John 1:35–42
Read the passage.
In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus goes out to the wilderness where He is tempted immediately after being baptized by John, and then He calls His first disciples upon His return. In John’s account, John declares Jesus is the Lamb of God, and the next day Jesus calls His first disciples. I have been wrestling with the timeline of these events, trying to see how they can be reconciled, and I realized I was drawing on extra-biblical material which was causing conflicts. In the “Jesus Storybook Bible”, which I have read to my children, John sees Jesus coming to be baptized, and declares “Behold the Lamb of God”. But that’s not how any of the Gospels say it happened. Only John’s Gospel records those words, but he doesn’t connect it to Jesus’s baptism. (That event isn’t in John’s account at all. We assume it is because it talks about John baptizing at the river, but it never says here that Jesus was baptized.) Instead, what makes more sense is that John says this once Jesus returns from the wilderness and since he says this to two of his disciples, they realize they should progress from following the messenger to following the Message.
One of these disciples is Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. This is another difference in John’s account, because the other Gospels say Simon and Andrew were called while fishing. Again, even though the heading for this section is titled “Jesus Calls the First Disciples” in the ESV, that’s extra-biblical material and technically inaccurate. Jesus didn’t call anyone to follow Him in these verses. They decided to follow Him and He allowed it, but that’s not “calling”. Additionally, we imagine Jesus and His disciples travelling around Judea and Galilee in a static group of 13 men, but that’s not how it went either. Eventually, many more people were following Jesus besides the Twelve, and there would have been a lot of coming and going from that group. Even in verse 41, Andrew leaves Jesus to go find his brother, and we don’t actually know how long that took.
It’s also really funny to me that the first thing Jesus does upon meeting Andrew’s brother is to give him a nickname. I don’t know if Peter thought it was a col thing to be called at the time, though he certainly owned it later on because no one thinks of him as Simon any more.
Your Word is suffient for teaching and reproof, for all life and godliness.