gure in a school of interpreterswho preserved his teaching and expanded it as the years went on, until a geniusmember of the school at the end of the first century authored the Gospel as we knowit now. His identity, however, remains a mystery. Considering the paucity of theevidence, it will probably always remain a mystery.supports an evangelistic purpose: that you may come to faith, come to believe. Theformer, then supports and edificatory purpose: that you may continue in faith,continue to believe. In fact, it can easily be shown that both expressions are usedfor both initial faith and continuing in faith, so that nothing can be resolved by theappeal to one textual variant or the other.It is worth comparing these verses with the stated purpose of 1 John: "Thesethings I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order thatyou may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). This verse was clearlywritten to encourage Christians; by the contrasting form of its expression, John20:30-31 sounds evangelistic.This impression is confirmed by the firm syntactical evidence that the firstpurpose clause in 20:31 must be rendered literally, "that you may believe that theChrist, the Son of God, is Jesus." Thus the fundamental question the Fourth Gospeladdresses is not "Who is Jesus?" but "Who is the Messiah? Who is the Christ? Whois the Son of God?" In their context, these are questions of identity, not of kind: i.e.the question "Who is the Christ?" should not here be understood as "What kind of'Christ' are you talking about?" but "So you claim that you know who the Christ is.Prove it, then: Who is he?"Support for this is simply common sense. Christians would not ask that kind ofquestion, because they already knew the answer. The most likely people to ask thatsort of question would be Jews and Jewish proselytes who know what "the Christ"means, have some sort of messianic expectation, and are perhaps in personal contactwith ...
