Four Gospels

Rev. Linda Francis

Essay for completion of the class on the four Gospels.

Perhaps the Gospel of John was were my doubts about the "real truth of the Gospels" begin when I was just a girl. I was a writer, an artist and storyteller even at that age and most of all a dreamer and a mystic. There was a new country song out called "Me and Jesus Have Our own Thing Goin'." Jesus became very real to me that year. I wrote poetry and made up songs to him almost daily on my walks in nature alone or in the hay loft of my Grand Father's barn. He became so real to me it was as we were twin souls and could read the mind and feelings of the other. I came to known a man meek, mild and humble yet strong and wise beyond words. I knew my fundamental parents and church had the man they believed in, picture in their minds and hearts all wrong. As I read the Gospel of John that summer I love the style of the poetic writer and his storytelling ability but I felt he did not know the "real man" I knew and was telling the story wrong. I recall communicating in my own special way that summer with my new friend I had discovered that summer and feeling "his" silent voice telling me, "Yes, Linda, you are right, I would never boast about myself to others as the author has me do. The write loves me as much as you have came to love me this summer but he just heard about me and created the person he wanted me to be, but he never took the time to really know me as you have this summer."

I feel as if there too are perhaps two people involved in authorship of this story. Perhaps a left brained centered person still much in the control of the ego that wants black and white questions and answers, and wanted to convince others he was right to strength the cause of the new church and perhaps a creative storyteller who took his story and told it as it was presented to him, but in a poetic and dramatic fashion. Creative thinkers, like poets and storytellers, in general are not back and white thinkers and want open ended questions and not closed answers as often appear in this gospel.

It was a good to find many years later in my others too who also had the wisdom and knowledge in their research to know and show this story had a purpose of it's own that was more to the author's personal views than the real nature and history of the man called Jesus.

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