The Early Judean Ministry of Jesus (4 of 12)

There is roughly a year of ministry that only John records, and it happens before the Galilean campaign the other Gospels begin with.

Reading Matthew, Mark, or Luke alone, you would not know it existed.

Why Do the Synoptics Skip This Period?

Because they start the public ministry after John the Baptist’s arrest.

Mark 1:14 begins with Jesus going into Galilee after John was put in prison. John’s Gospel covers the period before that, when both men were ministering at the same time, and even notes in John 3:22-24 that this was before John had been thrown into prison.

That overlap is one of the clearer cases where John supplies what the others leave out rather than contradicting them.

What Was the First Sign at Cana?

Water into wine at a village wedding, and the quantity is the surprising part.

John 2:1-11. The wine runs out, which in that culture was a serious social failure for the host family, the kind that would be remembered for years. Mary tells Jesus. His reply about his hour not yet having come does not stop her instructing the servants to do whatever he tells them.

Six stone jars, used for ceremonial washing, filled to the brim. The volume runs to something like a hundred and twenty gallons of wine.

The master of the banquet then complains, in the nicest possible way, that the good wine has been saved for last, contrary to all practice.

John calls it the first of the signs, through which he revealed his glory. The first public act is not a healing or a confrontation. It is rescuing a family from humiliation, extravagantly, at a party.

Why Did Jesus Cleanse the Temple Twice?

He appears to have done it at both ends of the ministry, and John places one early.

John 2:13-22 has the cleansing near the start, with the cords, the overturned tables, and the charge about making his Father’s house a market. The Synoptics place a cleansing in the final week.

Three positions exist. Two separate events, which is the plain reading of the texts as they stand. One event that John has moved for thematic reasons. Or one event that the Synoptics have moved.

The plain reading is defensible and it is what the timeline follows. What is not defensible is pretending the question does not exist.

The early cleansing also gives the saying about destroying this temple and raising it in three days, which John explains was about his body, and which resurfaces at the trial as a distorted accusation.

What Did Jesus Tell Nicodemus?

That he had to be born from above, and Nicodemus could not get past the biology.

John 3:1-21. A Pharisee and member of the ruling council comes at night, opens with a compliment about signs, and gets an answer to a question he had not asked: no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.

The Greek word carries both again and from above, and Nicodemus takes the first meaning and asks how a man can enter his mother’s womb a second time.

Wright translates it born from above throughout, on the grounds that the vertical sense is the one the passage develops: flesh gives birth to flesh, spirit gives birth to spirit, and the wind blows where it wants. And he draws attention to the reply Nicodemus gets, which is sharper in the Greek than in most English versions. You are a teacher of Israel, and you do not know about this? The rebuke is not for ignorance of a new doctrine. It is for not recognising something the prophets had already said.

The conversation produces John 3:16, and it also produces the observation that people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

Nicodemus reappears twice. He argues for due process for Jesus in John 7:50-51, and he brings a large quantity of burial spices to the tomb in John 19:39. The man who came at night is at the burial in daylight.

What Happened at the Well in Samaria?

The longest recorded conversation Jesus has with anyone, and it is with a Samaritan woman.

John 4:1-42. He is tired from the journey and sitting at the well around midday. She comes to draw water, which is an odd hour, and he asks her for a drink.

Two details in that sentence do more than they look. The text says he sat on the well, not beside it, which fits the large stone capstones that covered major wells in the region. And travelling parties carried their own leather bucket, because wells did not have one; his disciples had taken theirs into the town.

So he is seated on the wellhead with no means of drawing water. Bailey reads that as deliberate rather than incidental: he has placed himself in a position of needing whoever arrives with the right equipment. The conversation begins with him asking a Samaritan woman for something he cannot get himself, which is an odd way to open if the aim is to establish authority and an effective one if the aim is anything else.

Her response registers the problem: he is a Jew and she is a Samaritan woman, and Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

Three barriers are in that sentence. Ethnic, religious, and gendered. His disciples are surprised on their return to find him talking with a woman, and John notes that none of them asked why.

The conversation moves from water to her marital history to the disputed question of where worship belongs, Gerizim or Jerusalem, and he answers that the hour is coming when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth.

Then the clearest self-disclosure in the Gospel to that point. She says the Messiah is coming. He says, I am he, the one speaking to you.

She leaves her water jar and goes back to the town, and many of the Samaritans believe because of her testimony and then because they heard him themselves. The full treatment is in the post on the woman at the well.

Why Does the Samaritan Episode Matter?

Because of who receives the disclosure.

Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a teacher of Israel, a member of the council, and he comes at night and leaves confused. The Samaritan woman has no standing at all, and she gets a direct statement of identity and becomes the first person in John’s Gospel to bring a town to Jesus.

John has put those two conversations side by side deliberately. The order is the argument.

When Was John the Baptist Imprisoned?

At the end of this period, and it marks the transition.

John 3:30 has the Baptist’s summary of his own role: he must become greater, I must become less. Shortly afterward he is arrested by Herod Antipas.

That arrest is the point where the Synoptic Gospels begin their account, and the ministry moves north into Galilee.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Footnotes2

1. The volume of wine at Cana is the detail that resists a purely symbolic reading. A sign could have been accomplished with one jar. Six stone jars filled to the brim, in a village, is excessive by design, and the excess appears to be part of the point.
2. That John notes the disciples did not ask why he was talking with a woman is a small masterpiece of narration. Their surprise is recorded, their silence is recorded, and nothing is said about either. The reader is left to sit with it.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: John 1:35-4:54, John 7:50-51, John 19:39, and Mark 1:14.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 15. Supports the reading of Jesus seated on the wellhead without a bucket as a deliberate self-emptying, and the cultural weight of the three barriers the woman names. In print from IVP Academic.

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-10 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the rendering of the Nicodemus passage as born from above and the force of the reply to a teacher of Israel. In print.

Where the sourcing stops: whether the temple was cleansed once or twice is a genuine interpretive question and the two-cleansing reading is followed here as the plain sense of the texts rather than as a demonstrated result. The reason for the woman's midday visit to the well is commonly explained by social isolation, which is inference rather than something the text states.