The social meaning of love in the Gospel of John

Abstract

The concept of love abounds in the Bible but it is questionable whether the same un-derstanding that the antique audiences of the biblical documents could have had of this concept is prevalent in our time. The reason for such doubt lies, simply, in the noticeable absence of regard for each other among (even devout) people.

The study was directed towards an investigation of theological and popular views on biblical love as well as a brief overview of lexicographical works by known scholars as regards the noun  and the verb . It was found that, despite the vol-ume of entries, not much in the way of clarification of the meaning of  and re-lated words is available. There is, indeed, a dire lack of contemporary social-scien-tific related data as regards this important concept and related matters.

The world of the New Testament differs widely from the one we live in and a brief overview was given from social-scientific sources on the historical-cultural aspects of the first century Mediterranean world. This was done from the perspective of making use of such data in the exegesis of three shorts text-segments selected from the Gospel of John.

The text-segments John 3: 16; 13: 34-45 and 21: 15-17 are well-known for the bear-ing they have on the noun  and the verb  in the Fourth Gospel as well as the popular meaning/s that is quite commonly ascribed to the texts. Exegesis was done from a grammatical-historical paradigm with joint usage of applicable historical-cultural data.