John 14:6 — December 27, 2025 – John Agliata

THE DAILY UPDATE

It’s a quiet Saturday in Foristell, Missourah, my hometown of the past several years. I was up super-early this morning, just before 4 a.m. The oral surgery I had on Tuesday is fine and doesn’t hurt that bad, but it is just enough not-fine to wake me up and keep me awake, it seems.

I have been unsettled in general since Christmas Eve. I went to the church my family has been going to and seems to love because I wanted to be together for that holiday time, but it didn’t take long for the church/Church to reiterate to me that I am Them and they are Us. It is so damn overt to me, yet when I look around, I see no such awareness on the faces of anyone else. Maybe it’s because they are all Us.

So much lip service is paid to being open and welcoming of those who are not Us, but then the rest of what comes out of those lips is about how the Us Folk have the way and the truth. That means that all those they are supposedly welcoming are simultaneously being condemned by the Us Folk to eternal damnation, which doesn’t really seem that welcoming considering it is being done not based on anything other than a different belief in the unknowable.

So I did some investigating. So much of the Christian belief falls back on that John 14:6 claim in which the words are put into Jesus’ mouth that he said he is the lone way to heaven. But so much other intelligent commentary points out how unlikely it is that Jesus actually said that. Among that evidence:

The account of those words does not appear in any other text, and not just Biblical text but any text, even by those who wrote prolifically about the man who was Jesus. No Roman historian, no Jewish historian, no early Christian writer outside the New Testament quotes it independently.
Even early Christian writers who quote Jesus extensively (Ignatius, Clement, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus) only quote it because they are quoting the Gospel of John, not because they have another source. John’s Gospel has a very distinctive style — long theological speeches, “I am” statements, metaphors — that don’t appear in the earlier Gospels.
The saying doesn’t match Jesus’ speech patterns from earlier sources.
The saying doesn’t fit the historical Jesus of first‑century Judaism. This line is highly theological, reflecting the later Christian community’s beliefs about Jesus. It sounds more like the voice of the author of John than the voice of a Galilean Jewish teacher.
Even within John, the long speeches are widely considered literary creations, not stenographic transcripts.
The Gospel of John is written much later (around 90–110 CE), decades after Jesus’ death, and its purpose is explicitly theological, by John’s own words: “These things are written so that you may believe…” (John 20:31). It’s not trying to be a historical transcript, so asserting anything in it as a claim for exclusive right to anything is dubious.

It just feels to me like so much of the Christian services I’ve been to in the past year have been about trying really, really hard to assert as fact things that aren’t provable and probably aren’t true. That would be fine, I guess, if it weren’t being done to set apart as less-than those who believe something different. I heard more than three or four times Christmas Eve how I was welcomed, but in the next breath I was essentially told I was going to hell unless I got with the program. And that program? The only program? It’s Christianity.

There is so much evidence that should bring doubt to Christianity’s claim to exclusive truth, but to bring that up is to welcome statements such as, “Satan has blinded their eyes.” For. The. Love. Could it perhaps be equally asserted that Satan is blinding the eyes of those who feel the need to claim special favor at the expense of those who raise counterpoints that should at least lead to some motherfucking humility?!?!?!?! To claim you know something without a shadow of a doubt based on faith alone is to check the brain God gave you at the door. And that, to me, is an insult to God.

To be able to say with a straight face that no one should question the virgin birth of a man who is god and who is man and who is spirit who died and was resurrected is the very definition of hubris. It is fine to believe that. It might even be true. But to assert it as the truth that is beyond question is arrogant … and, frankly, rude to your guests, which isn’t very Jesus-like.

Here’s undeniable fact: How the Bible became the Bible is highly suspect. The first historical reference to it was in 367 CE, more than 300 years after Jesus’ death. That’s when some guy named Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a letter listing the 27 books Christians use as the Bible today. Two councils of unnamed individuals (Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397) affirmed it. The entire process was long, messy, and wasn’t really settled until the late 1500s, a period not exactly known for accurate thought. So if the only thing you’re going to use to condemn people to Hell is a highly suspect book and you can do it without a degree of uncertainty or humility, well, then I have no problem not being a part of your little club.

John 14:6 — December 27, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

Read More …

Share this:

Like this:

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Discover more from John Agliata - Johnny Boy Marketing