preparation for the feast. The short, pregnant words of teaching are missing in .

             John. The miracles of the synoptics are often presented as human acts of .

             compassion, done in response to faith, and to be concealed from the .

             authorities. In John, fewer miracles are dealt with, and their episodic .

             character is gone. Instead they are woven into the author's whole structure. .

             They are pointers to Christ; they are signs or Opportunities for faith, not.

             results of faith [emphasis added].

             Still, St. John's Gospel remains essentially a Jewish book, in its tone and in its underpinnings. However, Judaism, well before Jesus' birth, had moved into the Greco-Roman world, and therefore adopted many Greek (Hellenistic) approaches to both thought and expression. Within his Gospel, John, a Jewish follower of Jesus (the word "Christian" was not in use during John's time) describes the life and meaning of the ministry of Jesus Christ in language that clearly reflects this distinctive blend of Jewish and Greek literary influences. As the web article "St. John the Baptist" further suggests, "Direct Greek influence on the gospel has probably been overstressed in the past; the basic influence of the Old Testament has recently and rightly been stressed. But the thought-forms out of which the author moves, and to which he speaks, may be described as those of this Hellenistic-Jewish amalgam.".

             Putting aside for a moment the similarities of St. John's Gospels (Gospels 12 and 21, with their straightforward, concise, descriptive, yet non-metaphorical language come to mind) to the cerebral, reasoned, unadorned style Plato's Apology, the lives of Jesus and Socrates contain enough parallels that the particular literary style of the Apology and similar Greek philosophical works of its time may even have encouraged, and therefore been reflected within, the literary style of St John's Gospels.