Andrew Lincoln’s judgment is that we should compare the Gospel of John with the ancient lives of philosophers, religious leaders or holy men, with the result that [W]hat we know of the genre should lead us to expect, as ancient readers would also have done, a narrative which contained a substratum of core events from the tradition with substantial correspondence to what happened in the past but which was now shaped by an interpretive superstructure with varying amounts of embellishment, including
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