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John’s version of how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee

John 6:15-21

Mark called his gematria puzzles "mysteries," John calls them "signs." John’s version (Jn 6:1-14) of feeding the five thousand, which he calls a "sign," immediately followed by the miracle of walking on water repeats almost every detail of Mark’s version of these two miracles. According to John, Jesus knew the crowd would try to seize him and make him a king, so he went alone to the mountain. When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got in a boat, and departed for Capernaum. It was then dark and the sea was roused because of a great wind. Having rowed about twenty-five or thirty stadia, they saw Jesus walking on the sea coming near the boat. They were frightened, but he said to them, "I am, do not fear." According to John, they took him into the boat just as it arrived at the shore. This detail contradicts Mark and Matthew who both said Jesus got in the boat in the middle of the sea. The only witnesses to this new "sign" were the disciples.

Mark and Matthew’s gematria "mysteries" of how Jesus walked on water were just too good for John to resist. John’s version assumed one already knew the initial setup of the sea, mountain, and Jesus from Mark and Matthew. The solution to John’s version comes mainly from the technique of drawing instructions.

The words "Have courage, I am, don’t fear" are identical in Mark and Matthew but in John's version, he drops one of the words Mark and Matthew used. The position of the circle formed by the words of Jesus in John’s version gives a startling confirmation of why John slightly altered the words of what Jesus said. John didn’t repeat the saying about taking a mountain and putting it in the sea. He probably thought it was too risky to repeat such an important geometry hint.

Luke and John were written five to twenty years after Matthew and Mark according to the opinion of todays experts. The early orthodox church fathers and their formerly pagan Christian converts were probably ignorant of the gematria mysteries contained in the first two gospels. If the Church fathers did know, they would have wanted to suppress it anyway because the critics of Christianity could have used the gematria solutions of the miracles to discredit the new religion. If the miracles were just crafty geometric allegories, it would follow that all the Church’s promises of salvation and resurrection were also allegorical. This was probably the reason why Luke ignored the story of how Jesus walked on water. To solve John’s "sign," draw the boat in the middle of the sea and just follow the drawing instructions given in the imagery of the verses.

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