Quote:
Originally Posted by YP0534
My speculation, along the line of yours I believe, is that John was on a different line from the rest early on.
Maybe not read John as opposed to those brothers but as opposed to what came from their Jewish practice because of a more Greek connection of some kind?
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Well, my reading is that John was ambitious for power early on. He knew the high priest. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, who had enough power to take on the whole priestly class (a "brood of vipers"), counsel soldiers, and rebuke Herod.
But John's desire for power perhaps cloaked insecurity. I am not sure if that is the case, but for some reason, in the Gospels John seems power-focused even more than the others. He wanted the "right hand" of God kind of power. He wanted to call down fire on those who couldn't get with "the plan".
Instead, he got a front row seat to watch John the Baptist get beheaded, then his own brother, then Peter escape - barely - the same fate. Peter had guards chained to either side of him the night he escaped. The next day he would have been dead.
So John prudently "fell into the earth & died"; he disappeared. He didn't go around making a big fuss in the fellowship. He kept on being a disciple of Jesus, but he disappeared. Later, when he resurfaced, all the other stuff had leached out of him, and what was left was the power (to resist evil), the glory (the memory of seeing Jesus on the mountain (see John 1:14), and the love. God loves us, more than we can imagine, and John realized this and grew a burden to communicate this.