The Gospel of John is often considered the most spiritual, the most poetic, and the most theologically rich of the New Testament texts, but it is also the most dangerous. Unlike the earlier gospels, which preserve traces of a human teacher navigating real moral and social tensions, John presents a fully mythologized figure: not Jesus the man, but Christ the cosmic absolute. This essay offers a secular humanist reading of John, not to reinterpret its theology, but to examine what it reveals about our need for certainty, belonging, and permanence. By tracing how metaphor hardened into dogma, we can better understand both the power and the peril of turning a teacher into a god.

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