Scholarly consensus
John is the latest of the four gospels, usually dated between 90 and 110 CE, and the most different. It shares almost no wording with the other three. Its Jesus cleanses the Temple at the start of his ministry, not the end; visits Jerusalem three times, not once; dies on the day before Passover, not on it; and speaks in long discourses about himself rather than in parables about the kingdom. It has no birth story, no baptism scene, no temptation, no exorcisms, no transfiguration, no Last Supper words over bread and wine, and no agony in Gethsemane. What it has instead is a Jesus who says who he is.
Who wrote it
The gospel does not name its author. It ends by attributing its testimony to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (21:24), who is never named either, and the chapter that says so is an appendix: the gospel has already ended at 20:31. Irenaeus, around 180 CE, identified the author as John the son of Zebedee, writing in Ephesus in old age. Modern scholars note that the beloved disciple appears only in the Jerusalem scenes, that the gospel’s Greek and theology are far from a Galilean fisherman’s, and that the text shows signs of more than one hand: a prologue in a different style, a farewell discourse that ends at 14:31 (“Rise, let us be on our way”) and then continues for three more chapters, and the appended chapter 21. Most speak of a Johannine community and a school rather than an author. Papyrus 52, a scrap of chapter 18 in the John Rylands Library, is the oldest known fragment of any gospel and is dated to the first half of the second century, which sets a lower limit for the book’s circulation in Egypt.
The prologue
John 1:1-18 is a hymn to the Word (Logos), who was in the beginning with God and was God, through whom all things were made, and who became flesh. It is the clearest statement of pre-existence in the four gospels. Nothing like it is in Mark, the earliest, whose Jesus becomes Son of God at his baptism (1:11), or in Matthew and Luke, whose Jesus is so from his conception. The doctrine developed, and the order of the gospels shows it developing. In 1:18 the manuscripts disagree over whether the one who has made God known is “the only Son” or “the only God”; the oldest papyri have the second, and editors are divided.
The Jesus who speaks of himself
Only in John does Jesus say “I am the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the resurrection and the life” (11:25), “the way, the truth and the life” (14:6), “before Abraham was, I am” (8:58), and “the Father and I are one” (10:30). Only in John does Thomas address him as “my Lord and my God” (20:28). These sayings are the foundation of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. They are absent from the three earlier gospels, which record the same ministry. If Jesus had said such things, in public, to the crowds and to the authorities, it is hard to explain why Mark, Matthew and Luke left every one of them out. Most critical scholars conclude that the discourses are the community’s reflection on Jesus, placed in his mouth, rather than his words.
Two voices in one gospel
The same gospel preserves sayings that point the other way, and they are as plain as the others. “The Father is greater than I” (14:28). “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17:3). “I can do nothing on my own” (5:30). “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me” (7:16). “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20:17). When the Jews accuse him of making himself God, he answers from Psalm 82 that scripture calls men gods, and claims for himself only the title Son of God, as one whom the Father sanctified and sent (10:33-36). Christian tradition reads these texts of the Son’s human nature or his obedience. The Islamic reading takes them at face value, as the Qur’an does: he said only what he was commanded, worship God, my Lord and your Lord (5:117).
Two famous passages
The story of the woman taken in adultery (7:53-8:11) is absent from every Greek manuscript before the fifth century, from the oldest Syriac and Coptic versions, and from the commentaries of the Greek fathers; in the manuscripts that have it, it moves about, appearing after 7:36, after 21:25 and in Luke after 21:38. It is printed in brackets in modern editions. The ending of chapter 21, with its claim that the whole world could not contain the books that might be written, is part of the appendix. Neither passage belongs to the gospel as first written.
Why it matters here
John is the gospel on which the claim that Jesus taught his own divinity rests, and it is the latest, the most theological, and the furthest from the words of the other three. The Qur’an’s portrait of ʿĪsā, a servant and messenger who called men to worship God alone, agrees with the earlier gospels and with the second voice in John. The measure applied on this website keeps that voice and sets the other aside, and says so. See the measure and Paul of Tarsus against Jesus, where the doctrine is traced to its other source.
Islamic position
Al-Fārūqī reads the same sayings from the Aramaic side. “Son of man” in Jesus’s world meant a human being, and the synoptics use it so; “son of God” in Hebrew usage was the king, the righteous, or Israel; Kyrios, Mār, Mārī is “master”, the address of a servant to the one who sent him; and “I and the Father are one”, if Jesus said it, is the ordinary idiom of a man whose will is wholly one with his master’s, “which can be heard even today in Arabic a hundred times a day in any village market place”. Only in John and in the letters of Paul of Tarsus does sonship become metaphysical, and the prologue’s Word that was with God and was God, together with the creed’s “begotten not made” and “light of light”, is, he argues, the vocabulary of the Gnostic emanation schools, for whom the Logos was the first intelligence proceeding from the unknowable Father. On that reading the two voices in John are a Semitic teacher and a Hellenistic editor, and the measure keeps the first (al-Fārūqī, pp. 10-16).
Sources
- Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible, two volumes.
- Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple.
- Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, on John 1:18 and 7:53-8:11.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1, for the tradition of authorship.
- Ismāʿīl Rājī al-Fārūqī, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1983), pp. 10-16, on the titles and sayings read in their Semitic sense and on the Gnostic source of the Logos.