Gospel of John

[yinekka]

Is it true that most modern scholars think that John did not write the gospel attributed to him?

 

[prodromos]

I don’t know if it is true. I haven’t heard of it but then I don’t rub shoulders with too many of the “modern scholarship” variety. It wouldn’t surprise me though. One of the problems with modern research is the idea of “publish or perish”, that is, if you are not constantly putting out papers and articles you will simply fade into obscurity. This is particularly a problem if the field you happen to be working in has been thoroughly tapped out, and I strongly suspect that no stone has been left unturned in the field of biblical textual criticism. The only thing left for modern scholars to do in order to have something to publish is to simply make stuff up, invent controversy, and the more sensationalist the better.

 

[Maccabees]

Well the church fathers give strong witness that John did write his own gospel so to me there is no controversy there.

However the Book of Revelation is legitamately debateable in belonging to John the Apostles the church fathers disagreed on who wrote the book and up unitl the fourth century its canonicty was in doubt as attested by Eusebius some still didn’ t think it belonged in the canon most likely because of its controversial authorship and possible millinerian misinterpretation which was condemed by the fourth century.

 

[MaggieOH]

Yes it is true that the modernist scholars attempt to deny that John the Evangelist is the actual author of John’s Gospel, and I might add they dispute that he is the author of the Book of Revelation.

The reasons that they use to dispute authorship are:

1. There are two graves for someone named John, one of these is the Evangelist and the other is John the Priest.
2. When comparing the rudimentary Greek of the Gospel of John against the Greek of the Book of Revelation, they claim that the author cannot be the same.
3. That it was not John who wrote the Gospel but members of his community wrote it in his name.

The facts that they leave out are:

a. John describes the death of St. Peter the Apostle.
b. The author of the Book of Revelation lived through the sacking of Jerusalem.
c. John identifies himself as the author of the Gospel when he writes that he is the one whom Jesus loved. In the Book of Revelation John identifies himself in a more personal way.

The Gospel is written by an eyewitness to the Life Death and Resurrection of Jesus, but the modernists want to deny this fact as much as they want to deny the authorship of the othe gospels by claiming that they all got their information from “Q” (hmmm… that Q has been around a long time, and he has been appearing in James Bond movies too!!)

With regards to the level of the Greek in John’s Gospel, there could be an unheard of explanation - this might be a translation from Hebrew

Maggie

 

[Bobby_Jim]

Does it matter so much whether it was specifically John the son of Zebedee who put pen to paper and wrote it down, or if it was someone from his community to whom he had passed on an oral tradition? Not exactly the same thing, but lots of “autobiographies” are written largely by someone other than the person it’s “by”… it doesn’t change the authoritative quality for an autobiography, and nor would it really affect the authoritative eyewitness quality of the Gospel of John.

“Oral tradition” isn’t just a fancy name for a big game of telephone where everything gets jumbled up and embellished and changed in the retelling. I’m not saying it had to happen this way, but I would be just as comfortable calling it the “Gospel of John” if, say, John told the story in great detail to his followers, one of whom was a scribe who wrote it all down and gave it some literary form - perhaps John could have even read through it, made comments, corrections, and revisions. Or maybe John wrote the whole thing himself. I don’t know. Why does it matter? The early church considered this authoritative scripture with authentic eyewitness testimony, whereas other “gospels” that had the names of various apostles like Peter or Thomas associated with them were not. Beyond a bit of interesting historical trivia, does it matter who did the actual writing?

 

[stumbler]

“Scholarship” that questions authorship based on different writing styles strikes me as particularly weak. My writing style varies depending on the time of day, the day of the week, what I had to eat, how much I’ve been writing recently, the subject I’m writing about, my intended audience, how much time I have to write, my emotional state, how much sleep I’ve had, and more. And that just covers this past week.

Over a person’s lifetime, you also contend with varying language experience, differing levels of maturity, different dictation trans-scribers, different secretaries, different translators, access to different reference material, and more. This can really mix it up.

I’m not claiming that we can’t definitively prove that the authors of “Run Spot Run” and “Romeo and Juliet” are 2 different people. Rather, evidence that relies on writing style can only be weakly suggestive, not definitive.

 

[stumbler]

“Oral tradition” isn’t just a fancy name for a big game of telephone where everything gets jumbled up and embellished and changed in the retelling.

Oral histories were a significant part of the religious culture of the time. One’s ability to pass on exactly what he had learned from another was very important. The ability to repeat complicated passages verbatim was expected. This was very common in those days. While we rely more on the printed word today, there are still those individuals who can memorize extensive works. For example, there are some today who have memorized the entire Bible, able to repeat back verses verbatim for any given citation.

There was even a formalism used in rabbinical schools when passing on such oral material. Paul uses it repeatedly in his letters (e.g., 1 Cor 11:23 and 15:3): “I hand on to you what I have received.”