Re: 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life'

Why can universal truths not also be situated and expressed in particular contexts of time and space? If they were universal, one would expect to see them operate in time and space, as well as being propositions that operated in an abstract realm. Universal physical laws are demonstrated in particular experimental tests. This may not be agreeable to the postmodern outlook, but it does not mean it is not true! Universal does not mean ahistorical; perhaps rather trans-historical?

In John 14:6, Jesus does not relate truth to any particular historical context other than his own person. The astonishing feature of the assertion is that truth is to be found in a person, rather than in objective proof.  (A highly postmodern concept, but here turning postmodern on its head!).

A further place to look for Jesus’s meaning of the word truth is in the extended discussion in John 8. Here there is a  particular context, Jesus’s encounter with the Jews, and a historical background, the slavery of the free descendants of Abraham to pagan Romans. But the movement of the discourse is always away from the particularity of the context towards universal issues. Slavery to sin moves away from the more immediate idea of slavery to the pagans, which is raised by the talk about racial descent from Abraham, and moves towards the more universally underlying reality of sin. Freedom from death - is likewise an issue of universal truth, intimately connected with freedom from the slavery of sin. The Jews immediately latch onto the universal issue, and understand it as such. The conclusion of the discourse, ‘before Abraham was born, I am’ - might seem puzzling to us, but not to the Jews, who take its puzzling particularity as an assertion of association with deity by Jesus.

Similar things could be said about life, as Jesus uses the word in John’s gospel.

I’d have thought John’s gospel was a good example of the historical and universal going together.