This is going to be a long message, so please try to get through it, even though I know it is going to be really hard for almost everyone to hear.
If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video.
But I think it might be easier to get through by reading it, instead.
To begin with, no one really knows who wrote the gospels, and the names given are nothing more than educated guesses by Christians sometime in the second century.
The time line for each gospel is that Matthew was written circa 75- 85 A.D., Mark 70-75 A.D., Luke 80-90 A.D., and John 90-100 A.D., just before he is know no have died. As an interesting factoid, John was the only disciple not martyred.
There has to be some question why he wrote the gospel so much later than the other writers, being some 60+ years after the events he is supposedly recalling accurately. But more than this speculation, there are so many parts of John that are not like the other three, and in fact are in direct contradiction to what the other three say.
The other three are synoptic gospels, mainly giving a historic narrative of the teachings and events in Yeshua’s lifetime, also showing his lineage to prove his descent from David.
John’s gospel contains over 90% original material, using long theological and overly-spiritualized diatribe instead of the short, parables used in the other three. Another major difference is that it is only in John’s gospel do we find regular use of the “I am” statements, which are used, clearly, to indicate a divine presence of Yeshua.
Now let’s go chapter by chapter to find things that do not match or contradict what the other three gospels say.
John 1:29-34 has John the Immerser proclaiming that Yeshua was the lamb of God as he came to be immersed (1:29-34) and he says he saw the spirit coming down onto Yeshua like a dove. But he also says that he wouldn’t know who the Messiah was until the spirit came down on him.
Okay, so John the Immerser proclaims Yeshua as the lamb of God when he first sees him, before he was baptized, but then later in the Gospel it says John the Immerser didn’t know Yeshua was the son of God until AFTER the immersion!
So, what is it? Did he recognize him immediately or not? And in Matthew 3:13 John recognizes who Yeshua is and he says Yeshua should be baptizing him.
So the gospel not only contradicts itself, but is very different fromt he same event as described in Matthew. The one thing all four have in comment is the declaration of the spirit coming to land on Yeshua.
John 1:35 describes how Yeshua chose Simon and Andrew in a totally different manner than the other gospels, saying that they were with John the Baptist and they followed Yeshua when John declared him to be the son of God. But in the other three, Peter and Andrew were fishing when Yeshua calls them to follow him. This is a significant difference, in that John has them following the Baptist while the other three have them fishing.
And in John 1:42 Yeshua first meets Simon and then renames him Peter, while in Matthew he doesn’t say that until Matthew 16:16, after Simon proclaims Yeshua to be the Messiah. In Mark he doesn’t rename him until later when in Mark 3:13 he appoints the 12.
In John 3:17 he says he did not come into the world to judge but to save, yet later in John 9:39 he says he came into the world for judgement. Whether we want to say that his presence was a judgment on those who rejected him, or he judged people who rejected him, either way, judging passively or actively, his presence DID create judgement, and that is in direct contradiction to him saying he did not come to judge but to save, especially if his presence acted as any kind of judgement which did not save but ended up condemning! In John 3:19, Yeshua actually says that there is a judgment, right after he says he did not come to judge!
In John 4 we read about how he talked to the Samaritan woman, even accepting a drink from her, and telling her that he is the Messiah (John 4:25-26). But in Matthew 16:20, Mark 8:29, and Luke 9:21 he specifically tells his disciples NOT to tell anyone he is the Messiah! In John 10:25 Yeshua answers the Judeans who ask him if he is the Messiah that he has already told them and they don’t trust him.
The next thing that is a complete contradiction of the other three is that in John 4, he not only tells the woman he is the Messiah, but teaches in their town for 2 days; but in Matthew 15:21 he says he came only for the children of Israel (Shomron was not considered to be Jewish). And although he did heal the slave of the Centurian (Luke 7:1) and healed the daughter of the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24), he stated these two showed so much faith that he did as they said. But his objective was always the direct children of Israel, the Jews, and not anyone else. There is nothing in any of the other three gospels even indicating he taught anywhere but in Israeli lands.
In John 8:58 when Yeshua declares that “before Abraham was, I am” is clearly a definitive statement of eternal being. There is nothing even close to that in any of the other Gospels, and (as pointed out earlier) the use of the words, “I am” throughout John’s gospel is a clear claim of divinity, since God first used those words when Moses asked who he should say sent him.
In no other gospel except John does Yeshua come even close to claiming to be God, identified as God, as one with God, or any of the other spiritually confusing rhetoric we read in this one, unique gospel.
In John 12 he says that Judah the betrayer was stealing from the community purse he was in charge of, yet that is never mentioned or even implied in the other gospels. You would think something like that might be important to note.
Again we hear him say, in John 12:47 that Yeshua did not come to judge anyone, but then he says that what he has spoken will judge them. Well, what is it? If his word judges people, then he is judging them; passively or actively, they are being judged by what he is saying and that is a judgment that he is responsible for doing.
The betrayal is also described very differently. In Matthew 26:23, Yeshua only says the one who is dipping his bread with me will betray me, and then they all ask, “Is it I?”. In Mark 14 and Luke 22:21 he says the one dipping his bread with me, but in none of those three gospels does he address Judas directly as he does in John, nor do they say Judas was a thief.
In John 14:26 Yeshua says that the Holy Spirit will be sent by God in his (Yeshua’s) name, which does go along with the narrative in Acts 2:1; but, later in John 20:22, it says that Yeshua, after being resurrected, breathes on the disciples and gives them the Holy Spirit, which goes against the way Yeshua said it would be done and also against what is recorded in Acts.
He also tells them, at that time, they have the authority to forgive or not forgive sins. In the other gospels Yeshua says that all sins are forgivable (except against the Holy Spirit), but here he is saying, essentially, that if the disciples don’t forgive a sin it won’t be forgiven.
What happened to Matthew 6:14-15 when Yeshua said if we do not forgive someone’s sin, we will not be forgiven? Clearly this choice to forgive or retain sins is a direct contradiction to what Yeshua says in the other gospels, and to his teaching about that 7 times 70 times we should forgive thing, as well!
And what do the other gospels say about the Holy Spirit being given? There is no mention of the giving of the Holy Spirit in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. However, the Holy Spirit is only mentioned in Acts 2 as coming on the Disciples at the Shavuot celebration.
Here’s more!
Yeshua often refers to “their Torah” or ‘their law” when he is debating with the Power Elite in Jerusalem in John 10:34 and John 15:25. No Jew would ever say, “their Torah” because it is always our Torah, so he would say, “the Torah”.
Finally, when Yeshua is taken prisoner, John says he also went into the courts with Peter; in fact, John says he was known to the Cohen HaGadol and he was the one who got Peter into the courtyard. Now that would be an important thing to note, yet not one of the other three, all of which retell this part of the history, mention John ever being there. And nowhere is there ever any mention of John having any connection to or familiarity with the Cohen HaGadol.
And none of the other three have Tomas calling Yeshua his Lord and his God! They do call Yeshua “Lord”, but not to be confused with THE Lord, God the Father; rather with Lord being a title of authority.
And besides these obvious and undeniable contradictions to the other three gospels, which violates the interpretative tool called Hermeneutics, the overly spiritualized double talk- if could you see him you would see me but you don’t see me so you can’t see him, but since you see me ….yada-yadda-yadda- is confusing and unlike the way Yeshua talked or taught in any of the other three gospels.
Because of these many, many issues, I have come to believe that this gospel is not just a false one, but was not even written by the same John who lived and walked with Yeshua. The emphasis on the divinity of Yeshua, the different way Yeshua talked, and the many contradictions to the other gospels has inevitably led me to the conclusion that I think this was written by a Gentile using the name John (it could have been his real name) who was not a direct disciple, but one whose purpose in writing this so-called gospel was to write a gospel that would help to further separate the Gentile believers from the Jewish believers.
Remember also that at the time this gospel was written, most of the Jewish leaders of the original movement accepting Yeshua as the Messiah had all but died out, and this Jewish movement was being taken further and further away from its Jewish roots, creating a totally different religion based not on Yeshua’s Torah teachings as much as on the misinterpretation of letters written by Shaul to congregations of Gentiles who were being pressured to get circumcised and having power struggles within their organizations.
Another factor at that time was the animosity between Judea and Rome was building, coming to a head in 132-33 A.D. with the Bar Kokhba rebellion. These Gentiles who were being taught Torah began to think that the closer they got to a Jewish lifestyle, the more Rome would consider them Jews and not Romans, putting them on the firing line, so to speak, with the Jewish population. As pagans they were safe, but as Jews they were a target for Roman persecution, so they decided it was safer to change their form of worship.
Of course, that idea backfired because after the Jews were put down for good, this new religion become a target for Rome.
At the end of the first century, as noted by Ignatius of Antioch in 110 A.D., Gentiles were already meeting on their own Sabbath, which they changed to be on the first day of the week.
When John’s gospel was written, by then the move away from Torah and Judaism had been well under way, and this is why I believe this gospel, so contradictory to the other earlier gospels and the only one where there is clearly a desire to prove Yeshua is God, was definitely written in order to keep any self-respecting Jew from wanting anything to do with this guy Jesus (as is still true to this very day), and so was not written by the real disciple, Yochanan ben Zebedee but by a Gentile man using the name John.
All this being said, I still read the book when I am going through the Bible because although I know it is a false gospel designed specifically to keep Jews out of the (now) Christian religion, and also to prove the divinity of Jesus (which is more along the lines of the prior Pagan beliefs those Gentile believers were comfortable with), it does have some things in there of value.
Hey, accidents happen, and this one accidentally has some proper worshipful stuff in it.
So read it if you will, but be aware of the differences and contradictions, and know that God never changes. If you are reading something in a version of the Bible that doesn’t jive with any other part of the Bible or any other Bible you have read, know it to be questionable at best, and probably wrong at worst.
There are so many different versions of the Bible in so many hundreds of different languages that you have to read every one of those versions with discretion and discernment. And remember that the New Covenant writings are by Jews, but there wasn’t any Jew, ever, who was part of the coalition which put that part of the Bible together! According to Google, by the late second century (around 170–200 A.D.), a core collection—including the four gospels and the letters of Paul—was widely accepted and cited as authoritative by church leaders like Irenaeus.
The criteria used for judging which texts belonged in the Bible was based on apostolic origin (written by or closely tied to an apostle), orthodoxy (consistent with true Christian teaching, which by then was very different from Torah), and widespread liturgical use.
Widespread litugical use is another way of saying what the people were used to because they liked it, and not having to obey Torah is a lot easier than having to obey it.
And when they say it was based on Christian teaching, that is based mostly on Shaul’s (Paul) letters, and had little or nothing to do with Torah anymore.
Thanks in part to this so-called Gospel of John, by the middle of the second century what had been a Jewish movement to accept Yeshua as the Messiah God promised to send became an anti-Torah religion that proclaimed Jesus was God, replacing both the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Torah he gave us with man-made tenets, holidays, and even changed the Anointed One of God (the Messiah) into a Gentile Savior who they worship in place of God.
So, nu? Now you know why I cannot accept John’s gospel as a real gospel, but rather as a means of further separating Gentiles from Jews by making Yeshua into God and, by doing that making it nearly impossible for Jews to join in.
If you are still here, please comment and consider sharing this message, as well as all my others, with everyone you know. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.
That’s it for this week, hoping those who follow this ministry will continue to do so, and also hoping that I have upset many of you who have been taught that John’s gospel is the most important one by making you think, “I hate to admit it, but he makes sense.”
Let me wish you an early Shabbat Shalom and a very joyous Shemini Atzeret!