The Gospel of John is the fourth gospel of the canonical gospels in the New Testament. The first section of the gospel presents a short introduction followed by a schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven signs that culminate in the raising of Lazarus and validate the truth of his words. The second part of the text portrays the final week of Jesus’s life, recounting the Farewell Discourse and the passion and resurrection narratives.
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 ( AD), most reject this hypothesis, though they view "the beloved disciple" as the source of much of John's content.: "We start from the fact that this Fourth Gospel has always been known as the Gospel according to John, and this goes with the traditional view that the evangelist was the Apostle John. Although this tradition continues to have supporters among modern scholars, the majority cling to it only in the most tenuous form, or abandon it altogether. It is thus important to see the reasons why the traditional identification is regarded by most scholars as untenable.": "The name "John" was attached to this gospel by the Church, and the author was identified as the apostle John. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the Gospel was actually written by this apostle." 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. 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.
Structure and content
The first section of the Gospel of John presents a short prolegomenon followed by a schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven signs that culminate in the raising of Lazarus and validate the truth of his words. The second part of the text portrays the final week of Jesus’s life, recounting the Farewell Discourse and the passion and resurrection narratives. The gospel is usually divided into a prologue (1:1–18), an account of the ministry often called the "Book of Signs" (1:19–12:50), the account of Jesus's final night with his disciples and the passion and resurrection, called the Book of Glory or Book of Exaltation (13:1–20:31), and an epilogue (Chapter 21). The division of the gospel in this way was popularized by the American Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown.
A growing number of scholars, such as Bauckham, and Mark Goodacre, argue that John 21 was part of the original work given the lack of manuscript evidence otherwise.Felix Just, "Combining Key Methodologies in Johannine Studies", in Tom Thatcher (ed), What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present, and Future of Johannine Studies, (Baylor University Press, 2007), p. 356. Chapters 15-17 and 21 are commonly believed to be added by either the author of the rest of the gospel or by somebody else; Attridge notes that proposing stages in the gospel's composition does not imply a change in authorship. John displays a profound coherence and unity throughout, and the view of the gospel as a communal product of multiple editions is today in retreat, as literary critics approach the work as a unitary text.
The prologue informs readers of the true identity of Jesus, the Word of God through whom the world was created and who took on human form; he came to the Jews and the Jews rejected him, but "to all who received him (the circle of Christian believers), who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God." Book of Signs (ministry of Jesus): Jesus calls his disciples and begins his earthly ministry. He travels from place to place informing his hearers about God the Father in long discourses, offering eternal life to all who will believe, and performing miracles that prove the authenticity of his teachings, which creates tensions with the religious authorities (manifested as early as 5:17–18), who decide he must be eliminated. The Book of Glory tells of Jesus' return to his heavenly father: it tells how he prepares his disciples for their lives without his physical presence and his prayer for himself and for them, followed by his betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion and post-resurrection appearances. The concluding verse of the gospel's penultimate chapter seems to declare the gospel's overall purpose: "that you may continue (disputed) to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name." Chapter 21 tells of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances in Galilee, the miraculous catch of fish, the prophecy of the crucifixion of Peter, and the fate of the Beloved Disciple.
The structure is highly schematic: there are seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus (foreshadowing the resurrection of Jesus) and seven "I am" sayings and discourses, culminating in Thomas's proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God" (the same title, , claimed by the Emperor Domitian, is an indication of the date of composition).
Theology
Christology
The Gospel of John contains some of the clearest identifications of Jesus with God in the New Testament; while Jesus is subordinate to God at times, the author also indicates that Jesus and God are somehow one. The prologue identifies Jesus as the Logos (Word) and identifies the Word as "God", and in the gospel while not being God the Father, Jesus is like the Father and claims the same powers and abilities as God. In Ancient Greek philosophy, the term referred to the principle of cosmic reason. In this sense, it was similar to the Hebrew concept of Wisdom, God's companion and intimate helper in creation. Pope Benedict XVI highlights a connection that this Gospel has with the Old Testament. According to James Dunn, this Christology does not describe a subordinationist relation but rather the authority and validity of the Son's "revelation" of the Father, the continuity between the Father and the Son; to Dunn, this is intended to serve the Logos Christology. Others (e.g., Andrew Loke) view it as connected to the theme of incarnation found within the Gospel. James Barker maintains that important aspects of Trinitarianism are present within the New Testament and that an economic Trinity "stood ready-made in the Gospel of John," and Larry Hurtado likewise argues that the books of the New Testament possess a triadic understanding of God and contain a number of Trinitarian formulas, despite not including any explicit references to the developed doctrine.
The high Christology of this Gospel depicts Jesus as divine and pre-existent, speaking openly regarding his role, and echoing the "I Am that I Am" of Yahweh with seven "I Am" declarations of his own.
Paul N. Anderson has argued that the Johannine "I Am" sayings, while theologically distinctive, share elements with Synoptic traditions and Hebrew scripture, suggesting they may reflect early traditional material that could support the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts.