The "Gospel" of St. John is another animal and entirely too complex to parse out what is going on in there. Let's stick with the synoptic Gosepls as such.
I'm interested in hearing why you've put "Gospel" in quotation marks.
If you familiar with Fr. Hopko's take on the Gospels, which comes other sources, that is similar to what I thought because of similar sources for quite a while before I heard of him. It was one of the things when I first took retreat with him that grabbed me (note the complete self-centeredness there). He was thoroughly Biblical and at the time I would have said "consecrative" rather than "Orthodox" IMO and yet willing to be provocative and radical in its radical sense
(getting to the root of things). He also gives reasons from a Liturgical context why St. John's Gospel might be something else, which knowing nothing much of Orthodoxy at the time we unknown to me and yet rather compelling.
Father, I hope you will not mind much if I don't wait to offer you Fr. Hopko's stuff and a overview till I can do so when I have access to a better internet device.
But in the meantime, I didn't mean to denigrate the text nor suggest it is of lesser value than the synoptics, but rather more of a suggestion that it might be considered a slightly different genre of writing than the synoptics.
I think we all can agree that St. John's Gospel is strikingly different than the synoptics, but again no less important or revelatory. If we can't agree to that, than it is probably better not to start.
And yes to everyone, I love Fr. Hopko. Without him and another Priest of much less renown, Orthodoxy would have remained to me a charmingly, quaint, and beautiful religion for peasants in Eastern Europe and a garish and ethnic enclave for Greeks in America.
I mean no offense by that last sentence, but rather state it as a point of my ignorance and how important a few people can be in changing one's mind, or at least mine.
