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The lectionary gospel readers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter take the three parts of John 10 in turn; in Year A, we read the first ten verses, and now in Year B we look at the second section in John 10.11–18. But this is a good example of where our modern chapter divisions (first created by Stephen Langton, the 13th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who helped to write the Magna Carta) hinder rather than help our reading, for two reasons.

First, John 10 actually straddles a fairly major division in the narrative. The events of chapter 6 are clearly situated near Bethsaida and around Lake Galilee—the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus walking on the water, and the dispute about Jesus as the bread of life. But in John 7.10, Jesus heads off ‘secretly’ to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles in the early autumn, one of the three Pilgrim Festivals (with Passover and Pentecost), and the action of chapters 7, 8 and 9 until 10.21 is set around this time. (Note the mention, for example, of the ‘people of Jerusalem’ in John 7.25 and the ‘temple guards’ in John 7.45; this is a reason why we might interpret the language of ‘the Jews’ (Judaioi) here as either ‘Jewish leaders’ or ‘Judeans’.) But in John 10.22, we have now moved to The Feast of Dedication (Hannukah), around two months later, without any note of the time passing. The intense focus on Jerusalem is one of the things that makes sense if we believe that the author of the gospel is a Jerusalem disciple, rather than one of the Galilean Twelve.

Secondly, the chapter change from John 9.41 to 10.1 disrupts the continuity of the narrative, and even breaks up a single speech by Jesus to the Pharisees that oppose him. Chapter 10 begins with the distinctive