Jesus, the God-man, has atoned for our sins. Because He is God, His sacrifice on the cross has eternal implications, unlike the limited effect of the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament. Therefore, His work on our behalf makes our salvation sure. He carries with Him the transcendence that comes only with God Himself. Jesus’s identity as the divine Son of God sets Him apart from any other man who ever lived. These miracles illustrate His identity as the Son of God. Might be called the Book of Signs, as it recounts Jesus’s performing of seven different miracles-such as the turning water to wine at Cana and raising Lazarus from the dead at Bethany. These include his citation of Jesus’s seven “I am” statements, in which Jesus spoke of Himself in terms such as “the Light of the world” (8:12), “the resurrection and the life” (11:25), and “the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). John used a variety of techniques to communicate to his readers the nature of Jesus. To accomplish that goal, John presented a riveting and distinctive picture of Jesus Christ, one in complete unity with the portraits in the other three gospels, but one that also adds significantly to the Bible’s revelation of Jesus Christ, the He wrote so that his readers might “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,” so that they may have life in His name (John 20:31). John stated his theme more clearly than any of the other gospel writers. While the other three gospels portray Jesus as the King, the Servant, and the Son of Man, John portrays Jesus as the Son of God. It also comes through clearly elsewhere in the book, particularly in John 8:58 when Jesus claimed the divine name-“I am”-for Himself, which led an angry mob of Jews to try and kill Him for blasphemy. The emphasis on the deity of Christ is a striking quality of John’s gospel. Invoking the “in the beginning” language of Genesis 1:1, John made a direct link between the nature of God and the nature of the Word, Jesus Christ. John did not include the nativity story in his gospel instead, he introduced his book by going back even further into history. These factors suggest that John wrote the bookīetween AD 85 and AD 95. Polycarp, a second-century Christian martyr who knew John personally, told Irenaeus that John had written the book during the apostle’s time serving the church in Ephesus. In Christian tradition, John’s gospel has always been referred to as the fourth gospel, meaning it was composed after the other three. The second significant evidence for John’s authorship is the unanimous testimony of early Christians, among them the second-century Christian Irenaeus, who declared that John was the disciple who laid his head on Jesus-the disciple “whom Jesus loved” (13:23)-and the author of the gospel. This description likely pointed to John for three reasons: the author had to be one of the twelve disciples because he was an eyewitness to the events in the gospel (John 21:24) he was probably one of the inner circle of three disciples (James, John, and Peter) because he was among the first Mary told of the resurrection (20:1–10) and this disciple is distinguished from Peter in the book, while James died too soon after the resurrection to be the author. First, the book itself identifies the author as the disciple whom Jesus loved. However, two significant factors point to the identification of John as the author. Such identifications were not made in any of the other three biblical gospels either. Not surprisingly, the gospel of John never provides the name of its author.
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