Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 1-3.

John does an interesting thing in his Gospel that I have noticed before, but never really thought about before.  He switches from quoting someone to making commentary without leaving a clear indicator of where the quote ends and the commentary begins.  Primarily he does that when he quotes Jesus, but he also does it a few times in today’s passage when he quotes John the Baptist.  Until today, I always thought it was just something which John did without thinking about it (side note: while there is some debate about whether this Gospel was written by John, or by someone else, and, if it was written by John, whether that was the Apostle John or another John, I generally write my blogs assuming that it was written from the perspective of the Apostle John).  As I read it today, it struck me that John did it on purpose; partly to communicate that his “quotes” were only paraphrases of what was said, and partly to communicate a deeper understanding of what the speaker said than conveyed directly by what they said.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.