5), who has the added reference as being Jesus’s friend. 5), the Gospel writer suggests the extended and continued nature of Jesus’ love he loves Martha and Mary as well as Lazarus (v.
Using an imperfect tense of the verb to love (v. Jesus’s love for Lazarus needs to be considered within the context of Jesus’s relationship with the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, as well. Lazarus is also given this title in John 11:11: “This He said, and after that He said to them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep but I go, so that I may awaken him out of sleep.’” Lazarus is the only individual character in the Fourth Gospel explicitly identified by name as Jesus’s friend. The Baptist is not the only Johannine character described as Jesus’s friend. The Bethany Family as Jesus’s Friends (John 11:1-46 12:1-8) In this way, John the Baptist can be understood as the precursor and bridge between pagan friendship, built on natural virtue and affinity, and the Christian understanding of friendship, built on grace. This idea is typical for the pre-Christian world of classical Greece and Rome friendship, where ideal friends shared in all of life’s experiences, whether good or bad. This is in conformity to another dimension of the friendship with John the Baptist, in that joy or sorrow was in large part dependent on the joy or sorrow of his friend. Nevertheless, John the Baptist, as the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, “rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice” (v. 35), including the right to convey eternal life (vv. Moreover, God has given Jesus authority over everything (v. 34), and is thus perfectly able to speak the words of God (v. 32), is sent from God, possesses the fullness of God’s Spirit (v. Jesus bears first-hand knowledge from above (v. 31), whereas John is merely one from the earth (v. 30), since he is the one who has come from above (v. Throughout John 3:27-36, the superiority of Jesus is repeatedly emphasized: Jesus’s divine origin Jesus’s permanent endowment with the Spirit and Jesus’s distinctive role as judge.
Moreover, while a special and mutual relationship existed between Jesus and John the Baptist, as written in the Fourth Gospel, the focus is more on the contrasts between them. To be a παρανύμφιος is an honor which expresses the bond of friendship between the groom and his best friend, who is chosen as the “one and only” from among the friends. In his book, Imaginative Love in John, Sjef van Tilborg suggests that, in a way, the reference to “the friend of the groom” in John 3:29 is more akin to the Hellenistic and Roman understanding of the friendship between groom and groomsman in the classical world custom, there is only one παρανύμφιος, in contradiction to the Jewish customs where there are always two “best men”: one for the bride ( sjosjbin) and one for the groom.
His role is secondary in that the bridegroom is the central figure yet, there is an intimacy between the groom and his “best man,” who had the role of preparing and presenting the bride to the bridegroom. The noun φίλος (friend/beloved) appears for the first time in John 3:29 when John the Baptist identifies himself as “the friend of the bridegroom,” παρανύμφιος. John the Baptist, the “Friend of the Bridegroom” In these three different and distinct relationships, the author of the 4 th Gospel makes use of the conceptual field of friendship, relationships which, in some ways, mirror that between Jesus and the Father. Specifically, this reference appears in three pericopes concerning the characters of John the Baptist, Jesus’s friends from Bethany, and the Beloved Disciple. The reference to friendship that precedes John 15:15 prepares the way for this astounding transformation of relationship with Jesus. The imagery of friendship is present in the first half of John’s narrative, but it comes into sharpest focus in the second half of the Gospel, particularly during the Last Supper, when Jesus refers to his disciples as “friends” in John 15:15: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”
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