How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

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Intertextuality Pair

John 21:25 → Ecclesiastes 12:12

Echo

Later text

John 21:25BSB

There are many more things that Jesus did. If all of them were written down, I suppose that not even the world itself would have space for the books that would be written.

Earlier text

Ecclesiastes 12:12BSB

And by these, my son, be further warned: There is no end to the making of many books, and much study wearies the body.

Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:31

Significance

Ending of John's Gospel (21:25), hyperbolically asserting that whole world could not contain books that would be written if everything Jesus did had been inscribed, stands firmly in literary conventions of time in both Greco-Roman and Jewish literature. OT book of Ecclesiastes says, "There is no end to the making of many books" (12:12), and Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (ca. AD 80) reportedly said, "If all heavens were sheets, all trees quills and all seas ink, they would not suffice for recording my wisdom which I acquired from my masters" (Sopherim 16:8 [see also examples from Philo cited in Köstenberger]).

Found via: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Contrast (two book-endings: the Preacher warns that "there is no end to the making of many books" beyond words "driven by a single Shepherd"; John says the books about Jesus would never end, yet what is written suffices "so that you may believe")