More on the Rich Young Man

One of the New Testaments sitting around in my house has a "Harmony of the Gospels" in the back of it, showing which parts of Jesus' life are talked about where. I should have known it before, but I just realized this afternoon that two events Unitarians use to argue against the supposed deity of Christ, which are the Baptism of Jesus and the story of the rich young man, are in all three of the Synoptic Gospels but nowhere in the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John does have a whole lot of stuff that isn't in the Synoptic Gospels, like the preface about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among men, the parable about the bread of life, and all those verses that seem to fit so neatly into an Evangelical perspective. It should be no wonder that when I went door-to-door soul winning when I was younger, all the verses that I referenced that weren't in the Romans Road were in John.

In the story of the rich young man, Jesus tells the young man (in 3 different gospels!) "Why do call me good? There is none good, but God." Implying, to the simple reader, that Jesus is saying that he isn't God. When I told my dad about this story not being in John, though, my dad *corrected* me and said that Jesus nowhere here claims to not be God, that he isn't telling the man to not call him good, and that he therefore is actually claiming to be God. I personally don't see how that fits into the story. If a man asks another guy why he's calling him good and then says that only God is good, the implication that he himself is God isn't the first thing you think of. And you typically wouldn't have any need to think of it, unless of course you already believe that Jesus is God and you have to somehow try to reconcile it with these three passages of the Bible which suggest that Jesus is in fact a mere human.

John is a very different kind of book from the other three gospels. I personally think it has a completely different agenda than the other gospels. And the interpretations people give to the three Synoptic Gospels to make them adhere to the rest of the New Testament are just as aggressive as the claims within these gospels about fulfilled prophecies from the Old Testament.