I just ruminated on this thread’s title: “Historical accuracy of the gospel of John.”
Here’s a thing to remember: we should throw away our modern definition of ‘history’ when it comes to John’s gospel. Sure, just as I noted earlier, John’s gospel probably has the most verisimilitude of the four gospels. In that respect, John is ‘historical’ (or at least ‘historically-authentic / plausible’) in the modern sense.
But then again, another thing about the gospel is that
the voice of the author is not clearly distinguishable from the voice of Jesus or even from John the Baptist. All three of them speak in the same voice, so that it’s hard to tell precisely where Jesus’ or John the Baptist’s actual, ‘historical’ speech ends and where John the Evangelist’s ruminations begins. This is especially true if you consider how the original gospel would have been written: without any quotation marks or any kind of punctuation. (John 3 is a prime example of this phenomenon. Is John 3:16-17 supposed to be Jesus’ actual words to Nicodemus? Or is it actually the narrator speaking? We can’t tell, because the flow is smooth.)
A modern historian looking at this would (and did) accuse John the Evangelist of ‘putting words into Jesus’ mouth’. For someone who is only interested in the dry, bare facts, John has so buried whatever ‘historical’ there is into layers and layers of theology and reflection. The assumption is that only the ‘historical’ core is good and of any worth; the rest are to be rejected and cast away as worthless garbage.
But John would not have seen it that way; and for that matter, I believe we Christians shouldn’t either. I think the key to understanding his gospel is in chapter 16:
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit, who will teach the disciples everything and “guide [them] into all the truth.” We know the disciples and the early Christians believed that the risen Jesus still continued to be in touch with them via the Spirit (the Ascension simply ‘removed Him from their sight’ - it’s not like after the Ascension Jesus no longer had anything for His disciples!); the Spirit of Jesus continued to teach them, to reveal things to them that they never saw while Jesus was still with them in the flesh.
That’s why I really like to view John as the story of Jesus
as filtered through John looking back with the gift of hindsight / the revelation of the Spirit. John wasn’t telling just ‘the bare facts’, nor is he interested in that. His story of Jesus, you might say,
transcends ‘history’ and ‘fact’. He’s not so much a ‘reporter’ as he was a ‘storyteller’ and an ‘evangelist’.
In fact, it doesn’t take a scholar to see this. Let’s say for example John’s story of the cleansing of the Temple. Were John just reporting the ‘facts’, we should expect the story to simply go on like this:
In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there.
And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”
Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
No fuss - just a dry report about ‘what happened’. Something that’ll make modern Westerners happy. But that’s not how John writes. Instead:
In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there.
And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.
And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”
Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Did Jesus really make those long speeches? Did He really speak those discourses as written word-for-word
historically? I’ll be frank. Without any time machine or video footage, we can’t 100% say “yes.” For all we know, the speeches could have been a great deal shorter historically.
But then again, we could say that John’s purpose is not so much to jot down what Jesus would have actually said word-for-word as if he’s writing a script or news report, but
the deeper meaning behind those words that John (thanks to the Holy Spirit) had now realized. Just because John would not have transcribed those discourses as Jesus spoke them historically that doesn’t make the contents “false;” if anything, now that the deeper meaning behind them is revealed I’d say it makes them more ‘true’.
