In early June, 2013, I saw a news program about a man who had transcribed the entire Bible.  He was motivated in a deeply religious way.  I thought about that for a while.  Finally, mostly out of intellectual curiosity, I decided that I would write one book of the Bible.  I quickly settled on one of the four Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories and parables.  They are mostly used for historic information about Jesus.  Church readings, Sunday Schools, and Christian religious schools primarily used these Gospels.  Most of my early memories came out of these Gospels.  I knew that John was still the story of Jesus life but a much deeper insight into His justification of his divine role and the agonizing discussions on getting people to believe in Him and in The Father (God). John was different and this appealed to me.  Additionally, I was named for James and John even though my Grandfather was James John.  My mother once told me that these were two of Jesus’ favorite disciples hence my name.

I was raised in a very religious atmosphere.  My father and his father before him were both Methodist Ministers of an evangelical genre that frankly could, at times, get oppressive.  My early social life revolved around the Methodist Youth Fellowship and organizations that were tied to the Church including our Boy Scout Troop.  Continual prayer was a norm in my little world.  So, my spiritual roots run deep.  However, as with most PKs (Preacher’s Kids), a rebellion set in which despite my parent’s attempts to crush, it continued to develop.  Throughout High School, I tugged a bit at the leash but always seemed to be back in the fold at the end of the day.  When it came time to go to College, I went to West Virginia Wesleyan College, a Methodist School in the Appalachians which was a focus area for the New York and New England Conference of the United Methodist Church.  Even my early declared major was pre-ministerial.

That ship sailed somewhere in the first semester when I discovered that there was fun to be had in College and I had fun.  I was always pretty well focused on scholastic endeavors but there was wine, women, and collegiality that more appropriately balanced my young life.  I didn’t attend Church very much but I still had a well ingrained spirituality that I chose to express in different ways.  I also became very fascinated with Science in College which caused me to think much more broadly about the Universe and its origin.    Eventually, after graduation, I became a combat Marine in Vietnam.  What happened there could uproot one’s entire belief system.  Everyone discovered God again in the foxhole.  However, I have to think of  that a method of trying to survive an ugly situation.

I doubt that I would have come back if it were not for my wife, a devout Lutheran.  She insisted on going to Church and so we did.  We were members of a Church everywhere we lived.  Although my spirituality was never quite the same, we were active.  This changed when we found our little Congregational Church in Brookfield, CT.  I went through a sense of spiritual renewal after a long brutal period in IBM’s transformation.  I actually looked forward to Church time and then came retirement.  We moved to Florida which is the home of the “mega church” with TV screens, thousands of members, and multiple services every Saturday and Sunday.  That was and is a turnoff for me.

So, what did reading the Book of John do for me?  First, I am glad that I went through this experience.  It was spiritually refreshing and somewhat fulfilling.  John recounts the story of Jesus life very differently.  The major events in his life were chronicled but the focus was on “the word made flesh”.  Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth.  The book was about the struggle to make people believe in God and the Holy Spirit.  Jesus performed eight “signs (never called a miracle in John) to inspire trust and confidence in “The Father”.  With this said, I found the communication from Jesus to “the crowd” to be difficult to understand at times.  This is reflected in a thread of misunderstanding and confusion whether it was “the crowd”, His Disciples, The Pharisees and High Priests, or Pilate.  Whether or not this was deliberate to “fulfill the scripture” is a question I leave to others.  If there was anyone who could have used a good PR person, it was Jesus.

There is the question of science.  The “works” or “signs” stretch the scientific mind to an extreme. For example, in a scientific mindset, no one walks on water, raises people from the dead, or feeds 5000 from a few fish and a loaf of bread.  This is a historic theological debate that continues to be played out.  At the end of everything, the answer seems simple to me (I am no theologian); you have to believe and have faith through this belief.   That is where I am  and that  is where I will leave it. 

I should mention something about the task itself.  I wrote 55 full pages and completed almost 16,000 words.  I enjoyed writing and it was a pleasure to start within the time I had allotted each day to the task.  I never got tired of actual writing although it has been easily since College that I wrote one document of this magnitude by hand.  I wrote out the passages, usually about 600 wordss each day.  When I finished writing, I went back and spent some time contemplating what the passage meant.  As the passages in John are almost all narratives, it became very interesting to put yourself into one person’s shoes or another.  I thought, in each case, how could I have done this better, or could I?  I could not know the undercurrents or the politics in depth that surrounded the passage so thinking through these things was also very interesting.  Lastly, it was wonderful to again discover cursive writing rather than typing.  It made the passages come alive for me in a way that I had never experienced.  I recommend it!