John 1 Footnotes

1:4,7,9 Each of these three verses could suggest that all people will be saved. But vv. 5,10,11 all make it clear that not everyone accepted Jesus. So John must have meant that salvation was available through Jesus for all people, not that salvation automatically is applied to all people.

1:14 Ancient Gnostics and modern “New Agers” have often challenged the idea of God taking on human flesh, since “flesh” is seen as inherently corrupt. But Gn 1 stresses that God created the world and everything in it to be completely good. Only later did sin corrupt everything. Jesus, however, was God’s “new creation” and free from sin. God himself became incarnate in order to redeem sinful humanity.

1:18 If no one has ever seen God the Father, how could the Lord appear to OT saints, wrestle with Jacob, show his back to Moses, etc.? Because “God is spirit” (4:24) and because a spirit “does not have flesh and bones” (Lk 24:39), God is not inherently embodied. But he appeared to people temporarily in bodily form in OT times as a precursor to his full incarnation in Jesus.

1:36,41,45,49 In a short span of time Jesus was called the “Lamb of God,” “Messiah,” the “one Moses wrote about,” the “Son of God,” and the “King of Israel.” How could Jesus’s first followers know so much about him so quickly, especially when the other Gospels do not include such understanding until much later in his ministry? Actually, all these titles carried with them the common Jewish expectation of a kingly, militaristic deliverer who would overthrow Rome. A full understanding of who Jesus was came slowly.

1:45 Jesus’s being called “son of Joseph” does not contradict the traditions of a virginal conception. Joseph would have legally adopted Jesus and become his stepfather. Nathanael is probably the same person as Bartholomew (Mk 3:18).

1:46 It is sometimes claimed that we have no evidence of Nazareth existing as a town in Jesus’s day. Yet artifacts show evidence of a settlement even before Roman times, as well as during the early Roman period, while a first-century inscription contains the name of Nazareth in Hebrew. But Nazareth was a small, out-of-the-way place that no one later wanting to honor Jesus would likely have made up. It is mentioned because that is where he really lived.