John 10


John 10 is the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel. This chapter records the sermon of Jesus Christ about Him being the "Good Shepherd" and contains the only mention of Hanukkah, "the Feast of Dedication", in the New Testament.

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 42 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:
Events recorded in this chapter refer to the following locations:
In verses 1-5, Jesus uses a parable, illustration or "figure of speech" regarding the manner in which a true shepherd enters his sheepfold, unlike the manner of a thief or a stranger. Anglican Bishop Charles Ellicott notes that "the word rendered 'parable' is the wider word which includes every kind of figurative and proverbial teaching, every kind of speech, as the etymology reminds us, which departs from the usual course ". Jesus' audience did not understand.
In this illustration, the true shepherd "enters the sheepfold by the door" and "calls his own sheep by name and leads them out ". This is the only occurrence of the word ἐξάγει in the New Testament. The Ethiopic version adds "and loves them". The alternative way in taken by the thief or stranger is to "climb up some other way", i.e. to climb over the wall of the sheepfold.

The door of the sheep and the good shepherd

Jesus describes himself in verses 7 and 9 as "the door" and in verses 11 and 14 as "the good shepherd". The word in θύρα is translated as "door" in the King James Version and the American Standard Version, but as "gate" in the New Revised Standard Version, the Common English Bible and other translations. In verse 7, the Textus Receptus adds that Jesus said to them but this addition is generally agreed to be "of doubtful authority".

The Feast of Dedication

Verse 22 refers to Hanukkah:
The feast recalls the Maccabean purification and re-dedication of the Temple,. The narrative moves forward from the Feast of Tabernacles, when the events and teaching from to appear to take place. During the intervening two months, there is no account of whether Jesus remained in Jerusalem or not. In we read that Jesus "went away again beyond the Jordan", and German Protestant theologian Heinrich Meyer identifies a number of commentators who have suggested that there was an additional "journey to Galilee or Peraea" before the feast of dedication, although Meyer himself considers that these suggestions are "dictated by harmonistic presuppositions and clumsy combinations,... and not by the requirements of exegesis".

The believers beyond the Jordan

The chapter ends with Jesus evading Jewish attempts to stone him and then leaving Jerusalem and traveling "beyond the Jordan to the place where John was baptizing at first". and similarly record that Jesus traveled "to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan", but in the synoptic tradition He had previously been in Capernaum rather than Jerusalem. Perea was a region where many people "came to the decision that He was the Messiah".