Johannine Portrayal of Jesus: Mapping “I Am” in the Gospel of John
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the Greek phrase ἐγώ εἰµι has been used as a form of the divine name by God to reveal himself in the Septuagint, biblical scholars generally acknowledge that the appropriate interpretation of this phrase is important for understanding John’s unique presentation of Jesus. However, scholars have not reached a consensus on the interpretation of Johannine “I am” and there are several problems with contemporary interpretive works. First, the extant studies rely heavily on the background of the “I am” phrase and draw their conclusions almost on the basis of diachronic data only. Consequently, the significance of this phrase in the Gospel of John itself has not been fully understood. Second, the linguistic features that are actually essential for the appropriate interpretation of this particular linguistic structure have not been fully assessed in current biblical scholarship. Third, the existing research normally interprets the “I am” phrases individually but fails to explore the relationship between these uses. In the Gospel of John, the Greek phrase ἐγώ εἰµι and its variants occur in Jesus’ utterances in thirty-one verses, namely John 4:26; 6:20, 35, 41, 48, 51; 7:34, 36; 8:12, 18, 23, 24, 28, 58; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25; 12:26; 13:19; 14:3, 6; 15:1, 5; 17:14, 16, 24; 18:5, 6, 8. This study conducts a discourse analysis based on the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to interpret these thirty-one occurrences of “I am” in Jesus’ utterances, concentrating on their interpretation and significance within the Johannine context. This new methodological framework can analyze the linguistic features of the New Testament text and may offer new insights into the current research of Johannine “I am” in most regards. Examining the function of this phrase through a functional-semantic analysis and a rhetorical-relational analysis, this study argues that the thirty-one occurrences of “I am” in Jesus’ utterances throughout the Gospel of John reinforce John’s portrayal of Jesus’ divinity. According to John’s construing of Jesus’ divinity, this study demonstrates how Johannine Christology is expressed through the narrative of John’s Gospel with various textual characteristics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".