John's Gospel opens not with a genealogy or a birth narrative but with a poem-and that choice informs everything. From the first verse, John is doing something ambitious and deeply Jewish: weaving the story of Jesus into the narrative of Israel's story of exile, longing, and promised restoration.
For God So Loved the World argues that the reunification of God's scattered people is not merely a theme in John's Gospel-it is the theme. Drawing on Jewish festivals, sacred geography, intertextual echoes of the Torah and the Prophets, and the ancient interpretive art of midrash, this work traces John's portrait of Jesus as a new Moses leading a new exodus-one that gathers not only Judah but the lost northern tribes dispersed among the nations, and even the gentiles among whom they live.
This book offers fresh readings of some of Johannine scholarship's most debated questions: Why are only the first two Cana signs explicitly numbered? What is the theological significance of John's geography? How does the placement of the temple cleansing shape the Gospel's structure? And how does the passion narrative culminate in nothing less than a new creation, with Jesus as the new Adam tending a restored garden?
