The Gospel of John (Part 5)

This is the 5th, and last part of a series on the Gospel of John.We have learned many things. For starters, just as with the others, we don’t know who wrote this book. We also learned that it was the last to be written, some forty years after the first, and seventy years after the death of Jesus.From the perspective of orally handed down stories, that is a very long time for stories to be circulating. It is not hard to imagine they changed along the way before they were finally written down. To further muddy the waters, we don’t have any of the original documents. What we have are copies from a couple of hundred years later.As such some have raised the question of whether these were really the words of Jesus, or of an author trying to make his point of view known? We have no way of knowing with absolute certainty, but there are clues that Biblical Scholars can pick up for insight into this question.Many have made this effort. One such group of scholars, The Jesus Seminar, actually concluded that essentially the entire Gospel of John are not the words of Jesus.In Unity we turn our attention to the words or ideas from this book that would come from a mystic, and when we do, we do find them in this spiritual book.