Replies

Bethany is not a place "across Jordan." There is not such place there. Some Bible versions call it Bethabara trying to salvage the damage. However, there is a suburb of Jerusalem by the name Bethany and it's not across Jordan. And, at least according to Mat 3:4-6 and mat 1:9 John baptized in the Jordan River.

So it seems - and Jerusalem (and Bethany) are a good day's trot from the Jordan, as well. Don't know.

I am sure there is a raitonalizaiton out there that shows there is no contradiction...I take everything John write with a grain of salt. More on the interpolated character of John's Gospel.

The content of the Faith was being developed at a furious rate during these times. Your source says that John was written to try to calm down distressed Jewish Christians (converts) who weren't liking the way things were going in the temporal realm...

So it seems - and Jerusalem (and Bethany) are a good day's trot from the Jordan, as well

But it's not "across". There is no Bethany across (the) Jordan.

Jewish Christians didn't like what was happening because the rabbis at Jamnia basically kicked them out of the synagogues and labeled them as the minim (usurpers, heretics). Christianity had to be Hellenized in order to survive. All of a sudden, we have a Platonic deity enter the stage, a concept alien and blasphemous to a Jew. John's Gospel was written (at the end of the first century) to show Jewish Christians that Jesus is the same Jewish God they believed in all along.

Without it, Christianity, suddenly finding itself outside Judaism, had no divine authority, and John's Gospel clearly tries to establish that Jesus is not only God but the same God Jews believed all along, and not the Jewish messiah the Nazarene Christians believed him to be.

Most Jewish Christians could not accept a Hellenized Jesus, because it violated the basic principles of Judaism, and the Faith became decidedly Gentile as it attained more and more a Hellenic character.

Most of the work of "harmonizing" the Jewish mystical spiritualism with Hellenic Platonism of the late 1st century was based on the works of Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher, whose contribution to Hellenized Christianity and the concept of a Logos was of such importance that the first Church historian, Eusebius, Bishop of Cesarea in the late 3rd century, refers to him as "St. Philo!"