John seems to me to tell us very plainly that he is not a mundane writer. The reproof to Nicodemus’ literalism is surely a general reminder not to read the words attributed by John to Jesus - and thus what John tells us about Jesus - in too literal a spirit.
The strong suggestion that the High Priesthood was an annual office suggests considerable detachment from the milieu of the events.
The whole point of ‘Bethany beyond Jordan’ is surely that it had the same name as ‘Bethany near Jerusalem’: Jesus was not with, but also with, Lazarus at the time of his sickness.
John’s assignment of the Temple Cleansing to an early point in Jesus’ ministry seems to me to make it harder to believe. Jesus uses a potentially lethal weapon against lawful activity in a sensitive place and it’s not easy to think that there would be no reaction - as there would if the same thing were done in (say) Westminster Abbey. The atmosphere at the arrest scene verges on surreal, where Jesus establishes an ascendancy over the arresting party such that they fall to the ground before him and then take no notice of Peter’s action against Malchus. Just imagine the scene in a modern, mundane city where one of police arresting a suspect has his ear removed by the suspect’s friend - who then turns up at the Archbishop’s house where another of the suspect’s friends, also a friend of the Archbishop, gets him admitted by a young female doorkeeper. I don’t think ‘surrealist’ is an excessive word here. Not that surrealist narratives need lack power or truth.
John seems to me to tell us very plainly that he is not a mundane writer. The reproof to Nicodemus’ literalism is surely a general reminder not to read the words attributed by John to Jesus - and thus what John tells us about Jesus - in too literal a spirit.
The strong suggestion that the High Priesthood was an annual office suggests considerable detachment from the milieu of the events.
The whole point of ‘Bethany beyond Jordan’ is surely that it had the same name as ‘Bethany near Jerusalem’: Jesus was not with, but also with, Lazarus at the time of his sickness.
John’s assignment of the Temple Cleansing to an early point in Jesus’ ministry seems to me to make it harder to believe. Jesus uses a potentially lethal weapon against lawful activity in a sensitive place and it’s not easy to think that there would be no reaction - as there would if the same thing were done in (say) Westminster Abbey. The atmosphere at the arrest scene verges on surreal, where Jesus establishes an ascendancy over the arresting party such that they fall to the ground before him and then take no notice of Peter’s action against Malchus. Just imagine the scene in a modern, mundane city where one of police arresting a suspect has his ear removed by the suspect’s friend - who then turns up at the Archbishop’s house where another of the suspect’s friends, also a friend of the Archbishop, gets him admitted by a young female doorkeeper. I don’t think ‘surrealist’ is an excessive word here. Not that surrealist narratives need lack power or truth.