I decided to watch an old movie with my kids the other day. It's not even that old. It was something from the mid-80s, and I don't remember what movie it was now because we didn't actually watch it because they all got bored. Well, they just left. In the past, apparently, the way they used to do movies is they would just put on a black screen and then they would play some orchestral music in the background, and they would show you the names of everybody who participated in making the movie in white text on a black background for like eight minutes before they would do anything else. And I mean everybody. Kevin, that's the best boy grip. You need to know that before you watch this movie. It used to be for a while, like in the 90s and stuff, you would get action kind of interspersed with credits. And then in the 2000s, you started to see more action and then cut to a credit sequence, like what James Bond movies famously, that's how they structure the front end of their shows. And now, overwhelmingly, except for maybe James Bond movies, the movie it just starts and you don't get any credits until the actual very end of the movie, which is my preference. Well, we did the jump right into the action version of getting into a movie this season here on the Gospel of John. Every other season I've done, there's been an intro episode or 30. But in John, I felt like we need to modernize the get into the story process. So the opening words of this season were, of course, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. We just jumped in cold because I wanted to see what would happen. And then 90 episodes and one big bonus episode later, here we are at the end of John chapter one. And this seemed like a really nice place to pause and do a little intro. Like, who's writing this book? Why did he write it? We've talked about that some, but I mean there's a lot of layers to be peeled back there. Where does this fit? Why is this in the Bible? What would happen if it weren't in the Bible? What do we need to keep our antenna out for? Culturally, what's going on here? And we're not going to take like 30 episodes to do this because we've kind of covered some of this as we've been going along. But I guess I guess what we're doing here is the James Bond style intro, except without all of the really provocative silhouettes and bullets and stuff in the background. We did our action-packed intro, 90 episodes on chapter one. Okay, the most obvious question about John is what do we know about the guy who wrote it? Now, a couple episodes from now, we're going to talk about competing theories over the course of history about who wrote John. Overwhelmingly, Christians and scholars through the centuries have said, well, John wrote John. John, like the brother of James, the guy I'm going to talk about in this episode and probably tomorrow. We're going to run with that assumption for a minute and we're going to get to know John the evangelist, John the disciple here better. But at some point, we need to talk about what people who don't see it the way I do think about it. And we need to talk about why they think uh differently about it. We need to try to, you know, give that a fair hearing. And ultimately, I'm not threatened by the question at all. Because if somebody other than John wrote it, well, that's fine. Because that wouldn't make like the Bible a lie or anything, because John didn't claim to write John. The title of this Gospel was added after the fact. All the Gospels are technically anonymous. Now there's a bunch of internal clues in the Gospels that could give you some hints about who's doing what, but those names were attached to these books from as best as we can tell from the very beginning. There is no competing manuscript evidence, that is, you know, early handwritten copies of the four gospels. There's no competing tradition with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In other words, we don't have some copy of the Gospel of John from 150 AD, you know, maybe like 60 years after it was written, that calls it like, you know, the Gospel of Nathaniel. That isn't out there. Every copy of the Gospel we have that has a name on it is the same as the names that you have in the Bible in front of you. So it's not just internal evidence that says Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote these. It's also all the external evidence says the same. But again, in fairness, we'll explore that more down the road. But for now, let's talk a little bit about John, who we will be moving forward in this podcast, assuming is the author of this gospel. So John, he's from Galilee. He's from up north. We figured that out about him fairly early on. He encounters Jesus as a young man and never looks back. Assuming that John the Disciple is the author of John, first, second, third John, and Revelation, then John is one of the biggest contributors to the New Testament. And I think Luke, I'm almost positive Luke is the number one contributor to the New Testament. I think I said that in the bonus episode. Hang on, I'm gonna search it. I want to know now. Uh, who contributed the most words to the New Testament? Come on, give me a Google article or something. What do we got? Okay, it's a toss-up, depending on how you count it, between Luke and Paul. Those two are the big contributors, each kicking in just a little bit less than a third of the New Testament. And then after that is John the Apostle, who kicks in about 20% of the New Testament. Okay, so a lot. By book count, he's the second biggest contributor by word count. He's the third biggest contributor. This guy's a super big deal if all he did was just write books of the Bible. But that isn't all he did. He's a character in the story of Jesus. And it's pretty interesting when you look at John and how he's depicted through church history. I mean, close your eyes right now. And can you picture The Last Supper by Da Vinci? It's painted on a wall there in Milan. It's been reproduced a billion times. It's been repainted by a whole bunch of different people. But can you picture it? Can you picture John? He's he's kind of right there by Jesus, and he looks very delicate, very young, very soft-skinned. You don't picture John being real masculine. I mean, Peter is the one you picture wearing like leather braces and looking all tough and everything. But that would appear to be a habit that developed in Christian art later on. When you actually encounter John on the page, he's like a less likable Peter in the early going. He and his brother James are feisty. They're willing to jockey for position, but they're socially sophisticated. John was clearly intelligent. It looks like his family had a little bit of money. Maybe his parents were business owners. And John comes off as pretty hard-edged early on. Now, which is a huge contrast with the tone that we get from John, the old man who wrote the Gospel of John, who wrote first, second, and third John, where he seems very tenderhearted. All right. Mark 9, he chews out somebody who was casting. Well, let me just read it to you. John, the evangelist of John the Disciple, said to Jesus, Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name. We tried to stop him because he was not following us. But Jesus said, Don't stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able to soon afterwards speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us. For truly I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward. So John comes off looking a little hot-headed and aggressive here. Well intentioned, I think. But young John to me seems a little entitled and a little too enthusiastic about his position in things. And that comes up again in Luke chapter 9 in this really unfortunate sequence where the party is traveling through Samaritan country. You know, the pivot point of all of Luke is Luke 9, 51, very famously. It says, you know, as the time approached for Jesus to be taken up into heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. And the whole story, the whole tone of everything completely shifts as it moves from everything happening kind of up north in the relatively safe confines of Galilee to down south, where Jesus' enemies are in the hive of scum and villainy, where he would be arrested, charged under ridiculous pretenses and found guilty and sentenced to death. So Luke 9, 51 is a big deal. And the very next thing that happens is it says, and he sent messengers on ahead who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for Jesus. Now, this is kind of in contrast to later on when people are sent ahead to get things ready for Jesus when he goes into Jerusalem and he's well received. But here, verse 53 says he was not well received. But the people there did not welcome Jesus because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples, James and John, saw this, they asked, Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them? But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went to another village. I love that story. I find that story so relatable in the internet age. What? Somebody sided not for our thing on this one thing. We should burn them to the ground. People get real excited about ideas, and what are they? It's like crush the person who's wrong. We're gonna wreck that person who's wrong. We've got to cancel that, like whatever it is, right? This hasn't changed in human nature. And here's gentle John, the grandfatherly type who gives us gentle first John and the gospel of John. And somebody dissed Jesus a little bit. He's like, burn them. Jesus, I know you have sky fire. Burn them all, get the thatched roofed cottages and send them scattering, Jesus. This is so gross. And Jesus chews them out. And I wish we had that recorded here. What are you talking about? We've been together for almost 10 chapters, and you're still saying stuff like that? Guys, get it together. I just don't think Jesus sounds like whiny like I do when I chew people out. Look, here are two really early-on examples of what we get from John's personality. In the early going, he was fiery, and he and his brother got given the nicknames Sons of Thunder. Dudes who could uh really bring it. They could get real worked up. Now we think of Peter as being the loud brash one who was swinging swords and getting mad and making big statements, but these two brothers did a whole lot of that. And I really want you to like John, because I really like John. But tomorrow we got to talk more about who he was before everything was finished. Because who he was before the events of Jerusalem and the trial and the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus is clearly very different than who he ended up being. And that's pretty cool. I'm a big fan of that belief that I can change, people can change. And most of all, I believe that God changes people. So if I can keep that in my brain, then even when I'm really angry at people or angry about stuff, then you know, I I find hope in that, just in getting through everyday life and getting through relationships and getting through the news cycle. And likewise, if I do something I wish I hadn't done, think something, say something, whatever, helps remember people can change. Like the redemption is real. So John is a he's got this oft overlooked story of redemption. He's got a beautiful redemption arc. He goes from being kind of a smug hothead who's maybe a little entitled and maybe came from a little bit of money, to being someone who is humble and gentle and man, where does he rank? Top three, top five, in terms of the entire history of the church and the importance of the role that he played. And humility and patience prove to be the attributes that God you that God formed in him and that God used in him to accomplish all this stuff. So, all of that to say, tomorrow we're gonna look at a few more of the painful, clunky, cringy anecdotes that go along with John in the early going. But we're also gonna get into that redemption arc that I was talking about that I'm so excited about. So, more John stuff, mana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.