“The Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue”—literally, would become aposynagoge, expelled from one’s home synagogue. New Testament scholar Louis Martyn has shown that whatever it meant in particular, this traumatic separation defined how John’s group saw itself—as a tiny minority of God’s people “hated by the world,” a group that urged its members to reject in turn the whole social and religious world into which they had been born.8
