“One day I hope to offer to John my congratulations and appreciation. I fully expect him to direct all praise to God in Christ through the Spirit, as he should, but I hope he also feels encouraged that we appreciated the difficulty of what he undertook, the profundity with which he accomplished it, and the elegance and beauty that by God’s grace he gave the world. What a book.
And it goes without saying but must be said: As good as the Gospel of John is, the master whose story it tells is even better.
John has produced a book that brings together the world-historical import of a Genesis with the reflective depths of an Ecclesiastes. His is a book that radiates as much glory as the Psalter even as it scales theological heights with ease comparable to Isaiah, with the urgent passion and love of Deuteronomy joined to the symbolic power of Hosea.
John was a man who meditated on the Scriptures, and in his beautiful book we read the words of someone shaped by them, a man who knew what it was to be loved by their fulfillment, a man who followed in the footsteps of his master and made God known to men.”
–James Hamilton, In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Meaning in the Literary Structure of the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2025), 13.
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