I have reserved for discussion here certain passages containing more than a single interaction. Not all combinations are significant, though. The significant combinations in the Greek corpus are of several kinds, of which the best attested and conceptually simplest comprises those instances with a broadly or cumulatively preparatory effect in favour of the vehicle.

Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Having established that God is the goal of belief, that God is physically visible in Jesus, and that physical sight can lead to belief, Chapter 6, ‘Seeing Jesus and Seeing God’, draws these three points together by asking whether John portrays visual encounters with Jesus as visual encounters with God. The chapter argues that the physical act of seeing Jesus is a necessary condition for seeing God in him despite the challenge that God emerges as most visible in Jesus’s most acutely human moments. Evidence for this position arises from exegesis of three passages in which Johannine characters see Jesus (John 6:19; 19:6; 20:14–29) as well as John’s account of the crucifixion as glorification (12:1–50; 19:28–37). The chapter closes by turning to the crucifixion and examining the profound irony of Jesus’s death as the high point of divine visibility in the Gospel.

Chapter 3, ‘God on Earth’, argues that, for John, Jesus’s body is the place where one may see God. It opens with John’s association of Jesus with the tabernacle and the temple, the most comprehensive descriptions of Jesus’s flesh and body in the Gospel, and asks whether one can read Jesus’s body as the literal ‘house of God.’ Evidence for this reading comes from an overview of Israelite and Early Jewish theologies that portray a God who can be in two places at once. John evidences a corresponding understanding of God’s dual presence in his association of the flesh and body of Jesus with the tabernacle and temple and in the Farewell Discourse. The chapter concludes that God can be on earth in Jesus’s body as well as in heaven.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.