John 10 Bible study: I am the good shepherd

Jesus's last words in John 9 have no closing quotation mark in the WEB, and they run on into this chapter (Favor's chapter on John 9 shows where the marks fall). He speaks of a sheep fold: "one who doesn’t enter by the door into the sheep fold, but climbs up some other way, is a thief and a robber. But one who enters in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep" (10:1-2) (tap door). "The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (10:3) (tap voice). Then the Gospel says, "Jesus spoke this parable to them, but they didn’t understand what he was telling them" (10:6) (tap parable). So "Jesus therefore said to them again" (10:7), and here is what almost everyone misses: the first thing he says he is, is not the shepherd. "I am the sheep’s door" (10:7), and "I am the door. If anyone enters in by me, he will be saved, and will go in and go out and will find pasture" (10:9). Only after that does he say, "I am the good shepherd" (10:11). In the parable the shepherd "enters in by the door" (10:2); in what he says next, Jesus calls himself the door (10:7, 10:9) and the good shepherd (10:11, 10:14). These notes don't say how the two go together.

Psalms 82:6→leads toJohn 10:34-36

At the Feast of the Dedication (John 10:22), Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). John writes, "Therefore the Jews took up stones again to stone him" (John 10:31), and they told him it was "for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God" (John 10:33). Jesus answered them, "Isn’t it written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture can’t be broken), do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?" (John 10:34-36). The psalm says, "I said, “You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High" (Psalm 82:6). In his own words, Jesus' question runs from "If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came" (John 10:35) to "him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world" (John 10:36). He gives only the first half of the verse, and the WEB prints it a little differently: You with a capital in the psalm, you in John. He doesn't say who the psalm's gods were, and he doesn't call anyone in John 10 the psalm's unjust judges; these notes don't either.

ποιμήνpoimensay poy-MANE

Strong's: "a shepherd (literally or figuratively)". In the parable, "one who enters in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep" (10:2). Then Jesus says, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep" (10:11), and again, "I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and I’m known by my own" (10:14). The hired hand is "not a shepherd" (10:12), and of his other sheep Jesus says, "They will become one flock with one shepherd" (10:16). John's Greek has the word six times, all in this chapter, and the New Testament has it 18 times (counted in RP2018, the Byzantine text the WEB translates). Mark has it twice: "they were like sheep without a shepherd" (Mark 6:34), and the words Jesus says are written, "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered" (Mark 14:27), which Favor's chapter on Mark 14 sets beside Zechariah 13:7.