AUTHOR

Despite doubts from various quarters, a good case can be made that the fourth Gospel was written by John, the “one Jesus loved” (as he referred to himself throughout his book), brother of James and son of Zebedee, just as early church tradition suggests. That same tradition places John in and around Ephesus, ministering to the churches of Asia Minor, until his death as an elderly man at roughly the end of the first century. The author would thus have been an eyewitness of much of the material he recounted and in a position to provide accurate information. The Gospel appears to be the first of five books he wrote in the AD 90s, the next ones being the three New Testament letters that bear his name and the book of Revelation.

It is possible that John relied on earlier written sources for some of the information in his Gospel, especially for the miracles of Jesus, where a different style and vocabulary at times intrude. In particular, it is possible that he knew one or more of the first three (Synoptic) Gospels. John’s Gospel seems to be literarily independent of them, however. More likely he was aware of their contents more from oral tradition and an active preaching ministry and wanted to supplement them by focusing on different information in his account.

Without question, John’s writing style, like his selection of content and themes, differs noticeably from that of the Synoptics. As was perfectly acceptable in his day, he would have written his account of what others said in his own distinctive style, being faithful to their meaning, if not to their exact wording. His sense of being led by the Holy Spirit (14:26; 15:26; 16:13) would have given him the freedom to couch things in his own words, believing he was being faithful to history at the same time.

THEMES

A list of themes that receive distinctive emphasis in John, as compared with the Synoptics, includes a strong belief in the full deity of Jesus as well as his full humanity, an emphasis on the availability of eternal life to all who believe in Jesus (beginning already in this life), miracles as signs meant to elicit faith in Christ, the beginnings of Trinitarian thought, the unity of disciples, the election and security of the believer, the death of Christ as exaltation and glorification, the Holy Spirit as Counselor (Comforter, Advocate), a playing down of the role of John the Baptist and of the baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and a strong polemic against unbelieving Judaism.

Many of these themes can be explained by the situation in which John’s churches found themselves. The minority of believers from Jewish backgrounds by this time were largely ostracized by the local synagogues and may have begun to wonder if they had made the right choice in following Jesus. John’s Gospel provided them with much “ammunition” in their quest to evangelize their non-Christian Jewish friends and family and encouraged them in the belief that Jesus is the true fulfillment of all of the central hopes and aspirations of Judaism. Ephesus, however, was also being infiltrated by the early Gnostic teacher Cerinthus, who taught a form of docetism—the belief that Christ only “seemed” (from the Gk dokeo) to be human. Hence, John emphasized Jesus’s full deity and his full humanity.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN JOHN’S GOSPEL AND THE SYNOPTICS

The apologist will probably be most interested in the numerous differences between John and the Synoptics and how they can be explained in detail. John includes no parables, few kingdom teachings, no exorcisms, and no pronouncement stories (short debates with hostile questioners ending in climactic pronouncements). But the parable seems to have been a distinctively Jewish form of teaching not known to the Greeks. The kingdom was an Old Testament theocratic concept that likewise could have misled a largely Gentile church. Exorcisms were viewed almost magically in the Greco-Roman world, and John does include plenty of more extended controversies with Jewish leaders.

More telling are examples of “interlocking” between John and the Synoptics—places where details in one Gospel help explain what might have remained mysterious in another. For example, John refers to the imprisonment of John the Baptist ever so briefly (Jn 3:24), but only the Synoptics narrate the actual story (Mk 6:14-29). John 11:2 distinguishes Mary the sister of Lazarus from Mary the mother of Jesus by alluding to a story John has not yet narrated but that Mark said would be recounted whenever the gospel is preached (Mk 14:9). And the references to Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas (Jn 18:24,28) are so short as to presuppose the fuller detail known from the first three Gospels (Mk 14:53-65).

In other instances John clarifies something the Synoptics leave puzzling. Why did the garbled charges against Jesus at his trial claim that he had predicted he would destroy the temple (Mk 14:58-59)? Presumably, because of what he said two years earlier about destroying the temple, when his audience didn’t understand he was talking about his own body (Jn 2:19). Why did the Jewish Sanhedrin involve the Roman authorities with Jesus’s execution in the first place, since their law prescribed stoning for blasphemy (Mk 15:1-3)? Most probably, it was because Rome prevented the Jews from carrying out capital punishment in most instances (Jn 18:31). How could the Synoptics describe Jesus as often wanting to gather the children of Jerusalem together (Mt 23:37) when they narrate only one trip the adult Jesus took to the holy city—that of his final Passover? Doubtless because he did in fact go there regularly at festival times, as John repeatedly indicates (chaps. 2; 5; 7–9; 10). Indeed, it is only from John that we learn that Jesus’s ministry lasted for roughly three years, a claim most scholars accept as accurate. Plenty of additional examples of interlocking in each direction could be given.

A key feature of John’s literary genre provides further explanation of the book’s distinctives. John was less literal in his reporting than the authors of the Synoptics, in large measure due to writing in a style somewhat akin to ancient Greco-Roman drama. But his recurring emphasis on themes like truth and witness shows that he believed he was faithfully reproducing the life and times of Jesus even through this genre.

A detailed analysis of the historical reliability of John proceeds through the Gospel, verse by verse, looking for compatibility with the Synoptic data and applying standard historical criteria for authenticity to each text in turn. The most helpful criterion is what has been called double similarity and dissimilarity. When a teaching or event from Jesus’s life fits plausibly into the Jewish world of Israel during the first third of the first century but differs in some respect from most conventional Judaism of the day, it is not likely to have been invented by some Jew other than Jesus. When that same teaching or event also shows some continuity with later Christian belief or practice and yet likewise proves distinctive at some telling point, it is not likely to have been manufactured by any later Christian. Usually at least one central element, if not several, emerge in each passage in John to satisfy this four-part criterion.

Much scholarship today continues to dismiss John as not nearly as valuable for recovering the “historical Jesus” as the Synoptics, but this scholarship rarely interacts in detail with the studies that demonstrate the points briefly summarized in this introduction.

None of this suggests that historical research can “prove” the reliability of every last detail in John (or any other portion of Scripture). But when writers prove repeatedly reliable where they can be tested, they should be given the benefit of the doubt where they cannot be checked. Christian belief in the full trustworthiness, authority, and inspiration or inerrancy of the text requires a leap of faith beyond what historical evidence alone can demonstrate. But it is not a leap in the dark, flying in the face of the evidence. It is a conscious choice consistent with the evidence that does exist.