On the other hand, I was taken aback when I realized that all the perspectives in John’s Gospel are shared by Jesus himself and the author. Let me explain. Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education. Yet there are passages in John in which the narrator sounds just like Jesus, so much so that you
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