Who really wrote the writings of John?

[polonius]

One of the Gospels (all of which were written anonymously) and the three letters of John, and the Book of Revelation are associated with the name "John."

But how many (if any) were written by John the Apostle and hence are eyewitness accounts?

Lets start with the Gospel of John written about 95 AD.

[1213]

...The Gospel of John reports the exclusion of the Christians from the Jewish synagogues.....

Before I can continue, could you please show the scripture that says that?

[polonius]

Let’s look at the answer to the first part of the question.

The writer of the gospel of John was not an eyewitness to Jesus’ life.

It has Jesus crucified on the Day of Preparation not Passoveras does Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it has no Eucharist instituted at the Last Supper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_John

(1) The Beloved Disciple has also been identified with Lazarus of Bethany, based on John 11:5:
(2) “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus�
(3) “Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.�
(4) Also relevant according to Ben Witherington III is the fact that the character of the Beloved Disciple is not mentioned before the raising of Lazarus (Lazarus being raised in John 11, while the Beloved Disciple is first mentioned in John 13).

John 19:26-27" When Jesus saw his mother* and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.�n27Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.� And from that hour the disciple took her into his home."

The Apostle John lived in Galilee a three day journey away. Lazarus lived in Bethany, less than a hour walking distance from where Jesus was crucified.

[polonius]

...The Gospel of John reports the exclusion of the Christians from the Jewish synagogues.....

Before I can continue, could you please show the scripture that says that?

RESPONSE:

See https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/a ... tastreamId

EXCLUSION OF CHRISTIANS FROM THE SYNAGOGUES KENNETH L. CARROLL, B.D., Ph.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN RELIGION, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY, DALLAS, TEXAS

“In three places the Gospel of John speaks of Christians being excluded from the synagogues by the Jews. The word used, in each of these occasions, is arroavvd'yaj'yos which means " excluded from the sacred assemblies of the Israelites ; excommunicated ". This word, often translated as " put out of the synagogue ", occurs only three times in the New Testament, with all three appearances being in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus himself, in one place, is pictured as foretelling that his followers would be excluded from the synagogue : " They will exclude you from their synagogues ; why, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is doing religious service to God " (xvi. 2).

The other two appearances of the word are located a few chapters earlier. In ix. 22 there is found " His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already made an agreement that if anyone acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, he should be excluded from the synagogues ". The third occurrence is in xii. 42 " Yet for all that, even among the leading men, many came to believe in him, but on account of the Pharisees they would not acknowledge it, for fear of being excluded from the synagogues."

It might save time if you read the Gospel of John before submitting questions.

[Mithrae]

And while it is true that the author of the Gospel did not identify himself, it is also true that the author of the Epistles of John DID identify himself.

Partly true. 1 John lacks the identification which you have quoted from 2 and 3 John, suggesting on face value that the latter two letters were written by a different author.

On the other hand, 1 John shares some obvious similarities of style and content with the gospel - even reading the opening verses of each shows that plainly enough - suggesting (again on face value) that the gospel and 1st epistle were written by the same author.

Both the gospel (eg. John 1:14) and the epistle (1 John 1:3) claim to have been written by a witness of Jesus' life. The appendix to the gospel contains apparently very early additional confirmation of that eyewitness claim (John 21:24; note also the contrast in tenses between that and 19:35).

Furthermore, unlike the other three gospels, in the case of John there is explicit attribution of authorship earlier than Irenaeus' famous list and - most surprisingly of all - these earlier attributions come from radically diverse Christians, gnostics rather than the proto-orthodox:

• There is evidence of the gospel's use in gnostic circles in the 2nd century:
  By Heracleon c. 170CE
  By the 'Peratae,' mentioned by Hippolytus c. 210-230CE
  By the Valentinians as described by Irenaeus c. 180CE
  However according to Irenaeus the Valentinians acknowledged John as the author:
  • 5. Further, they teach that John, the disciple of the Lord, indicated the first Ogdoad, expressing themselves in these words: John, the disciple of the Lord, wishing to set forth the origin of all things, so as to explain how the Father produced the whole, lays down a certain principle,—that, namely, which was first-begotten by God, which Being he has termed both the only-begotten Son and God...
  Similarly, Heracleon attributes the gospel to a disciple of Jesus:
  • The words, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him knownâ€�, were spoken, not by the Baptist, but by the disciple.

These early and diverse attributions of the gospel - by the author of the appendix, by the Valentinians, by Heracleon and finally by Irenaeus and other proto-orthodox writers of the late 2nd century - provide robust, unanimous confirmation of the gospel and epistles' own claims to have been written by an eyewitness.

Finally, the three synoptic gospels and Acts all identify Peter, James and John as Jesus' "inner circle" of disciples, and even Paul's letters (Gal. 2:9) confirm the ongoing prominence of Peter and John (James of Zebedee having died in the mid 40s CE, Acts 12:2). Of the earliest sources on Jesus' ministry, the fourth gospel is conspicuous in mentioning only two prominent disciples and naming only one of those: Peter, along with the "disciple Jesus loved." This textual characteristic is best explained if the author were in fact John, choosing not to write about his dead brother.

To take the position that Epistle 1 of John and Epistles 2 and 3 of John were written by different individuals is to take the position that 2,000 years of Christian tradition, that the apostle John wrote the Gospel, the three epistles and Revelation, is simply wrong.

And? I didn't know you valued Christian tradition so highly.

There are strong and obvious similarities between the gospel and 1st epistle (eyewitness claims, style and themes) which are not shared by the 2nd and 3rd epistle, which themselves have very strong and obvious similarities with each other (salutation, style and length). The overwhelmingly obvious conclusion is that the former pair had the same author and the latter pair had a different author. Obvious isn't necessarily the same thing as correct, but anyone suggesting otherwise will have to do a lot better than some vague, unreferenced appeal to 'Christian tradition' of later millennia.

This textual characteristic is best explained if the author were in fact John, choosing not to write about his dead brother.

That the "textual characteristic is best explained if the author were in fact John," is no more factually accurate than by making the claim that the Gospels indicate that the apostle that Jesus loved was his homosexual lover, the youthful John. There is no actual direct support for any of this. Only inference, and the attempts by those with a specific motivation to make the NT conform to their predetermined conclusions. It has currently become popular to "suggest" that Mary Magdalene was actually Jesus' wife. But the NT really does not support that conclusion either.

One of those quite literally borders on the impossible - that Jesus' Jewish disciples would have turned a blind eye to open affection with a male lover, or that said lover would later publicize the affair - while the other seeks to address a clear and distinct discrepancy between the fourth gospel and other early sources. It could be argued that trying to imply an equivalence between those two suggests a specific motivation on your part more than anything else. Each early source attests the early prominence of Jesus' "inner circle" of Peter, James and John:
- Paul notes the ongoing prominence of Peter and John (Gal. 2:9)
- Mark names them as the three to witness the transfiguration (Mk. 9:2), and names James and John as bold enough to think they might sit on Jesus' right and left in his kingdom (10:35ff)
- Matthew and Luke follow Mark's lead
- Acts describes James' death (12:2) and repeatedly pairs Peter and John as early protagonists
- ....and then the fourth gospel names only one of those three, but pairs Peter with "the disciple Jesus loved"

That's not some fanciful reading into the text, that is a clear discrepancy between the fourth gospel and the other early sources, one which should if possible be coherently explained. Authorship by the disciple John explains it; as far as I have seen, other notions do not.

As to why John might have been in particular "the disciple Jesus loved," it has been plausibly suggested that he was Jesus' cousin. At the cross of Jesus, Mark names three women in particular (15:40); Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less and Joseph (Jesus' mother, cf. Mk. 6:3), and Salome. Matthew likewise names three women (27:56); Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee's sons (presumably Salome again). John seems to mention four women (19:25); in addition to Mary the wife of Clopas, he mentions Mary Magdalene, the mother of Jesus, and his mother's sister.

The way it's written, it could be that Mary the wife of Clopas was Jesus' mother's sister (Mary the sister of Mary ): But if they were four distinct women, it would imply that the mother of Zebedee's sons was Jesus' aunt, making James and John his cousins. A man taking the apparently widowed mother of Jesus into his own home would also make a lot more sense if he were actually a relative.

[Mithrae]

Let’s look at the answer to the first part of the question.

The writer of the gospel of John was not an eyewitness to Jesus’ life.

It has Jesus crucified on the Day of Preparation not Passoveras does Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And it has no Eucharist instituted at the Last Supper.

There's actually a strong case to be made that the Preparation day crucifixion represents an earlier tradition than the Passover crucifixion. After all, a trial before the Sanhedrin and burial of the dead would have been historically all but impossible on the feast day of Passover, and it's just a little too convenient for Christian symbolism if it had been on the actual day. Moreover, the textual evidence of a pre-Markan 'passion narrative' suggests as much:

• Early Christian Writings - Passion Narrative
  Theissen begins his discussion by observing that there lies behind Mark a narrative that presupposes a chronology that corresponds to the one found in John, in which Jesus dies on the preparation day before the Passover. Theissen states (pp. 166-167):
  • In my opinion, in Mark we can discern behind the text as we now have it a connected narrative that presupposes a certain chronology. According to Mark, Jesus died on the day of Passover, but the tradition supposes it was the preparation day before Passover: in 14:1-2 the Sanhedrin decided to kill Jesus before the feast in order to prevent unrest among the people on the day of the feast. This fits with the circumstance that in 15:21 Simon of Cyrene is coming in from the fields, which can be understood to mean he was coming from his work. It would be hard to imagine any author's using a formulation so subject to misunderstanding in an account that describes events on the day of Passover, since no work was done on that day. Moreover, in 15:42 Jesus' burial is said to be on the "preparation day," but a relative clause is added to make it the preparation day for the Sabbath. Originally, it was probably the preparation day for the Passover (cf. Jn 19:42). The motive for removing Jesus from the cross and burying him before sundown would probably have been to have this work done before the beginning of the feast day, which would not make sense if it were already the day of Passover. Finally, the "trial" before the Sanhedrin presupposes that this was not a feast day, since no judicial proceedings could be held on that day. It would have been a breach of the legal code that the narrator could scarcely have ignored, because the point of the narrative is to represent the proceeding against Jesus as an unfair trial with contradictory witnesses and a verdict decided in advance by the high priests.

If John's divergence from the extant Synoptics on this point actually represents the earlier and more authentic tradition, the claim to be an eyewitness work is enhanced rather than diminished.

The absence of a direct depiction of the Lord's supper and Jesus' baptism is also surprisingly consistent with the early church traditions on the gospel's authorship: According to Irenaeus, "John, the disciple of the Lord, preaches this faith, and seeks, by the proclamation of the Gospel, to remove that error which by Cerinthus had been disseminated among men..." (AH 3.11.1) and, perhaps a little more reliably, relates from Polycarp a story about John's encounter with Cerinthus at an Ephesian bathhouse (3.3.4). The doctrine of Cerinthus included the belief that:

• Irenaeus, AH 1.26.1
  Moreover, after his baptism, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler, and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father, and performed miracles. But at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.

Our information is quite limited of course, but if Cerinthus taught that 'the Christ' descended on Jesus at the time of one major early Christian ritual (baptism), it seems entirely probable the alleged departure occurred at the other (Lord's supper). That's slightly speculative of course, but it makes a lot of sense of the fact that direct reference to those two events in Jesus' life are conspicuously omitted from the gospel allegedly written against Cerinthus. (Both baptism and the eucharist are clearly taught by Jesus elsewhere in the gospel of course, eg. ch3 and ch6... a fact which some scholars invoke a 'redactor' to explain, as far as I'm aware without explaining why this alleged redactor didn't just insert the actual baptism and supper stories themselves!)

Once again, I haven't seen any alternative theory which makes half as much sense of those omissions.


Edit: You might be interested in this 2011 thread in which many of these issues are discussed. Ultimately, any theory of authorship will be considerably less than 100% certain, but now as then I would still say that a very solid balance of evidence favours the view that the disciple John was the primary author.

[polonius]

Mark 14:51-52 51 A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, 52 but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked. (NRSV)

This passage in Mark has nothing before it or after it to describe who the young man was or what relationship he had with Jesus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Go ... aba_letter

“In 1973, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, reported having found a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba on the West Bank transcribed into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to another monastery, and the manuscript is believed to be lost. Further research has relied upon photographs and copies, including those made by Smith himself�

.� They come into Bethany, and there was a woman whose brother had died 2 and [she] approaches and bows down before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." 3 But the disciples scolded her. 4 And Jesus got angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. 5 Right away there was a loud voice from the tomb. 6 Then Jesus went up and rolled the stone away from the opening of the tomb. 7 He went right in where the youth was, reached out a hand and raised him, taking hold of [his] hand. 8 The youth loved him at first sight and began to plead with him to stay. 9 And coming out of the tomb, they go to the young man's home for he was rich. 10 And six days later Jesus called him. 11 And when evening came, the young man went to him wearing a shroud over his nude body. 12 And he stayed all night as Jesus taught him the secret of the kingdom of God. 13 From there he gets up and goes back across the Jordan.�

( See Morton Smith (A), Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 152-153; or Morton Smith (B), The Secret Gospel: TheDiscovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 53.)

Was this Lazarus? Was this the young man who ran off in Mark 14:51-52?

[Tired of the Nonsense]

[Replying to post 14 by Mithrae]

And? I didn't know you valued Christian tradition so highly.

Of course I don't value Christian tradition at all. It means the world to Christians however, who have declared for the last 2,000 years that not only are their traditions valid, but that God Himself guided the choice of the 27 books of the NT and that they are inerrant. If 2 John and 3 John were not written by the apostle, that openly undermines all Christian claims. To those of us who are NOT Christians however, it is clear that many assumptions that Christians have made about the NT for the last 2,000 years are simply untenible.

And we still have no direct evidence as to who wrote Gospel John. All we have is Christain tradition. SO if 2 John and 3 John were not written by the apostle, then Christian tradition is valueless.

One of those quite literally borders on the impossible - that Jesus' Jewish disciples would have turned a blind eye to open affection with a male lover, or that said lover would later publicize the affair - while the other seeks to address a clear and distinct discrepancy between the fourth gospel and other early sources. It could be argued that trying to imply an equivalence between those two suggests a specific motivation on your part more than anything else. Each early source attests the early prominence of Jesus' "inner circle" of Peter, James and John:
- Paul notes the ongoing prominence of Peter and John (Gal. 2:9)
- Mark names them as the three to witness the transfiguration (Mk. 9:2), and names James and John as bold enough to think they might sit on Jesus' right and left in his kingdom (10:35ff)
- Matthew and Luke follow Mark's lead
- Acts describes James' death (12:2) and repeatedly pairs Peter and John as early protagonists
- ....and then the fourth gospel names only one of those three, but pairs Peter with "the disciple Jesus loved."

This assumes that Jesus' closest companions were not hand picked for having similar, shall we say, proclivities. Now let me make it perfectly clear... I am not claiming that Jesus and his group were a traveling band of homosexuals. Others have, however. I am simply pointing out that it is possible to make that case by using, or misusing, cherry picked snippets of the texts. Those who promote the apostle John as the author of Gospel John have reached that conclusion by making a biased and conjectured reading of the text. The bottom line is that the Gospels do not give us the identity of the "disciple that Jesus loved." It is currently popular to to claim that this disciple was actually his wife, Mary Magdalene. But the Gospels do not give us that information.

As to why John might have been in particular "the disciple Jesus loved," it has been plausibly suggested that he was Jesus' cousin. At the cross of Jesus, Mark names three women in particular (15:40); Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less and Joseph (Jesus' mother, cf. Mk. 6:3), and Salome. Matthew likewise names three women (27:56); Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee's sons (presumably Salome again). John seems to mention four women (19:25); in addition to Mary the wife of Clopas, he mentions Mary Magdalene, the mother of Jesus, and his mother's sister.

I have "plausibly suggested" that the reason Joseph's tomb proved to be empty on Sunday morning is because Joseph never intended his newly constructed family crypt to be the final resting place for Jesus, only used the tomb as a convenient place to wash and prepare the body, and then had the body shipped home to Galilee for burial by the family of Jesus. The next day the priests in Matthew 27 took possession of a closed and already empty tomb, which they did not open and inspect. This is a vastly more believable possibility than the Christian claim that the corpse came back to life and vacatated the tomb on it's own, ultimately flying off into the sky. Unfortunately my "plausible suggestion" can't be directly proven either, although it has at least as much likelihood of being true as the claim that the apostle John wrote the Gospel According to John.

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 14 by Mithrae]

And? I didn't know you valued Christian tradition so highly.

Of course I don't value Christian tradition at all. It means the world to Christians however, who have declared for the last 2,000 years that not only are their traditions valid, but that God Himself guided the choice of the 27 books of the NT and that they are inerrant. If 2 John and 3 John were not written by the apostle, that openly undermines all Christian claims. To those of us who are NOT Christians however, it is clear that many assumptions that Christians have made about the NT for the last 2,000 years are simply untenible.

And we still have no direct evidence as to who wrote Gospel John. All we have is Christain tradition. SO if 2 John and 3 John were not written by the apostle, then Christian tradition is valueless.

Traditions of later centuries and millennia are valueless. Traditions of the earliest centuries are not infallible, but ignoring the earliest available information on the basis of some kind of black and white absolutism would obviously be misguided. Especially when your assertions about "all Christian claims" are demonstrably false: Even as late as the 4th century CE, Didymus the Blind (head of the catechetical school at Alexandria and teacher of Jerome) apparently rejected 2 and 3 John as canonical, hardly suggesting that he considered them the work of the apostle! In earlier centuries Polycarp, the Valentinians, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian all accepted 1 John, but of those only Irenaeus is known to have accepted 2 John and only Polycarp is known to have accepted 3 John. Compelling evidence that the first epistle came from a considerably more 'authoritative' source than the latter two.

Those who promote the apostle John as the author of Gospel John have reached that conclusion by making a biased and conjectured reading of the text.

Well, you're certainly welcome to actually point out the problems with the reasoning. Besides feeble insults like these, so far all you have done is promote a few hypotheticals which even you seem to consider far-fetched, and baldly assert an equivalence between them.

More to the point, you are incorrect that the identification of John as the author is based solely on the textual characteristics of the book. As I pointed out in my initial response, the explicit identification of John as the author comes from early and diverse Christian sources such as the gnostic Valentinians and Heracleon in the mid 2nd century, even before the attribution by proto-orthodox Irenaeus (via Polycarp). (It was also quoted as from 'the memoirs of the apostles' by Justin Martyr, c. 150-160CE, in 1 Apology 61 and Dialogue with Tryhpo 105.) Such early and widespread acceptance of probably the latest canonical gospel written - moreover one so different from the more widely-read synoptics! - is difficult to explain unless the attributions had some basis in fact.

The fact that multiple textual characteristics of the book align with those traditions (absence of John and James; earlier tradition of a Preparation day crucifixion; no direct mention of the baptism and Lord's supper in a gospel against Cerinthus; possibility that John was Jesus' cousin) are confirmation of the more explicit information passed around in the early church, moreso than reasons in themselves for identifying John as the author: The gospel itself would furnish us only with the sound conclusion that it was written by a disciple and (as Polonius is coherently arguing) perhaps close to even odds that Lazarus was the author instead of John!

[Tired of the Nonsense]

[Replying to post 18 by Mithrae]

Traditions of later centuries and millennia are valueless. Traditions of the earliest centuries are not infallible, but blithely ignoring the earliest available information on the basis of some kind of black and white absolutism would obviously be misguided. Especially when your assertions about "all Christian claims" are demonstrably false: Even as late as the 4th century CE, Didymus the Blind (head of the catechetical school at Alexandria and teacher of Jerome) apparently rejected 2 and 3 John as canonical, hardly suggesting that he considered them the work of the apostle! In earlier centuries Polycarp, the Valentinians, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian all accepted 1 John, but of those only Irenaeus accepted 2 John and only Polycarp accepted 3 John. Compelling evidence that the first epistle came from a considerably more 'authoritative' source than the latter two.

I haven't asserted that "all Christian claims" are demonstrably false. Tradition says that Gospel Luke and Acts of the Apostles were written by the same author. Virtually all modern experts agree that Gospel Luke and Acts were written by the same person. That's one! Papias, in the second century, indicated that the author of Gospel Mark was an individual named Mark who served as the interpreter for Peter. While I don't claim to know for certain who wrote Gospel Mark, the evidence, such as it is, is not unreasonable, and I have never questioned it. On the other hand, the entire Christian religion stands or falls on the truth of the Christian assertion that the corpse of Jesus returned to life and subsequently flew away, off into the sky. This claim alone, given it's central importance to the entire belief, and it's apparent absurdity, makes ALL Christian claims reasonably suspect.

Well, you're certainly welcome to actually point out the problems with the reasoning. So far all you have done is promote a few far-fetched hypotheticals and baldly assert an equivalence between them.

Insupportable claims and evidence leads us to the conclusion that we DO NOT KNOW who wrote the Gospel According to John.

According to Christian tradition, the apostle John (the evangelist) wrote ALL of the works attributed to him. As it turns out, the author of 2 John and 3 John identifies named himself as the presbyter, and not the evangelist. If we are going to conclude that Christian tradition is not accurate, then it is necessary to provide an actual line of evidence for the origin of the Gospel. In truth we do not know who actually wrote the Gospel According to John in the same way that we do not actually know who wrote the Gospel According to Matthew. The historical record does not support the claim that the Gospels were written by apostles, and you have invalidated Christian tradition as being trustworthy. Which leaves us with "I don't know."

The fact that multiple textual characteristics of the book align with those traditions (absence of John and James; no direct mention of the baptism and Lord's supper in a gospel against Cerinthus; possibility that John was Jesus' cousin) are confirmation of the more explicit information passed around in the early church, moreso than reasons in themselves for identifying John as the author.

In what sense is this claim anything other than an example of wish fulfillment in action? Really no different than making the claim that Jesus and company were a group of homosexuals, because that happens to suit someone's personal agenda? And because "clues" found in the NT can be interpolated to support such a claim.

[Mithrae]

According to Christian tradition, the apostle John (the evangelist) wrote ALL of the works attributed to him. As it turns out, the author of 2 John and 3 John identifies named himself as the presbyter, and not the evangelist. If we are going to conclude that Christian tradition is not accurate, then it is necessary to provide an actual line of evidence for the origin of the Gospel. In truth we do not know who actually wrote the Gospel According to John in the same way that we do not actually know who wrote the Gospel According to Matthew. The historical record does not support the claim that the Gospels were written by apostles, and you have invalidated Christian tradition as being trustworthy. Which leaves us with "I don't know."

It seems that you are either unable or unwilling to come to terms with things like detail, nuance and actual evidence. I do not accept this black and white thinking as valid. As long as you keep imagining vague, unreferenced 'Christian tradition' as a monolithic entity to be accepted or mistrusted as a whole, there really is little point in further discussion.