The Philosophical Jesus: John’s Gospel and The Way
Part 4 of a 5-part series exploring Christianity’s lost path (read previous article here).
“In the beginning was the Logos.”
These famous opening words of John’s Gospel, written around 90–100 CE, launched a bold new way of understanding Jesus’s message. While Paul created a faith-based religion and the Thomas community preserved secret teachings, the author of John’s Gospel tried something more ambitious: explaining Jesus’s multi-level teaching in a way that would make sense to everyone from Jewish mystics to Greek philosophers.
The Greek term used here for “Word” was “Logos” — a rich concept that meant different things to different people. Greek philosophers saw it as the divine reason that ordered the universe. Jewish thinkers understood it as God’s creative power that spoke the world into being. Students of mystery schools saw it as the divine wisdom they sought to understand.
By saying this Logos “became flesh” in Jesus, John was making an extraordinary claim: divine wisdom itself had taken human form. This wasn’t just creative religious thinking — it explained why Jesus taught the way he did, speaking in simple parables to some while sharing deeper mysteries with others.
Two Different Voices
Anyone reading John’s Gospel after the other three gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) notices something striking: Jesus sounds completely different. In the earlier gospels, Jesus speaks in short, punchy sayings and brief parables: “Consider the lilies.” “Let the dead bury their dead.” “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” His words often have the sharp, paradoxical quality of Zen koans.
But in John’s Gospel, Jesus delivers long, elaborate speeches about his identity and mission. Instead of pithy parables about farmers and fishermen, we find extended metaphysical discussions about light, truth, and divine unity. The simple “Our Father” prayer becomes “I pray that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”
Teaching Through Layers
This difference in style reflects a deeper pattern in John’s Gospel. Each story and conversation operates on multiple levels, allowing readers to discover deeper meanings as their understanding grows.
Take the conversation with Nicodemus about being “born again” or “born from above” (the Greek word means both). When Nicodemus takes it literally, Jesus guides him toward deeper meaning. The story itself demonstrates how spiritual teaching works — what seems like a simple conversation about birth becomes a profound lesson about spiritual transformation.
We see the same pattern in Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. What begins as talk about ordinary water becomes a discussion of “living water.” Their debate about where to worship leads to a revelation about worshiping “in spirit and truth.” Each level of the conversation reveals a deeper meaning for those ready to understand it.
This layered approach helps explain why John’s Jesus speaks so differently. Those brief, memorable sayings in the other gospels were like seeds. In John, we see how those seeds could grow into fuller philosophical and spiritual teachings for those ready to go deeper.
“I Am the Way”
This context transforms our understanding of Jesus’s famous statement: “I am the Way (hē hodos), and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). Like Paul’s mystical experience and Thomas’s secret sayings, this suggests “the Way” wasn’t just about ethical behavior or religious practice. But where Paul emphasized faith and Thomas emphasized self-knowledge, John presents Jesus as the living embodiment of the path to divine wisdom.
His Jesus, like a mystery school guide, initiates through levels of understanding: “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). This isn’t about withholding information — it’s about the gradual development of spiritual capacity.
A Philosophical Synthesis
What makes John’s approach unique is how it weaves together different ways of understanding truth:
- Jewish Wisdom: The Logos idea connects with Jewish teachings about divine Wisdom and God’s creative Word
- Greek Philosophy: The gospel speaks to Greek thinkers who sought to understand divine reason and reality
- Mystery Teachings: It uses the same pattern of gradual revelation found in ancient mystery schools
- Early Christian Practice: It preserves early Christian rituals while revealing their deeper meaning
This wasn’t just mixing traditions for the sake of it. John’s gospel tries to show how Jesus’s teaching brought together all these different paths to truth. The idea that divine wisdom took human form in Jesus explained why he could speak to people at all levels of understanding — from simple parables to profound mysteries.
Conflicts and Controversies
But this sophisticated synthesis also hints at conflicts within early Christianity. The gospel’s insistence that “the Word became flesh” may argue against groups who saw Jesus as purely spiritual. Its complex portrayal of “the Jews” reflects its community’s painful separation from the synagogue. Its emphasis on love and unity suggests internal Christian conflicts about how to understand “the Way.”
Perhaps most significantly, John’s gospel reveals a community wrestling with how to preserve Jesus’s multi-level teaching method in written form. How do you create a text that, like Jesus’s original teaching, can speak to both beginners and initiates?
Preserving the Teaching
The group of early Christians who preserved and developed John’s Gospel (scholars call them the “Johannine community” because of their connection to John) found a creative solution to a difficult problem: how do you write down teachings that were meant to be understood at different levels?
Their answer was to create a gospel that worked like Jesus’s own teaching method. Just as Jesus used stories that had both simple and deeper meanings, they wrote their gospel to be understood differently depending on the reader’s level of spiritual development. We can see evidence that this community existed somewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, probably in cities with both Jewish and Greek populations, because their gospel shows deep familiarity with both traditions.
Their approach was remarkably effective: they created a text that, like Jesus himself, could speak to both beginners and advanced students. Simple stories about water, bread, and light carried deeper meanings about spiritual transformation. Conversations, like the one with Nicodemus about being “born again,” worked as both basic teaching stories and profound spiritual lessons.
By the time Christian bishops began standardizing doctrine, the gospel’s philosophical subtleties were often reduced to simple proof-texts. Its vision of Jesus as divine wisdom teaching at multiple levels was overshadowed by Paul’s emphasis on faith and doctrine.
The Road Not Taken
What if Christianity had developed primarily through John’s philosophical lens rather than Paul’s theological one? What if “the Way” had been understood as a path of deepening wisdom rather than adherence to beliefs? These questions become even more intriguing when we examine how different early understandings of “the Way” were gradually marginalized as one interpretation became orthodox.
But that’s a story for our final installment.
In Part 5, we’ll explore how and why certain interpretations of Jesus’s message became “orthodox” while others were labeled heretical, and what this means for understanding both early Christianity and the nature of religious evolution.
This is Part 4 of a 5-part series exploring the forgotten history of early Christianity. Read the final installment here.
