Divine Presence and Absence and the Purpose of John’s Gospel

The final chapter of the study seeks to consider how the themes of divine presence and absence affect an understanding of the Gospel as a whole. To do so, I link John’s claims about the significance of Jesus’s presence and absence to the Gospel’s stated purpose in John 20:31. I then compare John to the Lindian Chronicle, an inscription set up on Lindos to provide evidence of Athena Lindia’s presence. The comparison illuminates how John leverages a history of prior epiphanies to provide corroborating evidence for his claims about Jesus, highlights Jesus’s care for his people to strengthen intra-community bonds among believers, and stresses the necessary human response of loving others in the community in order to maintain relationship with Jesus’s presence. Additionally, the comparison provides insights into scholarly debates about whether, and to what extent, the Gospel text itself might be understood to mediate Jesus’s presence.