Of all Jesus’s I Am statements, this is perhaps the most easy to understand, and it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. In this statement Jesus engages in something called “challenge and riposte” which in an honor-shamed based society was a formal and public dispute before a crowd, with winners and losers. Jesus and his opponents are locked in a fight about identity and lineage “from God.” After this episode in John 8, the skids toward Calvary were “greased’ so to speak. In the previous chapter, Jesus was a hero with crowds still following him. But after this statement, his death sentence was sealed. He went from hero to zero all over claim to spiritual originations: who had claim to Yahweh as Father?

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