In the not too distant future, 27 seconds from now. Matt Women, he got carried away. Talking about John's target crowd. Did a good job making it interesting. Thinking about everyone who might be listening. Got into Mr. Podcaster mode. And now we got an extra bang-along episode.
SPEAKER_02Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And this stuff on the front end is gonna feel like a programming note. So some of you are gonna be like, I don't care about stupid programming notes. I'm gonna skip that so I can get ahead to the Bible stuff. I care about the Bible stuff, but don't skip it. They're not programming notes. I mean, a little bit they are, but they're programming notes that are gonna help us make sense of the Bible. I'm setting the thing up. You gotta trust me here. This podcast has a couple of very artistic people who have helped out a whole bunch along the way. One is my friend Bethany, who is a wildly tender-hearted, gifted, biblically minded artist who has helped develop everything about the look of all of my stuff that I've done on the internet over the years and all of the branding that you see right there on your computer, your device, or your car screen, or whatever as you listen to this as you drive, all of that is by her. She hand drew all of the fonts and everything, the 10-minute Bible hour. She drew that cool lightning bolt, all of that. It's all her idea. And when she first did that, she sat me down and she was like, All right, before I draw anything, first, tell me who you're talking to. Who do you imagine is on the other side of this thing? What kind of person do you think would listen to this? I was like, oh, that's a great question. Well, I think a lot of people who would listen to this would be people like me, people who were raised around Christian faith by good parents, or yeah, maybe it didn't go as well. And we were raised around church, maybe something went a little bit wrong, and then the thing it kind of broke for a while, or we didn't take it as seriously for a while, or maybe we're a little heart heavy or busy, or I don't know what happened. Maybe something went wrong in our own lives, and it was our own dang fault. But at the point in life we're at now, we really care about this and we really care about getting it right, and we want to understand it and we want to study the Bible deeply for ourselves. We want to know what's going on here, and we're kind of building out our adult faith that we chose. I think people like that are gonna listen to this. And I'm like, there, now we're done. And I remember Bethany was like, Cool, that's one. Who else you got? Oh, okay. Well, I imagine men and women who have been around church, God, Christianity for just decades, and they go to a good church where they get good Bible sermons every week, but they just can't get enough Bible because they really think God is behind this thing, and they love to study it and they love to have fun studying it. And this is kind of a cool changeup and a way to make it a part of their rhythm. And so they like this podcast for that reason. And she was like, Great. And I'm like, all right, we're done. And then she's like, Who else do you think might listen? And I said, Okay, well, I also imagine people on the outside looking in might like a podcast like this. People who are sizing up Christianity, maybe they're not sure they want to do it, but they want to know before they embrace it or reject it what it is. Maybe it's people who just have a whole bunch of people in their lives who really like the Bible and God and they're very empathetic and they want to understand this because it's the thing that makes their loved ones tick. And she was like, Okay, that's really good. And then she's like, All right, that's helpful. I'm like, Wait, but now you have me going. I thought of more stuff. I think my audience is probably also going to include people who really like art and culture and who could be persuaded if they don't already like it, to like history. I think my audience is gonna have a bunch of people in it who really like great storytelling and think critically about the world and think about the meaning of life. And she's like, Okay, that's really good. That's great. I have so much more than I need that's really helpful. But I'm like, now you've got my brain turned on. So we had this very long conversation, frankly, about you. And I think you got treated really well in the conversation and spoken very highly of in the conversation. Indeed. I assume you are awesome. Well, then I sat down with this other person who really makes this podcast go. That is my buddy Jeff Foote, who edits the program and does all the music. And when he decided that he was gonna jump in and help me with this years and years ago. We've been friends since all the way back in college. He said, Well, you know, who do you think listens? Tell me about it. Help me get a feel for it. Well, it's the same conversation I had with Bethany. So I covered a whole bunch of the same stuff and he's like, Yeah, I think so too. I see that. I see that. And why did he ask? Well, because he wanted to edit the podcast with you in mind, and because he wanted to make music with you in mind. Now, this is a little bit of a programming note, I guess, but did you notice that he's making different music for every day of the week for this season? I really like the poolside Latin sounding one, and I also really like the Miami Vice sounding intro. I like them all. I think it's super. Also, bonus programming note if you're new here, you should always stay till the very end. I don't get anything for that. There's no like viewer retention metrics on podcasts or anything. But from time to time, Jeff doesn't play the normal outro music. That's the normal one. From time to time, he'll hear something that I said in the episode and he'll be like, ah, that's a reference to a movie or a game or a song or something. He'd he'll whip up a little pastiche or homage to that song. We think of them as little Easter eggs that we put at the end. The point is, both Jeff and Bethany knew that in order to make something that would make sense for you and that would work for you, they had to know who you were. And this isn't just true of me and this silly little podcast, it's true of everybody, and it's true of the gospel authors, it's true of John, whose book we're trying to figure out. And I guarantee you he had a certain group of people in mind when he wrote the following words. John 1 1. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Now, yesterday we talked about who the three synoptic gospel authors had in mind. Have we used that term yet? That might be a new term. Synoptic just it breaks down into two neat little parts. S-y-n, sin, that means same. Optic, I mean, you got that one, it just means I mean same eye, same perspective. The first three gospels, they're called the synoptics because they're written at about the same time. They seem to depend on each other. There's different theories on exactly how they related or who talked to who or how they did it. There's just so much overlap between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but they're all catered, they're all written with, as we discussed yesterday, a little different audience in mind. Matthew's writing to Jews, Mark's writing to Romans, Luke is writing to pretty sophisticated, well-educated readers who were probably in a Greek cultural context, mostly Gentiles, maybe a few Jews, as well. Wells, and even though John and the synoptics agree, they're telling the same story, they're talking about the same stuff. It's not like they're all in conflict or anything, even though they agree, John tackles the story way different. I mean, we're already seeing that in the prologue, right? I mean, Matthew's given a genealogy all the way back to Abraham. Mark is like, this is the story of the Son of God. Go! Luke is opening up with this enormous birth prologue that includes uh genealogy that goes all the way back to Adam, including the entire human family tree. They all started the way they started because the authors had a good sense of who they were talking to. John starts the way it starts because he has a good sense of who he's talking to. I'm just telling you straight up, by the way, we're gonna go a little bit long today because I want to cover all of this. Why not? Let's just get this part done today because I don't want to break it into two parts, okay? So if you're looking at the clock and you're like, well, this is yeah, why are we doing this?
SPEAKER_01It's like a 10-minute podcast. Well, sometimes it's not a 10-minute podcast, and today's one of those days.
SPEAKER_02Here's my theory about who John would say he was writing this book for a few decades after the synoptics. I think that he was talking to scattered Jews around the Roman Empire and also non-Jews called Gentiles, spanning all kinds of levels of sophistication and socioeconomic status. The book is very smart, very Jewish, but it also has Greek undertones, which I think are on display right here in the opening passage we've been talking about, more on that in a minute. So sometimes I've heard people say, oh, well, John was writing to everybody. One of the people I've heard say that is me, Matt Whitman from the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. John is just, it's the universal gospel. It was written to everybody. But is it is anything really written to just everybody at once? I mean, anything could be useful to everybody at once, but when it's originally written down, you get somebody in mind. And I think the key to understanding who John is writing to is visible in two places. One is what's going on outside the Bible or what happened outside the Bible between the time when the synoptic gospels were written and the time when John was written, more on that in a minute. And two is the internal evidence from the book of John itself. You can pretty easily figure out who he's talking to just based on what he says. In the same way that when you look at Mark and you see that he's using a bunch of little Latinisms and that he assumes his audience knows exactly what a centurion is and some stuff about how Roman government and the Roman army is structured. Mark is assuming that the audience knows kind of how Roman currency works and what it's worth, but Mark isn't assuming that his audience knows as much about Jewish stuff, so he takes a little longer to lay that out or just doesn't reference it at all. Well, that's internal evidence that tells us, well, Mark assumes his audience is busy and that they are gonna want to give a quick evaluation of his claims about Jesus and that they know a bunch of Roman stuff and they don't know a bunch of Jewish stuff. Okay, yeah, he's writing to Romans. This isn't hard at all. Likewise, with John, when we look at the words of the text, we get a pretty good sense of who he's actually talking to. So a second ago, I used the term scattered to describe the Jews that John was writing to. I don't mean it as an insult to those Jews. I'm not talking about like somebody who has too much on their plate and just mentally they're kind of all over the place and they drift around and get distracted by their phone and they can't quite finish uh I'm sorry, what were you saying? I don't mean scattered like that, like an insult. I mean people who politically got scattered all over the world because a thing happened. What was that thing? Well, it is the cataclysm of cataclysms. It's the biggest thing other than Jesus and the early church that happened in the first century A.D. It is the invasion of Titus and Vespasian to go and put down a Jewish rebellion that occurred in the late 60s A.D. in Judea and that culminated with Titus and Vespasian, two emperors and generals, a father-son, combo, who ultimately destroyed the second temple, ripped it down. It was a temple that had been standing since 516 BC. That's when it was dedicated way back in the day. And then this temple had just been expanded to these grandiose proportions by the non-Jewish but Jewish-ish Roman stool pidgin leader Herod the Great. This new temple that had just been prettied up was bigger than even the ancient Temple of Solomon, which got sadly destroyed in 586 BC. This was the best the temple had probably ever looked. It was a point of pride. Many of the Jewish people believed that, as was the case way back in the olden days of the Old Testament, that God even dwelt among his people in that temple. It's unclear whether or not that was the case at the time of Christ. But there was this sect among the Jewish people who hated that the Romans, these outsiders, these Gentiles, were the occupiers. And they wanted them gone, and they were willing to stoke and foment rebellion to try to get people whipped up and to bring the thing to a head. They really thought they could win. One of these guys who had this mentality was even a disciple of Jesus. He's called Simon the Zealot. Well, the zealots are agitating during the time of Jesus. Jesus' public ministry is in the late 20s A.D., and he's probably executed, crucified, in the very late 20s A.D. or early 30s. Some point we'll talk more about that timeline and why it times out that way. But it took a few more decades for the zealots to finally get their way and agitate enough that the thing goes into full-blown open rebellion. Well, let me tell you who's pretty good at fighting wars when it comes to the ancient world. It's Rome. They are great at it. They're just super, super good at stabbing and arrow shooting and sieging. They weren't used to losing a lot. Yeah, tip of the cap to the Jews. They were feisty, they hid in cliffs, they made these cool plateau fortresses. I mean, they really held their own against the greatest army in the world for a while, but I mean it's just a matter of time. You can't beat Rome at the height of its power. When Rome ultimately wins, they tend to be pretty mean about it. They came into Jerusalem, there's a huge massacre, and then they went and they destroyed the temple and they hauled away all of the riches of the temple. And you can actually go see, if you go to Rome, maybe some of you have, there's an arch there, the Arch of Titus. The main image that you see on that arch from the ancient world is a dude walking away with what looks like the Hanukkah menorah or something. It's like, you know, the candle stand from the temple. There's just some Roman guy bastardizing that, strolling away, like I went into the Holy of Holies, I got this thing. And so the treasures of the temple come back and get paraded about Rome in these grand triumphs as Rome gloats over fallen Judea. The temple is destroyed, and the whole religious system around the temple is destroyed. The sacrificial system is interrupted. All the stuff that had worked for so long, for hundreds of years, going all the way back to the time of Ezra and Nehemiah at the end of the Old Testament, it's all gone. And there's, of course, there's all kinds of like there's a reckoning after this, and and Jews are scattered out of Jerusalem, and people are asking questions. I mean, this is a the apocalypse for crying out loud. The Jews are trying to figure out what the heck I mean, even Christian Jews are trying to figure out what the heck just happened. How are we to interpret this? Being in Jerusalem wasn't a great place to hang around. So there's this mass exodus of Jews from the land God promised to them, all out and around the Roman Empire. And John is writing 15, 20, 25 years after that incident. It's not so fresh anymore. So the synoptics are all writing before that great compass spinning calamity. John is writing after it, and far enough after it that most people have kind of settled into this new post-second temple reality. Here's old man John. He's the only one of the disciples who's still alive. Everybody else got martyred fairly quickly. They all went and did stuff, went to the four corners of the world, the seven winds, and every single one of the disciples, other than Judas, all the rest. They went out and did stuff and they all died violently, except for John. Somebody tried to kill him, but he survived it. And John lives out his days, we think, in the ancient city of Ephesus or around there. John remained very pastoral for the rest of his life. Indeed, the Gospel of John takes on a very pastoral tone. Part of what he's pastoring people through is this calamity and what the world is gonna look like moving forward now. And I'm telling you, if you keep your antenna out for this as you're going through the book of John, what you're gonna notice is that, yeah, he's writing to a very Jewish audience. But that Jewish audience that he's anticipating, if you read between the lines, it feels a little bit different in terms of where their heads are at and what questions they're asking than the Jewish audience that might have been in view for Matthew and a little bit in view for Mark and for Luke. So part of the reason I think John has scattered Jews in view is because his language assumes Jewish knowledge about things. I mean, it's a very Jewish book. Even this opening prologue that a lot of people think of as being very Greek, and indeed, I mean, there's Greek undertones there for sure. It also has really Hebrew undertones. It has a ton of Old Testament undertones, and we're gonna break all of that down in coming conversations, obviously. So the historical evidence and the historical context, as well as what the book itself says, tells me that John has the scattered Jewish people after the destruction of the temple in view as he's writing this book. But history and the text of John itself tells me that John also has non-Jews in mind. Some of these non-Jews would be what historically we call God-fearers. This is a term for somebody who isn't ethnically Jewish, but dang it, they think there might be something to that god of Judaism. Maybe that is the one true God. Some God-fearers in the ancient world enthusiastically followed the God of Abraham, the God who goes by the name I am. There were a ton of people like this at the end of the first century, and it would be weird and negligent for a gospel not to take them into account. But also, John seems to be writing to Jewish and Gentile Christians alike. As we go through the book of John, what we're going to see is there's certain stuff where it almost looks like John is clarifying questions that have come up along the way in the ensuing decades, from the actual lived time of Christ through the early church, through the writing and circulation of the synoptic gospels. It's like you got old man John over here taking it all in. He's very hands-on with these different congregations. He's paying attention, he's got his finger on the pulse of the questions that are coming up in this church, and those sound a lot like the questions that are coming up in this church over here and in this church over here. He's taking it all in. He's storing this stuff up in his mind and in his heart. And it looks to me like eventually he goes, All right, I know exactly what I'm gonna write to supplement this stuff. It's going, it's not gonna be a like a letter like you get later in the New Testament that directly addresses these questions. I'm just gonna tell the story of what I saw with my eyes, of what I heard with my ears. Yeah, maybe I'll also answer some of these questions later with some letters, but I'm gonna do this in story form in a way that makes this make sense to Jewish people who aren't quite sure what to make of Jesus. And I'm gonna make it clear to them that I'm giving them enough about what Jesus said and did and the miracles he performed and the claims he made, that they should look at that, see it with their eyes, internalize it, and believe that Jesus is the Son of God and God in the flesh, and by believing, they should have life in his name. So, in that respect, John is a persuasive document, overtly attempting to get Jewish people scattered around the first century Roman Empire to hear an accurate depiction of the story of Jesus in language they're gonna understand. And instead of putting their faith in a system that now looks pretty broken, there's no temple, there's no sacrifices there. Okay, put your faith in Christ. This is always where the temple and the sacrifice is pointed. And I'm not making this up. Again, John says why he wrote the book in John 20, verse 30 and 31. Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. Okay, so who he's writing to and why he's writing to them is really coming into focus here. He's writing to scattered Jews who are maybe rattled and don't know what to make of it, and he's trying to persuade them to believe in Jesus in language they will understand. Further, he's writing to people who've always been on the fringes of the Judaism thing. They're familiar with the God of Abraham, the great I am, but they also maybe don't know quite what to do with the Jesus thing and all the claims and all these Christians who are cropping up. Cool, this is also going to be for them. It's written with them in mind. Same exact thing. This stuff is written down that you God fearers, you people who've been lurking on the fringes, this is written down 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. And then finally, John is writing to people who are already Christians, Jews and Gentiles alike, and he's trying to help them understand it better and also shore up and respond to a few of the very legitimate questions that had surfaced along the way for their benefit and for the sake of the unity of the church. But also, John is writing John for the benefit of these Jewish and Gentile Christians alike so that they'll get it better. He's trying to give them language so they can go out and tell other people about this stuff in language that those other people will understand and have it make sense to them so they can become Christians as well. In that regard, John's pretty indiscriminate. It seems like he just thinks this is the truest, realist thing ever, and he wants everybody to be Christians. Finally, I would also argue, and this is very important for our whole season. I'm gonna keep coming back to this a lot. Finally, the the final member of the audience I think John has in view is you. Literally you. Wherever you're sitting, wherever you're listening to this, driving in your car, drinking. Your coffee, doing your morning workout, in your sweaty unitard, on the treadmill, at the gym. You. Why do I think that? Because John specifically quotes Jesus praying to his father for you in John 17. John didn't have to include this thing I'm about to read you, but he did. Starting in verse 20, this is a very emotional prayer from Jesus to his father. Jesus is about to go to the cross. He only has so much time to say the stuff that's on his mind. And under that pressure, in those circumstances, he thought of you in your sweaty unitard. Here's what he says My prayer is not for them, that's the disciples, alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. That's you if you are a Christian, or potentially you if you're thinking of believing in this. And he goes on, he's praying that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. There's a bunch more there, and obviously when we get to John 17, we're gonna break that whole thing down. But I'm not even kidding, there's a ton of stuff in the Bible that is clearly relatable to you and me. And it's not hard at all to imagine that the author of all these different parts of the Bible is picturing their original audience with great specificity, but they're also cognizant of the fact that this is a big deal and other people are gonna read this later. And you can read between the lines and see it. But here in John, you come up in the text and it's red letters. You come up in the text, and it's Jesus praying literally for you. So if you're having a crappy day, dang, you should take that into account. Jesus in the Bible, who has got to be the best at praying ever, he prayed for you. He envisioned you, he anticipated you, he knew you were going to happen, and he is praying for you right here. Why is that in the book of John? Well, it's because you are part of the intended audience, not just the scattered Jews after the destruction of the temple at the hands of Titus and Vespasian, not just those Gentiles who'd been sizing up Judaism from the outside looking in for a while, not just first century Christians, no, this is for you. John was thinking of you, and he quotes Jesus as thinking of you as well. So, in the same way that anybody who makes anything that's hopefully any good thinks about who they're talking to and who their audience is going to be and then frames it for them. So, John, who wrote what I would argue is the best thing ever here in this book, definitely put a whole lot of thought into who he was talking to in the original audience and a whole lot of thought into making this timeless. So it would be obvious to you that this was written with you in mind and that you are the intended audience. And I'm pretty sure the work we've put in together here today, trying to process through who the intended audience of John was, is gonna help us to better understand what he's saying in some of these challenging passages right here on the front end, where he's using language that might not be immediately familiar to us, but that is clearly very, very, very, very, very important to understanding the book and God and humanity and how history is gonna unfold and where we fit into all of it. We want to know that stuff. And I think we have made headway in positioning ourselves to be able to read it with our own eyes and understand it with our own brains with the help of God. Okay, final thought. Elephant in the room. This is a really long episode. Those of you who've been here for a long time, you know we don't normally do it like this. Normally we like to keep it, you know, pretty tight. And that is still my intention moving forward. But every once in a great while, I'm like, ah, you know what, we got the weekend ahead of us. We got a little bit of extra time, gives you something to listen to on Saturday as well. Let's just do it all at once and get the whole thing into one episode, and we have achieved that. So, next time around, it's direct interpretation time. What does this opening passage mean? Why does it say it the way it says it? And what are we supposed to do with that? Week one of John is in the books. I had fun. I hope you did too. Catch you next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.