Here’s perhaps the most excessively detailed Sunday School lesson plan I’ve ever imagined—but the exegesis was absorbing, and let me work out some thoughts I was having at the time. You’ll notice some infelicities: I discuss Biblical, Pastoral, Systematic theology but have not, yet, in 2001, learned much at all about the fourfold sense; I am pretty fluid with my Greek-word and English-word exegetical conclusions all at once (though I can say I looked up information on the Greek for every word, here, and that at the time I was doing ancient language study, so I wasn’t completely incompetent at that). And it’s clumsy to have regarded John’s Gospel as fundamentally written for first proclamation, rather than as a theological and liturgical filling out of the work the Synoptics had done. In any case, the main analysis of John’s craftsmanship of the opening verses of his Gospel, especially his confounding of both Greek and Hebrew expectations, still seems to have merit, I’d say:
