Finding Jesus (John 21:24-25)

Now and again, some scholarly group seeks out the “historical Jesus.”

By “historical Jesus,” they mean the man they chose Him to be and not God the Son made flesh He claimed to be.

Why do they do this? One reason is to disprove Christianity. (Good luck.)

But there’s also a curiosity about Jesus: what He looked like, how He ate, what He wore, and how His teachings started Christianity. There’s this quest to find more than what Scripture has revealed. I can understand this curiosity, but it’s not the point of why Jesus has been revealed.

What we have is enough. The final two verses of John’s Gospel tell us that.

We read in John 21:24-25:

This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true. Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
John 21:24-25
New International Version

It may seem strange for John to say what he did: “This is the disciple who testifies to these things…we know that his testimony is true” (verse 24). Strange to Western ears, right?

But we must remember that John is not a 21st-century Westerner. He’s a first-century Jew. In his Greco-Roman and Jewish world, legal documents typically ended with a statement of truthfulness. We do something similar when we complete some forms and attest that what we’ve written or stated is accurate.

John attests in the sight of God Almighty to the truthfulness of what he has written in this gospel account of Jesus. As a Jewish man, this was the highest form of his word he could give as an oath before God. And it was NOT a lighthearted thing like when so many say, “I swear,” when they KNOW they’re lying. John the Apostle was risking his soul if he swore this oath and lied.

His testimony is true. It is a fact. It is trustworthy. It was not someone else who wrote this using John’s name. Instead, it was his own hand with ink and quill telling us the eyewitness account of Jesus. It was a message John was willing to die for.

John 21:25 is one of my favorite verses: Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

John tells us the Holy Spirit led him to be selective. Things were left out. John informs us that most of what Jesus did was left out! If the Holy Spirit had led John to record everything Jesus did, the world wouldn’t be able to contain the books.