John has a peculiar (to us) understanding of the work of Christ that comes into view once one understands the audience he has in mind.. The purpose of this is carefully defined (in a context of heavy irony) in 11:51 f. In an editorial comment on Caiaphas' words John writes:
 

• He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

 

'The nation' is, as we have seen, for this writer Judean Judaism. Who are 'the children of God who are scattered abroad'? As in the case of 'the Greeks', the reference is almost universally taken to be to the Gentiles. But this is quite arbitrary. There is nothing in the Gospel to suggest it, and every reason, from the wealth of Old Testament parallels to identify them with those of God's people, the Jews, at present in dispersion. In the prophetic words of her own high priest, the purpose of Jesus' death, as Israel's Messiah, is to bring about the final ingathering of which the prophets so constantly spoke. And it is when Diaspora Judaism, in the persons of the Greeks at Passover, comes seeking him, that Jesus knows 'the hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified' (12:23). Hitherto he has been confined to 'his own' to whom he came; but once the seed falls into the ground and dies it will bear much fruit (12:24).
 

The supreme purpose of the laying down of Jesus' life is that all Israel should be one flock under its one shepherd (10:15 f.). And this pastoral imagery in chapter 10 is clearly modeled upon passages in Ezekiel (especially 34 and 37:21-8) and Jeremiah (23:1-8; 31:1-10) whose whole theme is the ingathering of the scattered people of Israel. The 'other sheep, that are not of this fold', whom also Jesus must bring in (10:16) are not the Gentiles - again there is nothing to suggest this - but the Jews of the Dispersion. And the purpose, that 'there shall be one flock, one shepherd, is reflected again in the repeated prayer of chapter 17 'that they may all be one', the chapter above all which interprets the purpose of Jesus' going to the Father. Here once more we have the same distinction as that between 'this fold' and the 'other sheep', the 'nation' and 'the children of God who are scattered abroad'. The prayer is not 'for these only', that is, for those already faithful to Jesus in Palestine, but 'for those also who shall believe in me through their word', that is (in terms of the same distinction again from chapter 20), for those who believe without having seen (20:29), for whom clearly the Gospel is being written. The prayer 'that they may all be one' is, on Jesus' lips, not a prayer for broken Christendom but for scattered and disrupted Judaism, viewed as the true Israel of God.
 

'Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved' (Rom. 10:1). That could be John speaking. His consuming concern is for the whole Jewish people, that they should find the life which is their birthright. Throughout the Gospel we can trace the concern of the author that none of those should be lost for whom this life is intended (6:39; 10:28 f.; 17:12; 18:9). This theme is first introduced in 6:12 f., where great importance is attached to the care with which the fragments must be gathered up after the feeding - 'that nothing may be lost'. Filling as they do twelve baskets, they symbolize the fullness of Israel still to be gathered in after 'the Jews' have eaten their fill.
 

Again we must insist that John, with Paul, is the least exclusivist or nationalistic writer in the New Testament. The right to become the 'children of God' is given to all who believe, exactly as in the Epistle to the Romans (John 1:12; cf. Rom. 3:22). John is certainly not suggesting that Christianity is for the Jews only: it is for the whole world. Indeed, it is explicitly stated in 17:21 that the bringing in of 'those who shall believe in me through their word' (those for whom the Gospel is written) is itself in order 'that the world may believe'.
 

Nevertheless, he is directing his appeal in the first instance to a specific audience, and like a good evangelist is defining salvation in the terms of their own heritage. In the same way Paul, when he wants to, can so identify Christianity with the true Judaism as to say of the Church, 'We are the circumcision' (Phil. 3:3), and equate being 'outside Christ' with being 'alienated from the commonwealth of Israel' (Eph. 2:12).
 

But, unlike Paul, John is not fighting on two fronts. He is not all things to all men, but limits himself voluntarily as an apostle to the Circumcision. Always he speaks as a Jew, and indeed, like Jesus, as a Jew of Palestine. In the course of his work he writes damningly of 'the Jews' - yet never perhaps with quite the animosity that shows through Paul's words in I Thess. 2:14-16. This passage indeed provides an instructive comparison with John. It is constantly said that John's use of the term 'the Jews' could come only from a man who stands outside Judaism and from a date when the break between the Church and the Synagogue was bitter and complete. Yet here in Thessalonians, in the early 50's, we see Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, writing in exactly the same vein (though with a personal animus that John does not show) and actually differentiating 'the Jews' from Christians in Judea exactly as John does.
 

'For you, brethren', he says to the Thessalonians, 'became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men.'

 

And so, we come back around to why John translated Hebrew and Aramaic words into Greek. It was because he was writing to "the children of God who were scattered abroad". That is, the Jewish diaspora scattered all over the Greek-speaking world.