I can conjecture what seems a plausible history and reason why the Fourth Gospel of The Bible (i.e. Chapters 1-20 of the Gospel usually called "John") has been so consistently downgraded, neglected and misinterpreted - in comparison what a focused reading of this Gospel (apparently) clearly and simply reveals to the 21st century reader.
The reason is explained by my belief that the IV Gospel was written by the resurrected Lazarus; because, as a resurrected Man, Lazarus knows that each individual can have a direct knowledge of and relationship to Jesus Christ; and that there is therefore no necessity for Christianity to be mediated by a church or a priesthood.
Lazarus knew this, because he had been resurrected and thereby had become a truly free agent: the only one (before Jesus's resurrection) who had seen both sides of the transformation of mortal life to resurrected life.
Whereas the other Apostles were subject to the normal consciousness and expectations of the Men of their time and place - for whom it seemed both natural and necessary that the message and work of Jesus must be mediated by a priesthood, and that salvation was communal, and indeed "tribal" (albeit an open tribe) as it had been for the Hebrews of their time. It would seem natural that they (plus Paul) would proceed by means of establishing a new priesthood and church.
And indeed; such a communal and mediated necessity was the almost-inevitable perspective of Men for many centuries afterwards - especially up into the "modern era" in "The West" and from the middling 1700s.
But nowadays (and especially in The West) - after a belief in the necessity of a mediated communal salvation has dwindled, and the churches (and their apparatus of theology and scholarship) have been so widely and deeply corrupted; we can, as individuals cut-off from our fellow Men by modern alienated consciousness; perceive the clear and simple truth of the Fourth Gospel...
A clear and simple truth that was, in a sense, "always there" but heavily obscured by many combinations of buried assumptions - as well as by the placing of the IV Gospel bracketed by the Synoptics on the one side, and Acts and the Epistles on the other side; which are thereby allowed "outvote", to set the context; and in general subvert, distort and relegate the IV Gospel to the kind of optional-extra and "supplementary" status it has for mainstream, traditional, and in-general church-led Christians.
