This note is interpretation, not translation. It reads the letter a line at a time against the rest of the Bible. The markers already on this page are named as they come; every other text is named where it is quoted. Where a join is Jon’s and no verse states it, a red flag says so.
Who is speaking (3:14). “The Amen, the trustworthy and true witness.” The green marker is Isaiah 65:16, which in the Hebrew calls God “the God of Amen” twice; the Greek translation turns both into “the true God.” This verse keeps both at once, the Amen and the trustworthy and true witness, so it is one of the places where the wording follows the Hebrew and not the Greek. Amen is a Hebrew word carried into Greek untranslated, from a root meaning steady, and as a title it makes a person the reliability itself. Archē, in “the source of God’s creation,” is both the point something starts from and first place in rank; the Greek does not force a choice, and the translation says “source.” Laodicea had heard the two words of Him before. Paul told the Colossians to have his letter read “in the assembly of the Laodiceans” too (Colossians 4:16), and in it he calls Him “the firstborn of all creation (ktiseōs),” and “the beginning (archē), the firstborn from the dead, so that in everything He might be first” (1:15, 1:18).
The water (3:15–16). The blue note sets out what is known of the city’s water. The reading here does not rest on it. “Lukewarm,” chliaros, is found nowhere else in the Bible, in the New Testament or in the Greek translation of the Old, and “hot,” zestos, is found only in these two verses. So the rest of scripture does not define the words, but it does use hot and cold, and both are good. Cold: “whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water … will not lose his reward” (Matthew 10:42), the only other verse in the New Testament with this word for cold, psychros; “like cold water to a weary soul, so is good news from a far country” (Proverbs 25:25), where the Greek translation has the same word. Hot, from the same root as zestos: “boiling in spirit, serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11), and Apollos, “boiling in spirit,” teaching about Jesus (Acts 18:25). The one place cold is bad is a different word, a verb: “the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). Since He wishes they were cold or hot (3:15), He is not using cold that way here.
Hot and cold — Jon’s reading. Jon reads the hot as brotherly love, and boiling in spirit, teaching accurately the things of Jesus; and the cold as the good news and the refreshing that goes with it. The word for hot, zestos, is from the verb zeō, to boil, and that verb is in two verses of the New Testament, which are the two halves of his hot: Romans 12:11, in the middle of brotherly love, and Acts 18:25, Apollos, who “boiling in spirit, spoke and taught accurately the things about Jesus” (zeōn tō pneumati elalei kai edidasken akribōs ta peri tou Iēsou). For the first, Romans 12 puts three of this letter’s things within four verses: “in brotherly love (philadelphia) warmly devoted to one another” (12:10), which is the name of the city in the letter just before this one; “boiling in spirit” (12:11); and “sharing in the needs (chreiais) of the saints, pursuing hospitality” (12:13), where Laodicea says “I need nothing” with the same word (chreian, 3:17). For the cold, Solomon has it twice, both times with a messenger: “like the cold of snow at harvest is a faithful messenger to those who send him; he refreshes the soul of his masters” (Proverbs 25:13, in the Hebrew; the Greek translation drops the snow and keeps “a faithful messenger”), and good news from a far country as cold water (25:25). In Matthew 10 the cup of cold water goes to the ones Jesus is sending out to preach: “whoever receives you receives me” (10:40), and the little ones of 10:42 are His messengers. So the message refreshes the thirsty, and those who receive the messengers refresh them. Read together, Laodicea neither loves the brothers with a burning heart nor refreshes anyone with the good news; it thinks it needs nothing, so it gives nothing. Apollos shows what hot is. He was “boiling in spirit,” speaking and teaching accurately about Jesus, and speaking boldly in the synagogue (Acts 18:25–26). When Priscilla and Aquila explained the way of God to him “more accurately,” because he knew only John’s baptism, he took it; the brothers wrote ahead for the disciples in Achaia to receive him, and when he arrived he “greatly helped those who had believed through grace,” showing from the scriptures that the Anointed is Jesus (18:26–28). So being hot did not mean he had everything right. It was zeal for the Lord, spent on helping the believers.
Lukewarm, and mixing — Jon’s reading. Hot and cold mixed make lukewarm, and Jon reads the lukewarm of 3:16 as a mixture, above all the mixing of the old covenant with the new, of law with grace. Jesus states the rule: “No one can serve two masters … you cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). James says it of the mouth: “with it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people made in God’s likeness; from the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring pour out sweet and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brothers, produce olives, or a vine figs? Neither can salt water produce sweet” (James 3:9–12). Jesus joins the tree to the mouth: “each tree is known by its own fruit … out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:44–45).
Law and grace do not mix. Paul says it outright, and more than once. “If by grace, it is no longer from works; otherwise grace is no longer grace” (Romans 11:6): mixed, it is not half of each, it stops being grace. “If those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made empty and the promise is cancelled” (4:14). “If the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from promise; but God gave it to Abraham freely, by promise” (Galatians 3:18). “The law is not of faith; rather, the one who does them will live by them” (3:12): two principles, not one. To people who began with the Spirit and then took on the law: “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being completed in the flesh?” (3:3). “If righteousness comes through the law, then the Anointed died for nothing” (2:21). “You who are trying to be made right by law have been cut off from the Anointed; you have fallen out of grace” (5:4). And the reason a little matters: “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (5:9). The two covenants are two women, and scripture’s word on them is not to keep both: “Throw out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman will not inherit with the son of the free woman” (4:30, with 4:24). Paul’s other picture is marriage. A woman joined to another man while her husband lives is called an adulteress (Romans 7:3); “so you also, my brothers, died to the law through the body of the Anointed, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, so that we might bear fruit for God” (7:4). Two husbands at once is the unfaithfulness. And Hebrews: “in saying ‘new,’ He has made the first old; and what is growing old and ageing is near to vanishing” (Hebrews 8:13).
New wine. Jesus said it when He was asked why His students did not fast like the Pharisees and John’s students (Matthew 9:14): “no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the skins burst, the wine is spilled and the skins are ruined; but they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are kept” (9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37–38). Luke adds the patch torn from a new garment, which “will not match the old” (5:36), and the drinker who “after drinking old wine does not want new, for he says, The old is good” (5:39). The new wine is His. The first of His signs was water turned into wine, water standing in six stone jars “for the purification of the Jews,” and the steward said, “you have kept the good wine until now”; John calls it “the beginning of the signs,” and says He showed His glory (John 2:6, 2:10–11). At the last supper the wine is the covenant: “this cup is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20), “my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). And He calls what is in the cup “the fruit of the vine”: “I will not drink from now on of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18). “New” there, kainon, is the word of the new covenant and of the new wineskins (Luke 5:38). He is “the true vine” (John 15:1), where Israel, the vineyard God planted and looked to for grapes, gave wild ones (Isaiah 5:2, 5:7).
The fig. Jon reads the fig as the old. It is the first covering in scripture. After they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Genesis 3:7). Then “the LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them” (3:21): the covering people make for themselves, and the covering God makes. Laodicea has the same pieces. It does not know, it is naked, and it is told to get white clothes from Him and have its eyes anointed (3:17–18). Jon reads the law as the knowledge of good and evil. What scripture says of the law: “through the law comes the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20); “I would not have known sin except through the law” (7:7); and Moses set it before them as “life and good, death and evil” (Deuteronomy 30:15), the tree’s two words. When Paul tells how the commandment worked on him, he uses Eden’s word: “sin, taking its opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me” (Romans 7:11), the verb of “the serpent deceived me” (Genesis 3:13 in the Greek) and of “as the serpent deceived Eve” (2 Corinthians 11:3). He also says the law itself “is holy, and the commandment is holy and right and good” (Romans 7:12); the death came through sin using it (7:13). The fig tree Jesus cursed had “nothing but leaves,” and He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again” (Mark 11:14); in Matthew, “may no fruit ever come from you again,” and it withered at once (Matthew 21:19). Mark wraps the story around the clearing of the temple (11:12–21), and the next morning the tree is “withered from the roots.” When Peter points to it, Jesus answers, “Have trust in God” (Mark 11:20–22). In the prophets the fig is Israel (Hosea 9:10), and Luke has a fig tree given one more year to bear (13:6–9).
What the new covenant’s works are — Jon’s reading. If law and grace do not mix, what does the new covenant do? Paul answers in the same breath as law and grace. “You who are trying to be made right by law have been cut off from the Anointed; you have fallen out of grace. For we, by the Spirit, out of trust, wait for the hope of righteousness. For in the Anointed Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but faith working through love” (Galatians 5:4–6). Jesus said it before him: “This is the work of God, that you trust in the One He sent” (John 6:29). And love is what the law was after all along: “serve one another through love; for the whole law is fulfilled in one word, You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Galatians 5:13–14; Romans 13:8–10), the brotherly love of the hot. Paul’s own choice of words says the rest. The flesh has “works”: “the works of the flesh are plain” (Galatians 5:19). The Spirit has fruit: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (5:22–23). That is law and grace again: just before the list, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law” (5:18). Works are made; fruit grows.
Fruit grows on a tree. There were two trees in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9), and after the fig leaves the way to the tree of life was guarded (3:22–24). This book gives it back: “to the one who comes through it I will give to eat from the tree of life” (2:7), and in the city the tree of life bears its fruit every month, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations (22:2). Jon reads the tree of life as Jesus. “In Him was life” (John 1:4); “I am the bread of life” (6:35); “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). Proverbs calls wisdom “a tree of life to those who take hold of her” (3:18), and Paul calls the Anointed “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24, 1:30). God says it of Himself to Ephraim, the man of this letter’s boast: “I am like a green cypress; from me your fruit is found” (Hosea 14:9). And the fruit is the vine’s, like grapes: “I am the vine, you are the branches. The one who remains in me, and I in him, bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5); “the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine” (15:4). Laodicea says “I need nothing” (ouden); the vine says “apart from me you can do nothing” (ouden). Since He is the source, there is nothing to boast of. “Where then is boasting? It is shut out. By what law? Of works? No, by the law of trust” (Romans 3:27). “Not from works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in the Anointed Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand” (Ephesians 2:9–10). “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31).
The boast (3:17). “I am rich, I have made it, I need nothing.” The green marker is Hosea, and the Hebrew has both halves of the boast in one verse: “Ephraim said, Surely I have become rich, I have found wealth for myself; in all my labours they will find in me no iniquity that is sin” (Hosea 12:9 in the Hebrew, 12:8 in the English). Rich, and nothing wrong found in me: “I need nothing” in money and in righteousness. The Greek translation has peplouteka, “I have become rich,” the word of 3:17 in the same form. For the second clause it has “I have found refreshment (anapsychē) for myself,” from the root of cold, where the Hebrew has wealth (on); that is the Greek only. The New Testament has that word family twice: “change your minds and turn … so that times of refreshing may come from the face of the Lord” (Acts 3:19–20), and Onesiphorus, who “often refreshed me, and was not ashamed of my chain” (2 Timothy 1:16). Ephraim found his refreshment for himself; Peter says it comes from the Lord, and Paul has it from a brother. Ephraim’s name credits God, “for God has made me fruitful” (Genesis 41:52), and Hosea ends with God’s answer, using the verb of the boast: “from me your fruit is found” (14:9). Deuteronomy sets out the same two sides: “you say in your heart, My power and the might of my hand made me this wealth,” and “remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to make wealth” (8:17–18).
Paul meets the same boast inside a church. “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not? Already you are full! Already you have become rich! Without us you have reigned. And I wish you did reign” (1 Corinthians 4:7–8). “Become rich” is the verb again, and “I wish,” ophelon, is the rare word of 3:15, “I wish you were cold or hot”; it is in four verses of the New Testament, and these are two of them. Paul’s answer is that everything they have was received.
Luke shows the boast in two men, one after the other. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is told “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (18:9); the one prays about what he does, the other asks for mercy and goes home made right (18:10–14). Then the ruler: “All these I have kept since my youth.” Jesus: “One thing you still lack: sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” He became very sad, “for he was very rich” (18:21–23). He is Hosea’s two halves in one man, rich and claiming the law kept, and “one thing you still lack” answers “I need nothing.” Mark adds that Jesus, looking at him, loved him (10:21), as the one He loves is the one He corrects here (3:19). Those who heard asked, “Then who can be saved?”, and the answer is “what is impossible with people is possible with God” (Luke 18:26–27).
Wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked (3:17). “Wretched,” talaipōros, is in two verses of the New Testament, this one and Romans 7:24, and Paul gives the answer in the next breath. “The law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin” (7:14). “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus the Anointed our Lord!” (7:24–25). “There is therefore now no condemnation for those in the Anointed Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in the Anointed Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do … God did, sending His own Son” (8:1–3). Romans 7 is a man trying under the law; Laodicea is that man and does not know it. Whether Romans 7 is Paul before he trusted or after is argued, and the answer in 7:25 and 8:1 is the same either way. Romans 8 answers more of the list. Poor: “if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with the Anointed” (8:17), and “how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (8:32). Naked: “who will separate us from the love of the Anointed? … famine, or nakedness …?” (8:35), and that word, gymnotēs, is in three verses of the New Testament, one of them 3:18, “the shame of your nakedness.”
“Pitiful,” eleeinos, is also in two verses, this one and 1 Corinthians 15:19, and it has the same shape: “if in this life only we have hoped in the Anointed, we are of all people most pitiful. But now the Anointed has been raised from the dead” (15:19–20). Blind: “you trust yourself to be a guide of the blind, a light to those in darkness … having in the law the form of knowledge and truth” (Romans 2:19–20), a man sure he is the one who sees, with the verb of Luke 18:9, “trusted.” Naked again: “I was naked and you clothed me” (Matthew 25:36), and “naked and you did not clothe me” (25:43), with the verb of 3:18, periballō; and the brother or sister who is naked (James 2:15). In the rest of the New Testament the naked are clothed by the brothers, the hot of Romans 12. Poor: the purple note at 2:9 has Paul’s sentence with both halves, “though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9), with this letter’s verb.
Buy from me (3:18). “My advice is that you buy from me.” The blue note is the city’s three industries, named in order: it was a banking centre, and when the earthquake of AD 60 flattened it, it refused imperial aid and rebuilt from its own funds; it bred a glossy black-fleeced sheep and exported the cloth; and its medical school was known for eye ointments. Gold, white clothes, ointment for the eyes: each is something the city already sold. And this is the only place in the New Testament where anyone is told to buy from Jesus. The verb, agorazō, is in thirty verses; wherever He is the subject, He is the buyer and the price is His: “with your blood you bought people for God” (5:9), “bought from the earth” (14:3–4), “you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23), “denying the Master who bought them” (2 Peter 2:1), and “the Anointed bought us out of the curse of the law” (Galatians 3:13). Where people tried to trade in holy things He drove them out, “do not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:16), and Peter told Simon, “you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money” (Acts 8:20). Isaiah has the same verb with no money: “come, buy and drink without silver,” and in the Hebrew, “buy and eat, without money and without price” (Isaiah 55:1), and in the Greek the next line is “why do you spend silver on what is not bread? Listen to me” (55:2). The book ends with the water of life given “free of charge” (22:17; 21:6). Jesus once spoke of buying when He meant to give. Seeing the crowd, He asked Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”, and John adds, “He said this to test him, for He Himself knew what He was going to do” (John 6:5–6); Philip worked out two hundred denarii, and Jesus gave them as much as they wanted (6:7, 6:11). In the parable of the ten bridesmaids, the foolish are sent “to those who sell, to buy for yourselves,” and while they are gone the bridegroom comes and the door is shut (Matthew 25:9–10). Laodicea is told to buy “from me.”
Jon reads the “buy” as irony: a figure Jesus uses to make the hearer stop and think. Laodicea says it is rich and made itself so; so He says, then buy, and what He offers cannot be bought. Jesus said the same kind of thing to the Pharisees, who took themselves to be the righteous: “those who are strong have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17; Matthew 9:12). “Have no need,” ou chreian echousin, is Laodicea’s phrase, “I need nothing” (ouden chreian echō), and the one who needs no doctor is the one who thinks he is well. Matthew adds, “go and learn what this means: I want mercy, and not sacrifice” (9:13). The city with the famous eye ointment is told it is blind.
Jesus spoke this way elsewhere too. To the Pharisees, a command He did not want obeyed: “fill up, then, the measure of your fathers” (Matthew 23:32); and “well do you set aside the commandment of God, to keep your tradition” (Mark 7:9). The buying question to Philip, above, was asked “to test him” (John 6:6). God speaks the same way through the prophets: “come to Bethel and transgress” (Amos 4:4); “go and cry out to the gods you have chosen; let them save you” (Judges 10:14); “go, serve each of you his idols” (Ezekiel 20:39). Jon does not suggest that any of these is behind this letter. They are here for readers who want to explore how Jesus, and God before Him, used irony.
Gold refined in fire. The green marker is Zechariah 13:9: “I will bring the third through the fire, and refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say, They are my people, and they will say, The LORD is my God.” The Greek translation’s “refine,” pyroō, is the verb of 3:18, “refined in fire.” In Zechariah the refining comes after the spirit of grace is poured out and they look to the one they pierced (12:10, marked at 1:7), after a fountain is opened for sin (13:1), and after the shepherd is struck and the sheep scattered (13:7), which Jesus quoted of Himself the night He was arrested (Matthew 26:31). The fire proves; it does not earn. In this book the verb is used twice, here and of His own feet, “like fine bronze glowing in a furnace” (1:15), where the Greek is the same word, refined. Peter sets gold beside faith: “so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus the Anointed” (1 Peter 1:7), the only verse in the New Testament with gold, testing and fire together. What the fire does: “when He has tested me, I will come out as gold” (Job 23:10); “the crucible is for silver and the furnace for gold, and the LORD tests hearts” (Proverbs 17:3); “I have refined you … I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10); He sits as a refiner and purifies them like gold and silver, “and they will bring offerings to the LORD in righteousness” (Malachi 3:3). Paul says the fire tests the work built on the foundation, gold, silver and precious stones or wood, hay and straw: “the fire itself will test what sort of work each one has done,” and if it burns, “he himself will be saved, but as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:12–15).
“So you can actually be rich.” Paul names Laodicea in Colossians 2:1, and then says what the riches are: “that their hearts may be encouraged, knit together in love, and into all the riches of the full assurance of understanding, into the knowledge of the mystery of God, the Anointed, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:2–3). The word for full assurance, plērophoria, is in four verses of the New Testament, and one says what it is: “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:22). The treasure is where Jesus put it: “do not store up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust destroy … but store up treasures in heaven … for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21; Luke 12:33–34), what He offered the ruler (Luke 18:22). Moses counted the reproach of the Anointed “greater riches than the treasures of Egypt” (Hebrews 11:26), and “we have this treasure in jars of clay” (2 Corinthians 4:7). In this book the gold ends as the city, “pure gold, like clear glass” (21:18), and its street (21:21); and the elders wear gold crowns (4:4) and throw them down before the throne (4:10).
White clothes to put on. The city sold black wool; He offers white. The clearest picture of God clothing someone is Zechariah 3. Joshua the high priest stands before the angel of the LORD in filthy garments, with the accuser at his right hand (3:1–3); “Take the filthy garments off him,” and to him, “See, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you in festal robes”; and they put a clean turban on his head “and clothed him in garments” (3:4–5). The Greek translation of 3:5 has periebalon auton himatia, the verb and noun of 3:18, “white clothes (himatia) to put on (peribalē).” Its 3:4 has “put on him a robe to the feet,” podērē, the robe Jesus wears at 1:13, the only time the word is used in the New Testament. Isaiah says it of himself: “He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10), set out at Sardis. Paul: “you are all sons of God through faith in the Anointed Jesus; for as many of you as were immersed into the Anointed have put on the Anointed” (Galatians 3:26–27), done; and to people who already trust, “the night is far gone, the day is near … let us put on the armour of light; let us walk decently, as in the day … put on the Lord Jesus the Anointed, and make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:11–14), a command to live in what they have. “Decently” there, euschēmonōs, is the opposite of the shame at 16:15, aschēmosynē: “happy is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes on, so that he does not walk around naked and people see his shame.” In this book the white robes are given (6:11), washed in the blood of the Lamb (7:14) and worn by the elders (4:4); the bride “was allowed to dress in fine linen,” and the book adds, “the fine linen is the just acts of God’s people” (19:8).
Ointment for your eyes. The verb, enchriō, “rub on” or anoint, and the ointment, kollourion, are both found only here in the New Testament. The root is chriō, to anoint, and two passages with it land on this letter. Jesus reads at Nazareth: “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor … and sight to the blind” (Luke 4:18), from the Greek of Isaiah 61:1; in one sentence, anointing, poor and blind, two of Laodicea’s words with their remedy. And John: “you have an anointing (chrisma) from the Holy One, and you all know” (1 John 2:20); “the anointing you received from Him remains in you, and you have no need that anyone teach you … His anointing teaches you about everything” (2:27). Laodicea says “I need nothing” (ouden chreian echō); John says “you have no need” (ou chreian echete), the same phrase. Laodicea is told “you do not realise” (ouk oidas); John says “you all know” (oidate pantes). The ones who truly need no one are the anointed, and they know; the city that says it needs nothing without it does not know what it is. The words for the anointing differ (enchriō here, chrisma and chriō there) and John does not speak of eyes, but the two phrases are the same. Luke puts a blind man right after the Pharisee and the ruler: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me … Lord, that I may see.” “See again; your faith has saved you” (18:38–42). And John 9 ends on the claim this letter answers: “if you were blind you would have no sin; but now you say, We see; your sin remains” (9:41).
Jon also points to the pool of Siloam. In John 9 Jesus makes clay and puts it on the eyes of a man blind from birth, and says, “go, wash in the pool of Siloam,” which John translates “Sent”; the man washes and comes back seeing (9:6–7), and he tells it, “he made clay and anointed my eyes” (9:11).
Correction as love (3:19). The green marker is Proverbs 3:12: “The one the Lord loves he corrects, and he disciplines every son he accepts.” The proverb answers a reader who has taken correction as a sign of being unloved and says it is the sign of the opposite; the sentence here is nearly the whole of it, with the loving and the correcting in the same order.
The door (3:20). Two markers on one sentence. The green one is Song of Songs 5:2: “I sleep, but my heart is awake. The voice of my beloved, knocking: Open to me, my sister, my love.” In the Song the beloved knocks at night and asks to be let in; here the one knocking asks it of anyone who hears his voice, and promises to eat with them. The purple one is the knock itself. Krouō is nine words in nine verses in these writings; Luke 12:36 is the one place before this where the knocker is the lord himself, coming back to servants who open to him at once; and James 5:9, “look, the judge stands before the doors,” is the only other verse with look, stand and door together. It is not a quotation of any of them.
The throne (3:21), and the ear (3:22). “To the one who comes through it, I will give the right to sit down with me on my throne, just as I came through it myself and sat down with my Father on his throne.” The Greek-word note says thronos is the seat of someone with the standing to sit while others stand, and that the book uses it more often than the rest of the New Testament combined. Jesus had promised His followers the same twice. Straight after the rich ruler went away: “you who have followed me, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you also will sit on twelve thrones” (Matthew 19:28). And at the last supper, after the cup of the new covenant: “I appoint to you, just as my Father appointed to me, a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones” (Luke 22:29–30). The meal of 3:20 and the throne of 3:21 are in that one sentence, with “just as my Father.” The letter ends as every letter does, with the Gospels’ own line, ho echōn ous akousatō.
How far this reaches. Every text above is quoted, and the shared Greek and Hebrew words are named where they occur. The joins that are Jon’s and are not stated anywhere are flagged below.
Red flag That the hot of 3:15 is brotherly love and accurate teaching about Jesus, and the cold is the good news and the refreshing that goes with it. Revelation does not say what either stands for. What is stated: cold water refreshes and is given to the messengers (Matthew 10:42), and good news and a faithful messenger are compared to cold (Proverbs 25:13, 25:25); the verb “boil” is used in only two verses, one beside brotherly love (Romans 12:10–11) and one of accurate teaching about Jesus (Acts 18:25). That Jesus means these here is the join.
Red flag That the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the law, and so the fig the old covenant. Every other step is stated: the fig leaves after the tree (Genesis 3:7), the law as the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20, 7:7) and Eden’s word for what the commandment did (7:11), the fig tree cursed and withered (Mark 11:14, 11:20). No verse joins the tree to the law, and Paul calls the law itself holy and good (7:12).
Red flag That the tree of life is Jesus, and the fruit of the Spirit its fruit. No verse says either. The nearest texts are those above: life is in Him (John 1:4; 14:6), wisdom is a tree of life (Proverbs 3:18) and the Anointed is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), God is the tree from whom the fruit is found (Hosea 14:9), and the branches bear fruit by remaining in the vine (John 15:4–5).
Red flag That the “buy” of 3:18 is irony and that what is offered cannot be bought. The letter says “buy” and does not say “without money,” and in Matthew 13:44–46 buying the kingdom costs everything a man has.
Red flag That the ointment for the eyes is what Jesus did at Siloam. Siloam is not named in Revelation; John 9 has a different compound of the verb (epichriō) and no ointment, and 3:18 has no clay, pool or washing.