Abide CaseAbide: John 15:1-6PassageJohn 15: 1-6“1I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. 3You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 4Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. 5I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.”
IntroductionAs Jesus and His disciples were leaving the upper room where they partook in their last Passover meal together, they were walking on their way to the garden of Gethsemane. The mood was somber and then Jesus stopped by a grapevine and began to speak to His disciples. He spoke to them about bearing spiritual fruit and abiding in Him. As He was speaking, Jesus touched the grapes and showed the fruit of the vine to His disciples as he spoke. He was using the grapes and the grapevine as an object lesson for His followers. Did the disciples understand Him? Where they asking questions such as: What is He telling us? Why is He speaking in Parables? This account from the gospel of John portrays Jesus as the teacher who took every opportunity to teach His followers about Himself and His Father’s Kingdom. Jesus’ object lesson of the vine showed the disciples that Jesus cared for them with compassion and that His desire was for them to continue to bear spiritual fruit; Jesus was encouraging His disciples to continue what He had taught them throughout their ministry together leading up to the time of His death.
Socio-Historic BackgroundWhen examining a passage of scripture, one of the most important things to consider is the socio-historic context of that passage. First, the author must be identified. As with all the other gospels, the Gospel of John comes to its audience as an anonymous book. This simply means that the author did not address himself as the author of the book as Paul did in his epistles. So the question of this gospel’s authorship can be determined by looking at specific clues within the gospel itself, as well as by examining the tradition of the early church. In examining these two areas, three major positions have been held by scholars as to who the author of the fourth gospel is. The first and most widely accepted view is that the author is John the son of Zebedee, also known as “the beloved disciple.” The next view is that the fourth gospel is attributed to a pious believer
of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and that this was a time of great economic expansion, such that the prosperity of the early church coincided with the expansion of the gospel. According to a recent study by the Historical Society of London, the growth rate of the church as a whole, between the mid-late nineteenth century to early twentieth century, was much higher than that of all other churches (roughly 5–75% greater). If we assume that the author of the fourth gospel is the same person who has a direct relation to the Gospel, then the third view would point to that person. To clarify the two issues, a further section of this section is dedicated to the possibility of the historicity of the fifth gospel, because the historicity of the fifth gospel is extremely difficult to assess. . In the words of the English historian William Waltham, “If we take the whole historicity of the gospel of John to suggest the historicity of the last great dispensation, we are at greatest difficulty in assuming the historical record in all the relevant historical areas that is still capable of distinguishing between a third and fourth gospel of John.” 4 On this view, that the author (or some other person) of the fourth gospel “a disciple of Johnâ€* is a saint †does not appear at all to be so. On the contrary, John is a saint, John the disciple, who has lived the life of martyrs and saints for twenty years. The historicity of the fourth Gospel, after all, is difficult enough to define. It all depends on how much John cares about the gospel . The historical data of John’s life cannot allow us to answer that question, but it would be best to point out that there are two reasons for this. First, some of the data (for instance, the number of witnesses for John, and the number of women who testify in John) are not known fully to historical fact. The second is that if the historicity of the fourth gospel is so strong as to be independent of historical fact and therefore not an independent account and that it should be considered part of the historical record, then it may be that it could be said that John did not care for the story of martyrs and saints—or of the story of martyrs and saints who survived the final days of Revelation‬. In this case, it appears that the four women are present only when they were raised from the dead. But the fact that most of these women were mothers ‡who could not participate adequately in the service‡ reveals that in John’s last years of life and in the life of the apostles and at the end of the second epistles are the women the author refers to as martyrs, as they lived a life worthy of martyrdom, and as they did not follow the canonical orders, including baptism and the Church’s orders, into the faith. And John’s three sisters did not come to live their lives in the church, their lives with other sisters that were baptized or raised. Therefore, the author can assume that the four victims were all women. Although he does not explicitly mention them in the book, many scholars, especially in English, take them only as having lived a life worthy of martyrdom. In addition, many of them do not come from the same family (John, Mary, and Jesus ‡and have other names—John Chrysostom, John the Baptist, St. John, and St. John the Baptist