Sting: “Without uncertainty there is nothing worth doing. You need to put yourself in a slightly uncomfortable position in order to produce something new. I’m looking for novelty, I’m look for surprise. That is the essence of art. Without uncertainty there is no art.”
For the Christian artist there is more interest in discovering what is true, rather than just what is new, but one has to bear in mind the One who said ‘Behold, I make all things new’. In my recent work on the Beloved Disciple, and finding all sorts of confirmation both within and outside the Fourth Gospel that as John 11 says, Lazarus was the one our Lord loved in a special sense, I was not interested in novelty for its own sake, but also looking to be surprised, and I was. There were many mornings where research and the guidance of the Spirit led to new discoveries, and my editor can attest, that I kept adding and adding to the manuscript as more and more things were uncovered, for example the evidence that John Zebedee like his brother, was martyred before the sources of the Fourth Gospel were put together. Philip of Side, who like Eusebius had a copy of Papias ‘Exegesis of the Sayings of our Lord’ tells us that Jewish persons martyred John, just as Jesus had predicted for the two Zebedees. The John involved in the Fourth Gospel was clearly some other John, which frankly makes sense of the fact that none of the special Galilean stories in the Synoptics, that John of Zebedee could have confirmed, for example his being called from his nets in the sea of Galilee by Jesus, or his presence on the Mt. of Transfiguration with his brother and Peter are nowhere to be found in the Fourth Gospel.
There is much more in my forthcoming book entitled ‘Unmasking the Beloved Disciple’ to be forthcoming within the year, For now I would simply remind us all that the internal evidence in the Gospel itself must be the primary evidence, and later testimonies by church fathers must be the secondary evidence.
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