John stands out from the rest of the New Testament. With Paul we are in the seminar room: arguing things out, looking up references, taking notes, and then being pushed out into the world to preach the gospel to the nations. Matthew takes us into the synagogue, where the people of God are learning to recognize Jesus as their king, their Emmanuel. Mark writes a short tract, challenging his readers with the very idea of a crucified king and turning it into a handbook on discipleship for followers of the servant-king. Luke addresses the educated Greek world of his day and paints a big picture of God’s purposes through Israel’s Messiah for the whole world.
John, by contrast, takes us up the mountain, and says quietly: ‘Look—from here, on a clear day, you can see for ever.’ We beheld his glory, glory as of the father’s only son. John does not include the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, as the other evangelists do. But there is a sense in which John’s whole story is about the transfiguration. He invites us to be still and know; to look again into the human face of Jesus of Nazareth, until the awesome knowledge comes over us, wave upon terrifying wave, that we are looking into the human face of the living God.
John’s gospel is in some ways remarkably like the three synoptic gospels, yet in other ways it is very unlike them. Why? What account can we give of this?
But then there are the stark differences. How long was Jesus’ public career, and where was it located? John has his dramatic Temple-action near the beginning; the synoptics put it near the end. But then John has Jesus going to Jerusalem frequently; for Mark there is only the one visit. Was the Last Supper a Passover meal, as in the synoptics, or held on the night before, as John seems to suggest? There are also theological differences: the Johannine Jesus appears more forthright and explicit about his divine status than the Jesus of the synoptics, and the Johannine Jesus talks more about ‘eternal life’ than the ‘kingdom of God’ (though there is overlap on both). The Johannine Jesus uses discourses rather than parables (though some may be ‘buried’—parables woven into discourses like the image of the ‘apprentice son’ in John 5.19–23). The Johannine Jesus performs no exorcisms. We do not see Jesus baptized, nor are we told about his words of institution at the Last Supper. In the synoptics, the high priests seek to kill Jesus because of jealousy, but in John’s gospel it is because he raised Lazarus from the dead. That incident, indeed, is one of many things found in John but not elsewhere. Others include the ‘I am’ sayings, the dialogues with Nicodemus and with the Samaritan woman, the turning of water into wine, Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet, the teaching about the holy spirit as the ‘Comforter’, and so on. John is clearly making a distinctive, unique contribution.
First, John was writing a new Genesis. His whole book, opening with the words ‘In the beginning’, which echo Genesis 1.1, is about how the world’s creator has come at last to remake his world. John 20 is about Jesus’ resurrection, but every sentence breathes the life of ‘the first day of the week’, the start of new creation. And if John hints that his prologue is heralding a new version of Genesis 1, then the equivalent of the climax of that great chapter, the creation of humans in the divine image, is precisely when the Word becomes flesh. John 1.14 corresponds to Genesis 1.26–28: the one through whom the world was made now becomes the one through whom the world is rescued and remade.
Second, John was also writing a new Exodus. Moses led the people out of Egypt and gave them the Torah, to prepare them for God coming in person to dwell with them (in the tabernacle) and to lead them to their inheritance. Now ‘the Word became flesh and [literally translated] “tabernacled in our midst” ’ (Jn. 1.14). Jesus is the place where the one God has come to dwell among us and to reveal his true glory.
Third, as a result, John was also writing about Pentecost. John bears witness to what he remembers, but his memory of Jesus is augmented and animated by the holy spirit, the paraclete, who will ‘teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you’ (Jn. 14.26). John, it seems, sees himself as part of a Jewish movement that has experienced the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes in Israel’s Messiah, and as someone who has received the gift of YHWH’s own spirit from this Messiah. John is providing an epitome of Jesus’ life, written by one who has experienced the streams of living water promised by Jesus to his followers, with the story expounded in the co-ordinates of Israel’s scripture. This is no bland bios, with the sayings of a famous teacher strung together in a loose narrative framework. John has written a theologically creative and spiritually rich fusion of personal memory and Pentecostal faith . . . . The Johannine Jesus is what Jesus looks like viewed through the lens of the spirit, the paraclete.
The gospel of John sets out several vital biblical themes. There is rich teaching about God as father and his love for his world. There are clear warnings about the evil and darkness that have invaded God’s world, and about the tragic unbelief of so many Judeans in the face of divine witnesses. John has more to say about the spirit than all the other gospels put together, generating a strong theme about discipleship, which stems from faith in God and issues in love for others, and about the God-breathed mission to the wider world. John’s Jesus regularly refers to salvation in terms of ‘eternal life’—presumably, as elsewhere in the New Testament, ‘the life of the age to come’, not a Platonic dream beyond space, time, and matter.
But the heart of John’s thematic world is christology. John constructs a christological cascade, presenting Jesus as the father’s supreme agent, the heaven-sent son, the pre-existent Word who is enfleshed with full humanity.
CONTEXTUAL AND CRITICAL MATTERS
Origins of John
As with the other canonical gospels, John’s gospel makes no mention of its own author. However, a central character in the second half of the gospel is the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’, usually referred to in modern times as the ‘beloved disciple’. This figure was reclining beside Jesus in the upper room; he was, it seems, with Peter in the high priest’s hall; he was with Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross; he runs with Peter to investigate the empty tomb; he was among those to whom the risen Jesus appeared by the Sea of Galilee.
He is portrayed as being, literally and metaphorically, one step ahead of Peter, almost as if there might have been a friendly rivalry between them. Although the beloved disciple is not explicitly mentioned prior to Jesus’ final meal with his disciples in Jerusalem, this does not mean that he had no part in Jesus’ ministry before that point. It might well be that he was the unnamed one of the two disciples of John the Baptist—the named one being Andrew—to whom the Baptist spoke about Jesus and who both then began to follow Jesus.
The beloved disciple is more likely a historical figure, a Judean follower of Jesus, a community founder, whose eye-witness testimony and personal authority undergird and vouch for the fourth gospel’s veracity.18 But this only presses the question once more: who was he?
According to tradition, the beloved disciple was John the son of Zebedee, brother of James, one of the senior apostles among the Twelve. Many early Christians believed that he wrote the gospel of John and the three letters of John, and that he received the revelation of Jesus Christ on the island of Patmos, where he composed the book of Revelation.
In the late second century, the Muratorian canon states that ‘The fourth of the Gospels is that of John, one of the disciples.’ Around the same time, Irenaeus wrote that ‘John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence in Ephesus in Asia.’ Irenaeus traces this view back to a group of Asian elders, probably including Papias of Hierapolis (d. c. AD 130) and Polycarp of Smyrna (d. c. AD 155), who had conversed with John before his death after a long old age, probably during the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117). According to Irenaeus, Papias had been a ‘hearer of John’;24 according to Philip of Side, Papias was a ‘disciple of John the theologian’.
A more compelling alternative to John the son of Zebedee is another John, ‘John the elder’.
This hypothesis rests on Papias’s statement about preferring oral testimony over written records when accessing Jesus’ teachings. He mentions two distinct Johns:
I will not hesitate to set down for you, along with my interpretations, everything I have carefully learned then from the elders and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth. For unlike most people I did not enjoy those who have a great deal to say, but those who teach the truth. Nor did I enjoy those who recall someone else’s commandments, but those who remember the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the truth itself. And if by chance someone who had been a follower of the elders should come my way, I inquired about the words of the elders—what Andrew or Peter said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from books would profit me as much as information from a living and abiding voice.
Papias’s identification of the ‘elder John’ can also be correlated with the self-designation of the author in the second and third Johannine letters. Assuming a close connection between the gospel of John and the letters of John, the clearest self-identification of the author is not as an ‘apostle’, but as an ‘elder’, and a ‘witness’ to the events of Jesus’ life.
Date
If, as many suppose, John was dependent on the synoptic tradition, that might push us to a later date, but only if we could be more certain than we are about the dating of the synoptics themselves. There is no strong evidence against the traditional date near the end of the century, either towards the end of Domitian’s reign (AD 81–96) or at the beginning of Trajan’s (AD 98–117). But that double negative indicates the continuing uncertainty on the topic. Some have continued to argue that a much earlier date is possible and even preferable.
Place of writing
So where was the gospel written? Early and unanimous tradition suggests Ephesus.
Purpose
On the surface, John’s gospel gives us a clear purpose-statement at the end of the resurrection narrative: ‘But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.’ The words ‘that you may believe’ should perhaps say: ‘that you may come to believe’; there is a difference of one letter in the Greek, and both readings are strongly attested in the manuscripts.
Nor are the stories of Jesus in this book simply ‘illustrations’ of an abstract point; the ‘faith’ to be elicited is that the Word became flesh, specifically the human flesh of this unique human being, doing these unique things.
This christology generates an ecclesiology, as John seeks to reinforce a particular form of group identity that construes Messiah-believers as God’s children, the true worshippers, those of the light, his sheep, who have vexatiously been labelled as schismatics or apostates by their fellow-Jews. This explains why, in the course of the narrative, Jesus’ messianic identity is so disputed, and why, the more clearly Jesus is identified with God, the more ferocious the opposition against him becomes.
John’s gospel, then, is a masterpiece of evangelistic proclamation and intra-Jewish apologetics, deeply rooted in Israel’s scriptures, witnessing to Jesus’ identity as the divine Messiah and claiming that his followers, gentile as well as Jewish, were the legitimate heirs of Israel’s heritage and promises.
The Carpenter's Nail 