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Gospel of John

Book of the New Testament

  • 21 min read
  • 5 chapters

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Most scholars agree that the Gospel of John was completed between 90–100 (AD). It identifies an unnamed "disciple whom Jesus loved" as its source and, perhaps, author. 20th-century scholarship interpreted the gospel within the paradigm of a "Johannine community," but this has been increasingly challenged in the 21st century; the gospel's historical context remains debated. Most scholars treat the gospel and the Johannine epistles, along with the Book of Revelation, as a single corpus of Johannine literature, albeit not by the same author.

This gospel displays a literary unity throughout its text, and the current scholarly tendency is to approach the work as a coherent whole by a single author. It contains the clearest identifications of Jesus with the God of Israel in the Christian texts, with Jesus in the form of the Logos being paralleled in Greek philosophy and Targumic concepts of the divine.

Although the Gospel of John is distinct from the Synoptic Gospels, most scholars today accept that John knew and used the Synoptics. John's relatively free usage of Mark aligns with the compositional practices of antiquity while contrasting with the unusually conservative adaptations found by the Synoptic authors.

Authorship

Composition

The Gospel of John is traditionally attributed to John the Apostle. While many modern scholars continue to affirm the traditional attribution, first found in Irenaeus (c. 130 – c. 202 AD), most reject this hypothesis, though they view "the beloved disciple" as the source of much of John's content. The gospel is internally anonymous. John 21:22 references a disciple whom Jesus loved and John 21:24–25 says: "This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true". Most scholars believe the verses claim the beloved disciple was the author of the gospel, but others argue the author is claiming to be someone else recording the disciple's testimony. The beloved disciple is generally considered a historical person, though a growing number of scholars have argued the disciple was a literary creation with the advent of literary criticism. There is no consensus on who the beloved disciple was. John 1:14 also switches to a first-person narration, saying "And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth," revealing himself as a participant in the events narrated. The gospel gradually identifies its narrator as the beloved disciple by chapter 19. The scholarly consensus dates the writing of the gospel between AD 90–100. Most critical commentaries agree the gospel was likely composed in Ephesus.

Recent scholarship has tended to turn against positing hypothetical sources for John. While a few scholars support old ideas about debated sources like the "signs source" and the "sayings source", or develop new theories, it is widely considered that John incorporated synoptic traditions into his own composition instead. For much of the twentieth century, the consensus was that John was independent of the Synoptics, but most scholars now accept the Synoptics as sources for John. The Hebrew scriptures were an important source, with 14 direct quotations (versus 27 in Mark, 54 in Matthew, 24 in Luke), and their influence is vastly increased when allusions and echoes are included, but the majority of John's direct quotations do not agree exactly with any known version of the Jewish scriptures. The author may claim to be a witness in John 21, 1:14, and 19:35. Most scholars agree the Gospels do not contain direct eyewitness accounts, though this may partly be the result of dubious assumptions based on form criticism. Tom Thatcher, writing for the Oxford Handbook of Johannine Studies, argues that while the beloved disciple did not write the current form of the gospel, this does not entail reconstructions that put the author multiple stages or generations away from the disciple. Instead, he argues that the Fourth Evangelist was a companion of the beloved disciple who either wrote by the disciple's dictation or expanded his work. René Kieffer notes the possibility that there may have been a first and then a second edition.

The Johannine community

For much of the 20th century, scholars interpreted the Gospel of John within the paradigm of a hypothetical "Johannine community," meaning that it was held to have sprung from a late 1st-century Christian community that was excommunicated from the Jewish community for its belief in Jesus as the messiah. The gospel was considered to reflect a break between the Johannine Christians and the Jews, while the Johannine community itself disintegrated. This interpretation, which saw the community as sectarian and outside the mainstream of early Christianity, has been increasingly challenged in the 21st century; according to Richard Bauckham, the gospels as Greco-Roman biographies assumed a wide audience rather than individual communities and early churches maintained close contact with one another. Christopher Skinner noted that Raymond E. Brown's multiple-stage communal theories were arguably tendentious, and usage of the Birkat Haminim as a first century text has been questioned. There is considerable debate over the gospel's social, religious, and historical context.

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