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The eye-witness accounts of Jesus

Jesus’ life is best described by the 4 gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. One of these accounts John is being used as apart of  this week of events.

John’s Gospel is one of the books that form part of the Christian Bible. The word ‘gospel’ literally means ‘good news’.  John’s good news is written as a biography of Jesus’ life, it’s an eye witness account. In a visual age it’s easy to understand why we often demand to see something before we believe it, but our legal system depends on eye witness accounts and our courts make big decisions based on the testimony of credible witnesses (click on the link below to see how we can trust the authenticity of this account). This is no normal biography however. It doesn’t focus on his birth or growing up, but dedicates pages to his death. It speaks of three years in Jesus’ life, yet acknowledges quite freely that it is by no means a comprehensive record of all he said and did. So why did John write this? What was he trying to achieve?

Well, in his own words: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

John 20:30-31

John wasn’t a distant biographer. He was one of Jesus’ closest friends, one of the twelve disciples, who was with Jesus during the three years that he travelled, taught and performed miracles. This guy really knew Jesus. Yet he can still say with utter conviction, that this Jesus is the Son of God.

It seems that John’s account was originally aimed at an audience with an understanding of the Jewish Scriptures (the Old Testament in the Bible). In these Scriptures, we see the constant hope of a Messiah (which translates as ‘Christ’ in Greek) who will come and usher in a new era and hope for God’s people. John’s gospel seeks to lead people to the conclusion that Jesus is this promised Messiah, that Jesus’ identity is that of the Christ.

Some stories of those who met Jesus, taken from Johns gospel

Nathanael:

In chapter one of Johns gospel we meet Nathanael. He was originally skeptical when his friend Philip spoke to him about Jesus. Philip was so full of excitement because he was passionately convinced that Jesus was the promised Messiah that everyone was expecting. Nathanael, however, quickly dismissed his friend’s announcement with the memorable words, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Wonderfully, Philip held his nerve and invited his friend to check out the facts for himself. And that’s when everything changed. The skeptic became a follower of the Saviour! The evidence convinced him that Jesus was the promised Christ and from that day onwards he became a committed follower of God’s King. Are you a modern day Nathanael? Do you need to follow in his footsteps?

The woman from Samaria:

 She was a dissatisfied woman who is introduced in John chapter 4. She was in danger of being satisfied with too little. She was on the brink of accepting that life in the pigsty was as good as it could get. And then she met Jesus, who offered her the opportunity of drinking living water. It was his way of describing a personal relationship with God. Like the rest of us, she had been designed to need God and she would remain thirsty until she was reconnected with him. Are you in the same situation? Over the years you have tried to find fulfillment in many places but true happiness still eludes you. Why not follow the example of the Samaritan woman? Why not embrace Jesus as your King and be reunited with your Creator?

Admittedly, not everyone in John’s Gospel decides Jesus is for them. The Pharisees were too proud and Pilate was too scared to commit to the one who promised them eternal life. However, as you make your choice please remember these words from the end of John chapter 3:

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

Choosing for Jesus is not like selecting your favourite football team. It really matters how you respond from this point onwards. On the one hand, we face eternity without God if we reject his King. However, there is also the wonderful promise of life before and after death if we embrace the rule of Jesus. Ultimately, of course, the choice is yours but since the stakes are so big make sure you consider carefully what you do from here.

How we can trust the authenticity of John’s gospel?

Authorship of this gospel has in the past been disputed due to the fact that it is accredited simply to the ‘disciple Jesus loved’ (21:20-24). For various reasons, this disciple has been identified as the disciple, John, Son of Zebedee, brother of James.1

John was a disciple of Jesus and an eye-witness to the things he wrote down. The exact date of authorship is not known, but has been placed between 60 and 80AD, well within the lifetime of the many eye witnesses to Jesus’ life.2

It is often alleged that the Gospels (of Matthew, Mark and Luke as well as John) as they appear now can’t be trusted because the text has been corrupted. This allegation hardly has any evidence to support it. There are 2,328 manuscripts and manuscript fragments surviving from the earliest centuries of the Christian church and representing all portions of the Gospels. In fact, the earliest fragment of any portion of the New Testament (NT) currently in existence is the John Rylands papyrus fragment (P52) of John 18:31–33, 37–38, which probably dates to c. A.D. 125 or within about thirty years of the original composition of the John’s Gospel.

Twenty-one papyri containing major sections of one or more Gospels can be dated to the third and fourth centuries, while five virtually complete NTs survive from the fourth and fifth centuries. Compared with the numbers and ages of manuscripts which have survived for most other ancient documents, including many believed to contain reliable accounts of historical events, this evidence is overwhelming!3

As a result, textual critics have been able to reconstruct a highly reliable prototype of what the original Gospel writers undoubtedly wrote. Estimates suggest that from ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent of the original text is securely recoverable. There are some minor textual variants, most of which are obvious copying errors like spelling mistakes, and in any case they ‘affect no material question of historic fact or of the Christian faith and practice’4

The English text of the John’s Gospels being used for this week of events is the English Standard Version which has been translated from the most reliable Greek manuscripts by a team of expert translators who aim to “capture the precise wording of the original text”5. You can compare the English Standard Version with other English translations that have been done by a team of experts (like the New International Version) and see how similar they are – the differences are just a matter of style.

This means you can be pretty confident that the text in this book really is what John wrote about Jesus’ life.

1 For a detailed discussion of authorship, see pp 68-81; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Apollos.2 For further reading on dates, see pp 82-86; Carson, or Introduction; Bruce Milne: The Message of John, IVP.3 Joel B Green and Scot McKnight: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, IVP.4 F.F. Bruce: pp 15, New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 5 http://www.esv.org/translation/philosophy    

For more information on the reliability of John’s gospel and that of the whole bible, here a few possible sites and books you could investigate.

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