The author of this, the fourth gospel in the New Testament, was the Apostle John. John had been called by Jesus at the beginning of His public ministry to be one of the 12 Apostles.
Below are a few clarifications:
- In this Gospel, there is another “John,” namely John the Baptist.
- “Gospel” does not mean “true,” though this one (and the others are true). “Gospel” means “good news.”
- What is the good news? The gospels, including the one we will read by the Apostle John, tell us the Person and Work of Jesus of Nazareth, which is not only the greatest story ever told, it is the best possible “good news.”
- The Gospels are essentially focused biographies of Jesus Christ. They are focused in the sense that they are written to by eye witnesses of the public ministry of Jesus, His words and deeds. They are not “biographies” in the sense of a comprehensive catalog of His entire earthly life, though by the collection of the four Gospels we have quite a comprehensive view.
- The Bible as a whole is really the full biography of jesus Christ. The sacred name for God in the Old Testament, translated in most bibles as “Lord,” and occurring more than 6,000 times, is Jesus in His pre-incarnationation as fully man, and yet God, as recorded in the Gospels.
- The Bible is divided in two main sections. The first 75% of it is known as the “Old Testament;” the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) begin the second major section, the “New Testament.”
- The Bible never refers to these respective sections as “testaments” (old or new). Further, because the word “testament” is not an every day part of our language it does not convey anything particularly meaningful to us. A better word for what begins with the Gospels is a new “Covenant,” that is a permanent relationship established by the life and death of Jesus Christ (“Christ” comes to us from the Greek language in which the New Testament / Covenant was written meaning the same thing as “Messiah,” which word arises from the Hebrew language in which the Old Testament was written).
The Gospel of John can itself be divided into five main sections:
- The overview of Jesus’s eternal Being, as God and Creator.
- The identification of Jesus (by John the Baptist) as the One promised in the Old Testament, and Jesus’s calling of His Twelve Apostles in preparation for their becoming witnesses of His Person and Work.
- The public ministry of Jesus, testifying to both the people of the countryside of Israel (primarily in the northern region known as Galilee) and, also to the Jewish leadership in the capital city, Jerusalem.
- The private ministry of Jesus in His final days, with His disciples (including the 12 Apostles).
- The final day of Jesus’s earthly life fulfilling His Work of securing our deliverance from the penalty of our own sin by the judgment He endured becoming sin itself, for you and me.