As you all know William Barclay, a professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow, who died in 1978 is one of my New Testament mentors. He was a prolific writer with a loving and inspired insight in the Bible. He was a man of vast knowledge of the history, mythology, archaeology and geology of the New Testament times and reading his commentary is like reading the New Testament in cinemascope and technicolour.

If I say, “my mentor” then it is that very presumptuous side of me who “adopt” spiritual grandfathers. I have quite a few “chosen” mentors whom I have kept close over many years. A few examples beside Barclay are Jack Hayford, alive and well, over 80 years old and still active, Watchman Nee, who died in a communist prison in 1974 in China, John Lennox, retired Oxford Mathematician and a master of Apologetics and Andrew Murray, a Scottish minister serving South Africa in the nineteenth century.

In this discussion of John I have followed the commentary of Barclay as the main structural guide. I have also included the very instructive footnotes, word wealth and kingdom dynamics in the Spirit Filled Life Bible with Jack Hayford as editor. Further, the commentaries available on Biblehub.com are very informative and the history and factual confirmation on the wider World Wide Web are just overwhelming. I am a researcher at heart and the most difficult is to steer away from too much information, when I can lose myself in the background and ancient history of the Biblical stories.