John Introduction

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.