“But why do you “tend to agree with those old timers?”
+John’s theology is very complex and relies on concepts which were not back then, nor for that matter now, part of the knowledge base of the average person. We see this even here on FR, though in great measure that is as a result of truly awful English translations of his gospel. In the early Church the laity were both allowed and encouraged to read +John after baptism and chrismation but even then only under the guidance of a spiritual father for some time.
“Yet to love John does not mean one ought to disparage Paul.”
No, of course not. My antipathy for +Paul is sui generis! :)
“Thank you ever so much for the link to +John Chrysostomos!”
You are welcome. I tell people who are about to get married to read Homily XX...as I was directed to read it many years ago.
And all praise to you, Kolokotronis, for passing along that advice! Hope lots of folks out there in "the marrying state" will avail themselves of it.
Of course, such would be a most rude awakening and rebuke to the fem-libs out there. But then they are self-deranged anyway, and so possibly hopeless. :^)
As for the putative cultural inaccessibility of John's Gospel way back when (i.e., in the period of which we are presently speaking): Any student of Plato would have felt very much "at home" with John, beloved apostle, in this speaking of the very greatest, of the most tremendous things ordained by God (Plato's "Beyond"), as directly experienced and contemplated in the human psyche: the "site and sensorium" of conscious experience that Plato called the Metaxy, the "In-Between" of human experiential reality....
Oh. I can see how/why such issues should complicate theology....
Still, I am unable to discern any conflict between the Platonic insights and those of the dispensation inaugurated by the Crucifixion.
Have you noticed any such, dear Kolokotronis?