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📜 Table of Contents › John

📖 John

Chapters

10 of 21 chapters translated · 47.6%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

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Chapter by chapter

John 1The Word made flesh — the Prologue and its “was God / a god,” the Lamb of God, and the first disciples.John 2Water into wine at Cana — the beginning of the signs — and the temple cleared at the first Passover: “destroy this temple.”John 3Nicodemus comes by night — and the whole conversation runs on a pun no language can keep. ⚠ Anōthen means BOTH “from above” and “again”: Jesus says a man must be born anōthen, Nicodemus hears the second sense and asks the famous absurd question about re-entering a womb. Counted in the archive the word occurs 13 times in the New Testament, five of them John’s — and every other Johannine use is SPATIAL, while Galatians 4:9 proves the temporal sense is real, so the misunderstanding is a genuine possibility of the Greek and not a straw man. ⚠ And John settles it himself at v31, glossing anōthen with “out of heaven” in the same verse. Five verses after the first pun comes a second: pneuma is wind AND Spirit, and v8 builds a sentence on the fact. ⚠ Then the most quoted sentence in the world, carrying two things English has lost — houtōs is MANNER, not quantity (“this is HOW God loved the world,” not “so much”; the archaic Spanish RV 1909 gets it right where nearly everyone else does not), and monogenēs is “the only Son,” not “only-begotten,” which came through the Latin. ⚠ And a decision this library had to make in public: Greek manuscripts have no quotation marks, many editors read vv16–21 as the evangelist rather than Jesus, and because this translation prints red letters it cannot decline to choose — so the red ends at verse 15 and John 3:16 is not in red here, with the note giving both readings and stating that nothing theological turns on it. Three textual variants argued from the direction a copyist would move; the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness; the judgment as a light switched on rather than a sentence handed down; two men baptizing at once and the Gospel correcting itself about it; and the best man at somebody else’s wedding, whose job has a built-in ending.John 4The longest conversation Jesus has with anybody in any Gospel — and it opens with him asking HER for a favour. ⚠ Read it against John 3, because the two are built as a pair: a named male insider, a ruler, who comes BY NIGHT; and an unnamed foreign woman met at NOON. He misunderstands anōthen; she misunderstands “living water” — which in ordinary Greek simply means RUNNING water, so she is hearing it correctly in its everyday sense, exactly as he did. ⚠ And here John marks the misunderstanding with the vocabulary itself: the narrator and Jesus say pēgē, a SPRING, while the woman says phrear, a dug SHAFT — two words for the same hole in the ground, sorted by who is speaking, and the KJV’s uniform “well” erases all of it (the NWT and the archaic Spanish RV 1909 both keep it; the modern TNM loses it). Then the five husbands, where the text never calls her sinful and Jesus never rebukes her; the demolished Samaritan temple on Gerizim behind “this mountain”; and pneuma ho theos at v24 — the identical anarthrous construction as John 1:1, so “God is spirit” follows from the ruling already made in the prologue. ⚠ The first egō eimi in the book is said to a Samaritan woman alone at noon; the disciples arrive and are astonished not that she is a Samaritan but that she is A WOMAN, and John quotes the two questions nobody asked. She leaves her water jar, phrases her announcement in the form that expects the answer NO, and the town comes anyway — then tells her they have moved past her testimony, and calls him Saviour of the world, which was a title of Caesar.John 5A man who has been lying by a pool for thirty-eight years, and a question that sounds almost cruel — “Do you want to become well?” He is healed, told to carry his mat, and it is the SABBATH: the first real hostility in this Gospel starts here, not over the healing but over the mat. ⚠ Verse 4 — the angel stirring the water — is missing on these pages; the earliest Greek manuscripts do not have it, so the numbering simply skips it, v3 to v5. Then, for calling God his own Father, Jesus is accused of “making himself EQUAL WITH GOD” (isos, the plain word, not softened by any version checked) — and the long speech that follows (vv19–47), the longest single speech Jesus has given in this Gospel so far, answers that charge rather than backing away from it: the Son can do nothing of himself, which turns out to be the larger claim, not the smaller one. ⚠ “An hour is coming, and now is” (v25) is the exact formula John 4:23 planted, now applied to the dead hearing the Son’s voice and living — and three verses later the SAME formula drops its second half (v28), marking a hoped-for hour still only future. Four witnesses are called — John the Baptist, the works, the Father, the Scriptures — and v39’s “you search the Scriptures” is genuinely ambiguous in Greek between a command and a statement, KJV reading one way and nearly everyone else the other.John 6Five loaves and two small fish feed five thousand, twelve baskets are left over, and the crowd tries to make him king by force — so he withdraws alone up a mountain. That night the disciples row into a storm and see him walking on the water: “It is I; do not be afraid” — the same two words, egō eimi, this Gospel elsewhere lets stand absolutely as a claim of divine self-naming. The crowd catches up demanding a bigger sign than the one they just ate, and gets instead the first of this Gospel's seven “I am” sayings built with a stated predicate: “I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE.” ⚠ Then the language turns physical and does not turn back: the ordinary verb for eating gives way, six times running, to a cruder Greek word properly meaning to GNAW — tracking exactly how much of the audience the teaching costs him. “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” some of his own disciples say, and for the first time in this Gospel, they turn back and no longer walk with him. Peter's answer to “do you also want to go away?” is not an easier reading of the teaching but a confession that there is nowhere else worth going — “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” — a v69 title for Jesus (“the Holy One of God” against the Byzantine “Christ, the Son of the living God”) the shelf itself can't agree on. It closes on Judas, named for the first time by his father's name, already a devil, still one of the Twelve.John 7“I am not going up to this feast” — and then he goes anyway, in secret, nine verses later. ⚠ A single Greek word decides whether this is a real contradiction or not: the earliest manuscripts read ‘not,’ the majority text reads ‘not yet,’ and a third-century pagan philosopher already used this exact verse to call Jesus a liar. The crowd at the Feast of Tabernacles cannot agree what he is — good man, deceiver, the Prophet, the Christ, or disqualified outright because everyone already knows he's from Galilee, not Bethlehem where the Christ is supposed to be born. On the feast's last and greatest day, during the Temple's own water-pouring ritual, he stands up and redirects the whole ceremony onto himself: “let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.” Officers sent to arrest him come back empty-handed with the best line in the chapter — “no one has ever spoken like this man” — and the chapter's last verse opens directly into one of the New Testament's most famous textual disputes, absent from the earliest manuscripts entirely.John 8This chapter opens with a story absent from the two oldest complete Greek New Testaments: the woman caught in adultery, and the accusers who leave one by one, oldest first, after “let the one without sin cast the first stone.” ⚠ This translation states the textual situation plainly rather than passing over it in silence. What follows escalates fast — “I am the light of the world,” staged against the Feast of Tabernacles' own blazing lampstands; a claim with no grammatical predicate at all (“unless you believe that I am”) that this chapter refuses to complete until its final verse; and an argument with his own new believers that turns, verse by verse, into the single most historically dangerous line in this Gospel — addressed plainly, including why fifteen centuries of its worst use gets the text wrong. It ends on the sentence the Greek grammar itself was built toward: “before Abraham was, I am” — and men picking up stones before he finishes speaking.John 14“In my Father’s house are many mansions” — except that is not what the Greek says, and the proof is twenty-one verses further down the same chapter. MONE occurs twice in the entire New Testament, both times here, and at verse 23 nobody translates it “mansion.” ⚠ Three places where the manuscripts genuinely divide: verse 7 is a rebuke in one text and a promise in another; verse 14 either does or does not contain the word “me,” which would make it the only place in John where prayer is addressed to Jesus; and one small word decides whether verse 2 is a question. Plus the widest split on the whole shelf — Comforter, Helper, Advocate, Counselor, Paraclete — and why 1 John 2:1 settles it. Thomas asks the honest question, Philip asks the reasonable one, and the chapter ends by saying “get up, let us go from here” and then carrying on for three more chapters.John 15The vine, the branches, and “abide in me” — MENO eleven times in five verses, the word the previous chapter kept planting and never once commanded. ⚠ Verses 2 and 3 run a three-word pun no English version fully keeps: airei, kathairei, katharoi — takes away, prunes clean, you are clean — and verse 3 is the punchline, answering “you are clean, but not all of you” two chapters earlier, now that Judas has left the room. The one tending the vine is called by the word the other Gospels give to the tenants who kill the son. Slaves are promoted to friends on the grounds of having been told things. “They hated me for nothing” uses the New Testament’s ordinary word for a free gift. And verse 26 is the sentence the Eastern and Western churches split over in 1054 — one line that honestly supports both sides.

About the book

A full introduction to John — author, date, structure, themes and the honest questions of authorship — is still to be written for this book.