"What is truth?" And there Truth was, standing right in front of him.

John 14
1 “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And where I go you know, and the way you know.” 5 Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

John 18
33 Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered him, “Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning Me?” 35 Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered You to me. What have You done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” 37 Pilate therefore said to Him, “Are You a king then?” Jesus answered, “You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” 38 Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, “I find no fault in Him at all.

I don't think Ron grasped how strong the impact of these scenes were on his instructor, as they worked through the chapters of the Gospel of John together.This is not surprising because it only sank in very slowly to the one who was being affected by this strange idea: truth is a person, and that person claims a cosmic importance in every other person's life. We are all accountable to the truth, thus defined. This is still a dizzying thought, and yet it made a strange kind of sense, for one steeped in the lore of logic, philosophical and mathematical.

Students of logic come to view truth as an abstract value to be manipulated with the computational machinery of mathematial inference checking in order to determine the validity of an argument that certain propositions have certain properties (true, false or, in some cases, indeterminate). There was always one important constraint, however. The machinery, no matter how elegant and powerful, could never get you started. You had to come to it with a set of provisional axioms and then, if you were fortunate (as Godel discovered in the 1930's only very limited good fortune was to be had) you could establish formally that the axioms were mutually consistent and infer a limited set of consequences from them. But that's all, and even that was not always possible.

So, everyone has to start somewhere. Where to start? Jesus says, "Begin with Me."

John 8
31 Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. 32 And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” 33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?” 34 Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. 35 And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. 36 Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.