.57
to destroy the
village?" You know so.
00:13:56.60\00:13:58.82
That was not
always his character
00:13:58.85\00:14:01.06
eventually after
so long with Jesus.
00:14:01.09\00:14:04.47
His character was
eventually transformed,
00:14:04.50\00:14:07.63
isn't that right?
Yeah, that's right.
00:14:07.66\00:14:09.73
And even in the
gospel or not the gospel,
00:14:09.76\00:14:11.71
but his letters, his epistles
first, second, and third
00:14:11.74\00:14:15.09
or you know, they
talk so much of God's love.
00:14:15.12\00:14:18.48
Yeah. That's right.
00:14:18.51\00:14:20.02
So he definitely mellowed
as he walked with Jesus.
00:14:20.05\00:14:23.34
Jesus, you know,
made a difference
00:14:23.37\00:14:25.34
in his heart and changed him.
00:14:25.37\00:14:27.54
Well, there's a lot of
things about the Gospel of John
00:14:27.57\00:14:30.52
that are
definitely unique to John
00:14:30.55\00:14:33.79
and we'll get back to
some of those after the break.
00:14:33.82\00:14:36.11