Is the Gospel of John reliable?

[Elijah John]

1) Is the Gospel of John a good, reliable account of the historical Jesus?
2) Did Jesus say everything in that Gospel that was attributed to him?
3) Without the Gospel of John, how can a person make a good case be made that Jesus claimed to be God?

[Tart]

John's Gospel

This is what the soldiers did. 25 [j]Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. 26 When Jesus saw his mother[k] and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.� 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.� And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

RESPONSE: Lets observe exactly what is said in the above.

The "beloved disciple" took Mary to his home within the hour. The Apostle John and the other apostles lived in Galilee, a three day's journey from Jerusalem.

Thus the "beloved disciple" wasn't the Apostle John but someone who lived very near Jerusalem. (Clue. He is identified in John's Gospel).

Am i the only one whos creeped out by the passage? What's going on here anyways? John is the weirdest Gospel... Jesus is dying on a cross and just says to his mom plainly "look at me", and then his disciple takes her into his home, where who knows what happens...

Im not even joking... I even believe in this stuff.. what is wrong with the world anyways?

[Tart]

Personally i think it is the Word of God, because it says so.. And yes i truly believe that... Just accept it dude, it's the Word of God, it says it is the Word of God, and I believe it because Jesus Christ is the perfect embodiment of a personal God for me, and a guy i never met...

And i want to be very clear about this. It may look sarcastic, and maybe it kind of is, but I still truly believe what i wrote here... So there...

[Zzyzx]

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Why believe anything at all?

It might be prudent to accept ('believe') what can be shown to be truthful and accurate. No gods or ancient texts or wild speculation required.

[Elijah John]

1) Is the Gospel of John a good, reliable account of the historical Jesus?
2) Did Jesus say everything in that Gospel that was attributed to him?
3) Without the Gospel of John, how can a person make a good case be made that Jesus claimed to be God?

Well that depends if you believe the Bible or not... Maybe the Bible is wrong? It formed by chance accidentally by men

False dichotomy. All true or all false? Which Bible, Protestant? Jewish? Catholic? Eastern Orthodox? What was Jesus own Bible? The 66 books of the Protestant Canon?.

Or maybe God is real, but made a mistake in his plan of destiny, or let the Devil put things in the Bible that arent true.

How about this, the Bible is Divinely inspired, not dictated. And humans were part of the equation. And it is the human element, and bias where error sometimes creeps in.

But then, maybe "though shall live by every word of God"~Jesus was put in there by the Devil?? Maybe the Devil made the entire book and God did something else (this is sarcasm)....

What did Jesus mean by the "word of God"? Paul's letters? Not much evidence for that. Isn't it more probable that he meant the Hebrew Bible, what many Christians call the "Old" Testament?

Also, the erroneous parts of the Bible can reasonably be attributed to human bias and error. No diabolical motive needed.

The question is, is some things in the Bible wrong, and others not wrong? If so, we could just pick and choose what we want to believe (like many atheists say so).. In which case i could believe the parts about murdering homosexuals, and disregard the part about giving to the poor, and whos to say im wrong? You disregard John, but not other parts.

So you too admit to cherry picking. Thank God. There are some horrendous things in the Bible, like the imperative to stone many types of sinners, including homosexuals and also the keeping and beating of slaves, half-to-death because they are "property" according to Moses. But most ignore those parts, or condemn them.

When we cherry pick, we are using our God-given gift of Reason. I think God expects that of us, as well as faith in the Good.

Why believe anything at all?

Because the Bible contains much that is good, and God-given. Like the Golden Rule, the Wisdom of the Proberbs, etc, etc. The good in the Bible filtered though, virtually uncontaminated. The bad, the absurd and atrocious, are contaminants. The Good and God Himself, are worth believing in.

Why do you believe the Bible in it's entirety is the Word of God? Or do you.

[Zzyzx]

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Personally i think it is the Word of God, because it says so..

Where, exactly, does the Bible SAY it is the word of God? Citation?

And yes i truly believe that... Just accept it

I accept that you believe that. I do NOT accept that it is true.

it's the Word of God, it says it is the Word of God,

If a book claims, or is claimed, to be the word of God, does that make it so? The Koran? The Book of Mormon?

and I believe it because Jesus Christ is the perfect embodiment of a personal God for me, and a guy i never met...

Apparently you believe. So what? That isn’t of any significance in debate.

And i want to be very clear about this. It may look sarcastic, and maybe it kind of is, but I still truly believe what i wrote here... So there...

What you say does not seem sarcastic to me. Other terms seem more applicable.

[Difflugia]

I've apparently missed a lot in a few days.

One reason is that we can make a solid historical case that the Gospel of John has the authority of an eyewitness standing behind it. Generally speaking historical methodology recognizes an eyewitness account as more reliable than, say, a second hand account. Meeting the criterion of eyewitness is a sufficient to prima facie hold John as generally reliable. At least as generally reliable as any other ancient eyewitness account. From there, it would be incumbent upon the one arguing against generally reliability to make a case.

After reading the rest of this thread as well as your Tertullian/Tacitus monograph that Mithrae linked, I'm still trying to reconcile two directions of your overall argument. You've claimed that John is an eyewitness account and therefore generally reliable, but that contradictions and specific instances of unreliability don't argue against general reliability. Can you narrow the idea of general reliability a bit? What things do you think are reliable and unreliable about John?

Your reasoning here if applied to other historical works would likewise render those works “unhistorical.� For instance, I could say the same about the accounts from Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch, and Suetonius of Caesar’s assassination. They conflict and they embellish. One has Caesar speaking at the first blow, one has Caesar silent. One account has as many as eighty senators involved another only names a handful. They contain the supernatural and so on. Using your reasoning at least one of those accounts of Caesar must be unhistorical.

I agree with your assessment. If we say for the moment that the collection of Gospel accounts of Jesus is just as historical as the collection of accounts of Caesar's assassination, then "Caesar was assassinated" and "Jesus was crucified" are on par in terms of historicity. We can say that Jesus was crucified, but we don't know on what day it happened, what anyone said, whether Jesus's legs were broken, whether a spear was thrust in his side, or what his last words were. Is that what you mean by "historical" and "generally reliable"?

The theory is interesting but it’s undermined, if not outright falsified, every time John does not embellish when we would expect him to do so.

Take for instance the baptism of Jesus. All four Gospels have the spirit descending like a dove. The earlier Gospels all have a heavenly voice declaring, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.� But John doesn’t even mention this additional heavenly voice detail let alone embellish on the earlier Gospels when this would seem to present an ideal moment if it were the case John was inclined to up the ante, so to speak, of the earlier Gospels.

John does embellish this scene, though, in a way that particularly matches one overall pattern of John's Gospel. If we posit for a moment that Mark was the source of the scene (I think it likely, though not firmly established, that John knew one or more of the Synoptics), Mark's is the simplest. The way I read Mark, this is a personal theophany for Jesus. Jesus sees the Spirit descend toward (and perhaps into) him "like a dove" in the sense of a simile, or "as a dove would."

Matthew modified the scene to match a different theology. Matthew's Jesus was born as the Christ, so a personal theophany at the baptism makes no sense. He replaced Mark's ὡς with the subtly stronger ὡσεί (in my opinion, implying that the Spirit was visible) and changed God's audience from Jesus alone ("you are my...") to the assembled crowd ("this is my...").

I'll mention Luke for completeness, but I'll admit that I don't know what's going on there. Luke's baptism seems to be a weird amalgamation of Mark and Matthew. The Spirit is explicitly visible as a physical dove (σωματικῷ εἴδει ὡς πε�ιστε�ὰν), but God is still speaking directly to Jesus ("you are my..."). My personal opinion is that Luke removed the baptism altogether (like he did the "unforgivable sin" pericope) and 3:21-22 is a later insertion in a spot where it doesn't exactly make sense (as Luke 12:10 appears to be).

Now, we come to John. John embellishes the scene by explicitly making it about John the Baptist's witness. In the other traditions, the Baptist is a participant, but wasn't a witness for Christianity. One of John's goals is to establish "witnesses" for Jesus and that their "testimony" is "true." The baptism becomes John's "testimony" and Jesus proclaims that the testimony is "true." In Mark, there's no indication that the Baptist ever even realized who Jesus was. In Matthew and Luke, the Baptist sends messengers from prison to ask about Jesus (though in Matthew, he figured it out at the baptism, but apparently forgot again). In no case, did John have occasion or opportunity to offer testimony as a witness. If the Synoptics are even more-or-less correct, then John basically invented the testimony of an eyewitness and used the same kind of wording (5:31-32) as he did for the other sources of "testimony" (3:31-33, 4:39-42, 8:14-15, 19:35, 21:24).

Or take John’s account of the death of Jesus and discovery of the empty tomb in comparison to the other three earlier Gospels. No earthquake, no darkness, no tearing of the Temple veil, nor the rising of the Saints at the death of Jesus in John that we see in the earlier Gospels.

In Mark, the women came to the tomb, saw the empty tomb and a young man and ran away, full stop. Matthew went nuts with new and bizarre details, even if John knew Matthew's details and completely ignored them (perhaps the risen dead walking around Jerusalem was too much for even his mystical tastes), he still embellished with witnesses.

According to Mark, the only witnesses to any of this were a centurion and a group of women, and three specific, fleeing women were the only ones that knew of the empty tomb. Matthew added an appearance of Jesus to the women afterward, but it was still only women that saw the empty tomb. That didn't sit well with Luke, who conspicuously added "all his acquaintances" (23:49) to witness the crucifixion and then made sure that at least one man (Peter) saw the empty tomb. Luke followed this up with an extensive visit by Jesus on the road to Emmaus, then another appearance to all the disciples later, back in Jerusalem.

It's a tossup whether John or Luke has the witness story with the most overall embellishments, but I think I'll still vote for John. While both John and Luke have extensive post-resurrection visits that involve all of the disciples, John's involves Jesus teleporting into a locked room. That's pretty embellishy, right? According to John, the women were joined by the disciple Jesus loved in order to have the all important "behold your son" conversation. The centurion became one whose "testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe" (19:35).

[polonius]

Personally i think it is the Word of God, because it says so.. And yes i truly believe that... Just accept it dude, it's the Word of God, it says it is the Word of God, and I believe it because Jesus Christ is the perfect embodiment of a personal God for me, and a guy i never met...

And i want to be very clear about this. It may look sarcastic, and maybe it kind of is, but I still truly believe what i wrote here... So there...

My friend Ralph is also writing a book which he says is the inspired word of God too. Should I believe him? Why not since his book will say so?