The Gospel according to John

By D. A. Carson

In this solid evangelical commentary on John's Gospel, a respected Scripture expositor makes clear the flow of the text, engages a small but representative part of the massive secondary literature on John, shows how the Fourth Gospel contributes to biblical and systematic theology, and offers a consistent exposition of John as an evangelistic Gospel. The comprehensive introduction treats such matters as the authenticity, authorship, purpose, and structure of the Gospel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Dec 20, 1990
• ISBN: 9781467438230

D. A. Carson

D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He has been at Trinity since 1978. Carson came to Trinity from the faculty of Northwest Baptist Theological Seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he also served for two years as academic dean. He has served as assistant pastor and pastor and has done itinerant ministry in Canada and the United Kingdom. Carson received the Bachelor of Science in chemistry from McGill University, the Master of Divinity from Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto, and the Doctor of Philosophy in New Testament from the University of Cambridge. Carson is an active guest lecturer in academic and church settings around the world. He has written or edited about sixty books. He is a founding member and currently president of The Gospel Coalition.

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Front Cover of The Gospel according to John

THE PILLAR NEW TESTAMENT COMMENTARY

General Editor

D. A. CARSON

This book is gratefully dedicated to Kenneth and Ruth Kantzer

Book Title of The Gospel according to John

© 1991 D. A. Carson.

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers or the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Published 1991 in the U.K. by

APOLLOS (an imprint of Inter-Varsity Press)

33 De Montfort Street, Leicester, England LE1 7GP and in the United States by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.eerdmans.com

Printed in the United States of America

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Carson, D. A.

The gospel according to John.

1. Bible. N.T. John—Critical Studies

I. Title

226.506

ISBN 978-85111-749-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8028-3683-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used in USA by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I.Some distinctive characteristics of the Gospel of John

II.How John’s Gospel has been understood: select soundings

1.The early church

2.More recent discussion

3.The present position

III.The authenticity of the Fourth Gospel

1.The possibility of effective source-criticism in John’s Gospel

2.The challenge of the stylistic unity

3.The relation between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics

4.Reflections on the conceptual background

5.An assessment of the ‘new criticism’

IV.The authorship of the Fourth Gospel

V.The date and provenance of the Fourth Gospel

VI.The purpose of the Gospel of John

VII.Some theological emphases in John

VIII.Preaching from the Fourth Gospel

IX.The structure of John’s Gospel

ANALYSIS

COMMENTARY

SERIES PREFACE

Commentaries have specific aims, and this series is no exception. Designed for serious pastors and teachers of the Bible, the Pillar commentaries seek above all to make clear the text of Scripture as we have it. The scholars writing these volumes interact with the most important informed contemporary debate, but avoid getting mired in undue technical detail. Their ideal is a blend of rigorous exegesis and exposition, with an eye alert both to biblical theology and the contemporary relevance of the Bible, without confusing the commentary and the sermon.

The rationale for this approach is that the vision of objective scholarship (a vain chimera) may actually be profane. God stands over against us; we do not stand in judgment of him. When God speaks to us through his Word, those who profess to know him must respond in an appropriate way, and that is certainly different from a stance in which the scholar projects an image of autonomous distance. Yet this is no surreptitious appeal for uncontrolled subjectivity. The writers of this series aim for an evenhanded openness to the text that is the best kind of objectivity of all.

If the text is God’s Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience. These values should be reflected in the way Christians write. With these values in place, the Pillar commentaries will be warmly welcomed not only by pastors, teachers, and students, but by general readers as well.

PREFACE

Anyone who dares to write yet another commentary on the Gospel of John must give reasons for doing so.

The original impetus was the invitation to provide a volume for a series. But as I set to work, it became clear that I needed more reason than that. A new commentary needs to justify itself in broader terms: it needs to carve a niche for itself by aiming at a specific readership, or by tackling certain problems, or by its particular emphases.

As these matters were discussed with the publishers, both they and I originally thought that the extra length and detail my own aims demanded could be accommodated within the series. Eventually, however, it was thought otherwise, and so we amicably agreed to publish this commentary on its own. This history largely explains why the format of this work is as it is.

This commentary seeks above all to explain the text of John’s Gospel to those whose privilege and responsibility it is to minister the Word of God to others, to preach and to lead Bible studies. I have tried to include the kind of information they need to know, but to do so in such a way that the informed layperson could also use the work in personal study of the Bible, exclusively for purposes of personal growth in edification and understanding.

In particular, I have attempted:

(1) To make clear the flow of the text. Instead of offering detailed word studies and comments on Greek syntax, I have kept such remarks to the minimum required to make sense of the book, and have focused on the movement of thought.

(2) To engage a small but representative part of the massive secondary literature on John. Doubtless many who read this commentary will be informed pastors and theological students who need some kind of map of contemporary studies on John. Without permitting such interaction to become intrusive, I have tried to indicate what is valuable in such work, and where (and why) I depart from some of it.

(3) To draw a few lines towards establishing how the Fourth Gospel contributes to biblical and systematic theology. There is, of course, no point in deriding such syntheses; any thinking Christian is in some sense a systematician. But if all of us consciously or unconsciously systematize what we learn from the Scriptures, it may be a help to pause now and then in the course of an exegetical and expository commentary and reflect on the contribution of the text to a mature and holistic Christian faith.

(4) To offer a consistent exposition of John’s Gospel as an evangelistic Gospel. This is out of step, I confess, with what is in vogue in current scholarship: the majority opinion understands the Fourth Gospel to have been written with Christian readers in mind. In the past I have written the odd article poking away at this synthesis, trying to establish the minority opinion; but this commentary attempts, in part, to provide a global (if still entirely preliminary) defence of this reading.

No-one is more aware than I how far I have proved unable to achieve these goals as I would have liked. I am grateful for the careful reading and thoughtful suggestions of Leon Morris and David Kingdon. That I have not always agreed with them must not detract from the fact that because of their wisdom and attention to detail this work is better than it would have been without them. I am also grateful to the publishers, not least for their continued enthusiasm for the work even when it became clear that it could not be accommodated within the series for which it was originally planned. Finally, I want to express my thanks to Steve Bryan for compiling the Scripture index.

Above all, if this commentary helps some to honour the Son just as they honour the Father (5:23), and to believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus (20:30–31), and thus to discern both the love (3:16) and the wrath (3:36) of God that have been brought near in the coming of the Son, I shall be profoundly grateful.

Soli Deo gloria.

D. A. Carson

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I. SOME DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

Perhaps more than any other, the Gospel of John has been used by Christians in every age, and for the greatest array of purposes. University students distribute free copies to their friends in the hope of introducing them to the Saviour. Elderly Christians on their deathbed ask that parts of this Gospel be read to them. Academics write learned dissertations on the relationship between John and some ancient corpus of literature. Children memorize entire chapters, and sing choruses based on its truth. Countless courses of sermons have been based on this book or on some part of it. It stood near the centre of Christological controversy in the fourth century, and for the last 150 years it has been at the heart of debate about the relation between history and theology. Until recently, the best known verse in the Bible was John 3:16 (possibly displaced today by Mt. 7:1!): a toddler could recite it. In this Gospel the love of God is dramatically mediated through Jesus Christ—so much so that Karl Barth is alleged to have commented that the most profound truth he had ever heard was ‘Jesus loves me, this I know / For the Bible tells me so.’

Even so, a thoughtful reader does not have to work at this book very long before noticing remarkable differences between the Fourth Gospel (as the Gospel of John is often called) and the Synoptics.

First, John’s Gospel leaves out a great deal of material that is characteristic of the Synoptics. There are no narrative parables in John, no account of the transfiguration, no record of the institution of the Lord’s supper, no report of Jesus casting out a demon, no mention of Jesus’ temptations. There are fewer brief, pithy utterances and more discourses, but some discourses found in the Synoptics (e.g. the Olivet Discourse, Mk. 13 par.) are not found in John. Although Jesus’ baptism and the calling of the Twelve are doubtless presupposed, they are not actually described. Even themes central to the Synoptics have almost disappeared: in particular, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, so much a part of the preaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and the central theme of his narrative parables, is scarcely mentioned as such (cf. notes on 3:3, 5; 18:36).

Second, John includes a fair amount of material of which the Synoptists make no mention. All of the material in John 2–4, for instance, including his miraculous transformation of water into wine, his dialogue with Nicodemus and his ministry in Samaria, find no Synoptic counterpart. Further, the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus’ frequent visits to Jerusalem, and his extended dialogues or discourses in the temple and in various synagogues, not to mention much of his private instruction to his disciples, are all exclusive to the Fourth Gospel.

Doubtless some of this can be accounted for on the basis that John reports far more of Jesus’ ministry in the south, in Judea and Samaria, than in Galilee; but the differences between John and the Synoptics are not all attributable to geographical focus. No less striking are the forcefully presented themes that dominate John but that are largely absent from the Synoptics. Only in John is Jesus explicitly identified with God (1:1, 18; 20:28). Here, too, Jesus makes a series of important ‘I am’ statements: I am the light of the world, the resurrection and the life, the good shepherd, the vine, the living water, the way, the truth and the life. These culminate in a series of absolute ‘I am’ statements that are redolent of God himself (cf. notes on 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58). The Fourth Gospel maintains a series of ‘opposites’, dualisms if you will, that are much stronger than in the Synoptics: life and death, from above and from below, light and dark, truth and lie, sight and blindness, and more.

Third, these themes become still more problematic for some readers when, formally at least, they contradict the treatment of similar themes in the Synoptic Gospels. Here, for instance, John the Baptist denies that he is Elijah (1:21), even though according to the Synoptists Jesus insists that he is (Mk. 9:11–13 par.). What shall we make of the bestowal of the Spirit (Jn. 20:22) and its relation to Acts 2? Above all, how do we account for the fact that in the Synoptics the disciples seem to grow from small beginnings in their understanding of who Jesus is, with various high-points along the way, such as Caesarea Philippi (Mk. 8:27–30 par.), while in John the very first chapter finds various individuals confessing Jesus not only as Rabbi, but as Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man, Lamb of God and King of Israel?

Fourth, there are several chronological difficulties that must be addressed. In addition to the obvious questions, such as the relation between the cleansing of the temple at the beginning (Jn. 2:14–22) and at the end (Mk. 11:15–17 par.) of Jesus’ public ministry, or the length of that ministry as attested by the number of Passovers it embraces (John reports at least three, the Synoptists only one); there are one or two questions of great difficulty that are precipitated in part by a knowledge of background ritual and circumstance. In particular, the chronology of the passion in the Fourth Gospel, as compared with that of the Synoptics, seems so idiosyncratic that it has generated complex theories about independent calendars, or about theological motifs that John is self-consciously allowing to skew the naked chronology. Did Jesus and his disciples eat the Passover, so that he was arrested the evening of Passover and crucified the next day, or was he crucified at the same time the Passover lambs were being slaughtered? And how does one account for the fact that the Synoptics picture Jesus being crucified about the third hour (9.00 a.m.), while in John Pilate’s final decision is not reached until the sixth hour (19:14)?

Fifth, students of Greek, perhaps more readily than those who read the text only in translation, observe that the style of writing is quite different from that of the Synoptics. For instance, the vocabulary is smaller, there is frequent parataxis (the use of co-ordinate clauses instead of subordinating expressions, which elegant Greek much prefers), peculiar uses of pronouns (e.g. ekeinos, ‘that one’, frequently no more than ‘he’ in John), and many instances of asyndeton (simply laying out clauses beside each other, without connecting them with particles or conjunctions, as Greek prefers). More importantly, there is little discernible difference in style between the words that are ascribed to Jesus and the Evangelist’s own comments. John has re-written the whole.

Finally, several historical anachronisms or other discrepancies are often alleged. ‘Come now; let us leave’, Jesus says in 14:31; yet there follow two more chapters of material before it becomes unambiguously clear that anyone has moved. Most scholars hold that John 21 is something of an afterthought appended to the original conclusion (20:30–31). In one place, at least, it is less than clear where Jesus’ words end and those of John begin (3:10–21). Above all, the threat of synagogue excommunication (9:22) is widely regarded as anachronistic, since (it is argued) such discipline was not put into place until the late 80s of the first century.

Most of these features of John’s Gospel are discussed at some length in the commentary, and need not detain us here. Even so, it is clear that John’s independence is one of the reasons why this Gospel has precipitated such varied treatment during the history of the church.

II. HOW JOHN’S GOSPEL HAS BEEN UNDERSTOOD: SELECT SOUNDINGS

1. The early church

It could not have been long after the Fourth Gospel was published before it was collected with the other three to form the fourfold Gospel. In other words, for the most part the Gospel of John early circulated as part of one book. This book was not a scroll, as the first manuscripts doubtless were, but a ‘codex’, a book with separate leaves like ours, and sewn or glued on one side. It was known simply as ‘The Gospel’, containing the four canonical Gospels. This ‘Gospel’ was then divided into the parts that were thought to be ‘According to Matthew’, ‘According to Mark’, ‘According to Luke’ and ‘According to John’.

It is usually assumed that these traditional ascriptions of authorship were attached to the books not before AD 125. Recently, however, Martin Hengel has mounted a plausible defence of the view that these ‘titles’ were attached to their respective individual books from the beginning, i.e. the four canonical Gospels are no more anonymous than any other book with a title page that includes the name of the author.¹ Hengel’s arguments have not so far been accorded the attention they deserve. Although I shall not here assume that they are convincing, they must be borne in mind by those who too quickly dismiss the evidence of Papias, shortly to be discussed.

Probably the earliest New Testament fragment that has come down to us is a fragment of John, Papyrus 52, dating from AD 130 and containing a few words from John 18. Two other papyrus codices spring from the end of the second century: Papyrus 66 includes most of chs. 1–14 and parts of the remaining chapters, while Papyrus 75 contains most of Luke, followed by John 1–11 and parts of chs. 12–15. From the beginning of the third century comes Papyrus 45, which contains parts of all four Gospels plus Acts, though the mutilated state of the manuscript ensures that no book is complete. Thereafter the manuscript evidence becomes richer, the great fourth century uncials (manuscripts written in capital letters) followed by the many miniscules in succeeding centuries.

The thought and language of John’s Gospel find affinities both in the Odes of Solomon, a collection of hymns from about the same period, and in the epistles of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (c. AD 110–115), but no direct dependence has been proved to everyone’s satisfaction.² Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and writing c. AD 120, clearly quotes from 1 John (in To the Philippians 1:7, loosely citing 1 Jn. 4:2–3). If one concludes (as I do) that the Johannine Epistles were written after the Fourth Gospel, and by the same author, it is reasonable to suppose that Polycarp also knew the Fourth Gospel; but there is no conclusive literary evidence. Apparently the gnostic Basilides (c. AD 130) quotes John 1:9 (‘The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world’) as a comment on Genesis 1:3 (‘Let there be light’), but this information is dependent on Hyppolytus (Refutation of Heresies vii. 22. 4). If he is right, this is the first explicit quotation from John that has come down to us.

Indeed, gnostic interest in John continues strong throughout the second and third centuries. Gnosticism was not an orderly system of thought with well-defined borders, but (as one scholar has put it) ‘a theosophical hotch-potch’. It sprang in part from the neo-Platonism that developed more than two centuries before Jesus. This world-view pitted what is ‘spirit’ or ‘real’ against what is merely material, temporal and without significance. Gnosticism went farther, and held to some kind of gnostic-redeemer who came to ‘spiritual’ people and explained to them their true genesis in the spiritual world, thereby freeing them from their bondage to the material world by this ‘knowledge’ (Gk. gnōsis) of their true being. Those who were truly ‘spiritual’ received their message; those who were entirely material dismissed them. In some forms of Gnosticism there were intervening categories. But in any case, the nature of bondage, in this system, is enslavement to matter, ignorance of one’s true origins; the nature of redemption is the special ‘knowledge’ imparted by the gnostic-redeemer. In full-blown second-century Gnosticism, Jesus was identified as this gnostic-redeemer, and John’s Gospel was interpreted (or mis-interpreted) to justify this claim.

Thus the Gospel of Truth (c. AD 140), the product of either the gnostic Valentinus or of one of his disciples, apparently alludes to the Fourth Gospel several times, even if it does not explicitly quote it. We are told (26:4–8) that when the Word appeared ‘it became a body (sōma)—which is more than most Gnostics would concede, but probably ‘body’ was judged less material and offensive than John’s ‘flesh’ (sarx, Jn. 1:14). A little later, Valentinus displays his true colours when he says of the Word that ‘those who were material were strangers and did not see his form or recognize him. For he came forth in flesh (sarx) of such a kind that nothing could block his progress’ (31:1–7): apparently there is a confusion between Jesus’ body during his ministry and his resurrection body (Jn. 20:19). Heracleon, one of the disciples of Valentinus, wrote the first commentary on John of which we have any knowledge. It has not come down to us independently, but is constantly quoted by Origen in his third-century commentary on the Fourth Gospel.

Of course, the Gnostics were not the only ones to use John’s Gospel. Although several Fathers from the first half of the second century probably allude to the Fourth Gospel (cf. discussion below), the first writer in the orthodox stream actually to quote John, so far as our records go, is probably Justin Martyr, who at one point comments, ‘Christ indeed said, Unless you are born again you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. It is evident to all that those who have once been born cannot re-enter their mothers’ wombs’ (First Apology 61. 4–5). This is almost certainly a reference to John 3:3–5, though John is not actually named. Some scholars have wondered if this is merely a reference to oral tradition that came to Justin independently of the Gospel of John, since at a number of points where he might have usefully referred to John (e.g. in his teaching about the pre-existence of the Word of God) he fails to do so. Justin does not explicitly assign any of the canonical Gospels to a specific author, but he does refer to them as the ‘memoirs of the apostles’.

The first unambiguous quotation from the Fourth Gospel that ascribes the work to John is from Theophilus of Antioch (c. AD 181), but even before this date several writers, including Tatian (a student of Justin), Claudius Apollinaris (bishop of Hierapolis) and Athenagoras, unambiguously quote from the Fourth Gospel as from an authoritative source. This pushes us back to Polycarp and Papias, information about whom derives primarily from Irenaeus (end of the second century) and Eusebius the historian of the early church (fourth century). Polycarp was martyred in AD 156 at the age of eighty-six. There is no reason therefore to deny the truth of the claims that he associated with the apostles in Asia (John, Andrew, Philip) and was ‘entrusted with the oversight of the Church in Smyrna by those who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Lord’ (H. E. III. xxxvi).

Irenaeus knew Polycarp personally, and it is Polycarp who mediates to us the most important information about the Fourth Gospel. Writing to Florinus, Irenaeus recalls:

I remember the events of those days more clearly than those which have happened recently, for what we learn as children grows up with the soul and becomes united to it, so I can speak even of the place in which the blessed Polycarp sat and disputed, how he came in and went out, the character of his life, the appearance of his body, the discourse which he made to the people, how he reported his converse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord, how he remembered their words, and what were the things concerning the Lord which he had heard from them, including his miracles and his teaching,¹ and how Polycarp had received them from the eyewitnesses of the word of life, and reported all things in agreement with the Scriptures (H. E. V. xx. 5–6).

Most scholars recognize that this ‘John’, certainly a reference to John the apostle, the son of Zebedee, is in the mind of Irenaeus none other than the John whom he emphatically insists is the fourth Evangelist. For Irenaeus, that the Gospel should be ‘fourfold’ (in the sense described above) was as natural as that there should be four winds. As for the Fourth Gospel itself, he wrote: ‘John the disciple of the Lord, who leaned back on his breast, published the Gospel while he was resident at Ephesus in Asia’ (Against Heresies iii. 1. 2). In other words, the name of the fourth Evangelist is John, and is to be identified with the beloved disciple of John 13:23.

The evidence of Papias similarly depends on secondary sources. Papias was a contemporary of Polycarp, and may himself have been a student of John (Irenaeus, Against Heresies v. 33. 4, affirms it; Eusebius, H. E. III. xxxix. 2, denies it). Certainly Eusebius insists that Papias quoted from 1 John (H. E. III. xxxix). That Eusebius does not mention that Papias cited the Fourth Gospel is irrelevant: Eusebius’ stated purpose was to discuss the disputed parts of the New Testament, as well as some of those people who linked the first century with what follows, rather than to provide a list of citations regarding ‘acknowledged’ books.¹

Another piece of evidence regarding Papias is harder to evaluate. About AD 140 an extreme follower of the writings of Paul, Marcion by name, who had become convinced that only this apostle had truly followed the teachings of Jesus while all the others had relapsed into Judaism, went to Rome to try to convince the church there of his views. He argued, unsuccessfully, that the proper New Testament canon was comprised of ten letters of Paul and one Gospel, a mutilated version of Luke. Marcion was sufficiently dangerous that he succeeded in arousing responses. In particular, the so-called anti-Marcionite prologues to the Gospels have been viewed as part of these responses (though it must be admitted that some scholars think they emerged at a later period). The anti-Marcionite prologue to John has come down to us in a rather corrupt Latin version. It informs us that the Gospel of John was published while John was still alive, and was written down at John’s dictation by Papias, a man from Hierapolis and one of John’s near disciples. As for Marcion, he had been expelled by John himself. This information, the prologue argues, derives from the five exegetical books of Papias himself: the reference is to his Exegesis of the Dominical Logia, which survived into the Middle Ages in some libraries in Europe, but which is, regrettably, no longer extant.

Some of the information provided by the anti-Marcionite prologue is clearly mistaken. It is overwhelmingly doubtful that John excommunicated Marcion: the chronology is stretched too thin. Moreover, as Bruce (p. 10) points out, Papias for his part may have said that the churches or certain disciples ‘wrote down’ what John said, and was subsequently misquoted as meaning ‘I wrote down’, since in Greek the latter is formally indistinguishable from ‘they wrote down’. Even so, there is no doubt in this document that John himself was responsible for the Fourth Gospel.

Not only Irenaeus, but Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian as well, provide firm second-century evidence for the belief that the apostle John wrote the Gospel. According to Eusebius (H. E. VI. xiv. 7), Clement wrote: ‘But that John, last of all, conscious that the outward facts had been set forth in the Gospels, was urged on by his disciples, and, divinely moved by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.’ A more enigmatic, and in its details less believable, version of the same development is preserved in the Muratorian Canon, the earliest orthodox list of New Testament books to come down to us, probably from the end of the second century. It tells us not only that John’s fellow-disciples and bishops urged him to write, but that by a dream or prophecy it was revealed to Andrew that John should in fact take up the task, writing in his own name, but that the others should review his work and contribute to it. Most scholars take this to be someone’s deduction from John 21:24.

Some indirect evidence is in certain respects still more impressive. Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr, composed the first ‘harmony’ of the fourfold Gospel: he took the books apart and weaved them together into one continuous narrative. This Diatessaron (as it is called), first prepared in Greek, exerted enormous influence in its Syriac translation. But the crucial point to observe is that it is the Gospel of John that provides the framework into which the other three Gospels are fitted. That could not have been the case had there been questions about the authenticity of the book.

Indeed, by the end of the second century the only people who denied Johannine authorship to the Fourth Gospel were the so-called Alogoi—a substantivized adjective meaning ‘witless ones’, but used by the orthodox as a pun to refer to those who rejected the logos (‘Word’: cf. notes on 1:1) doctrine expounded in the Fourth Gospel, and therefore the Fourth Gospel itself. Further, an elder by the name of Gaius in the Roman church, who was one of the Alogoi, maintained orthodoxy at every point except in his rejection of John’s Gospel and the Apocalypse. At least part of his motivation, however, was his virulent opposition to Montanism, an uncontrolled ‘charismatic’ movement arising in the middle of the second century that was wont to claim that its leader, Montanus, was the mouthpiece of the promised Paraclete. Since all of the Paraclete sayings that refer to the Spirit are found in John’s Gospel (14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7–15), Gaius did not need much persuading to side with the Alogoi on this point.

Certainly from the end of the second century on, there is virtual agreement in the church as to the authority, canonicity and authorship of the Gospel of John. An argument from silence in this case proves impressive (because we would otherwise have expected the person in question to make a lot of noise!): ‘it is most significant that Eusebius, who had access to many works which are now lost, speaks without reserve of the fourth Gospel as the unquestioned work of St. John’ (Westcott, 1. lix). The silence is ‘most significant’ precisely because it was Eusebius’ concern to discuss the doubtful cases.

It should not be thought that the differences between John and the Synoptics (§ I, above) were unnoticed by the early church Fathers (cf. Wiles, pp. 13–40). The remark of Clement of Alexandria, to the effect that John composed ‘a spiritual Gospel’, is teasing. It certainly does not mean ‘spiritual’ as opposed to ‘historical’; it may mean ‘allegorical’ or ‘symbol-laden’. Irenaeus (Against Heresies ii. 22. 3) appeals to the length of Jesus’ ministry in John’s chronology to combat connections that gnostics drew between Jesus’ passion, which they claimed took place in the twelfth month after his baptism, and the twelfth aeon, important in their cosmology. Eusebius, Epiphanius and Augustine set themselves the task of explaining other difficulties between John and the Synoptics, sometimes resorting to tortuous ingenuity. Origen does not think that the chronologies can be reconciled at the historical level, but argues that material falsehood may be the means, through allegory, of preserving and presenting spiritual truth. Theodore, by contrast, seeks to resolve chronological difficulties by arguing that the Synoptics do not really present a chronology with which to conflict: much of their presentation is piecemeal, and can be fitted into the Johannine schema. If there are differences between John and the Synoptics on the passion, for instance, it must be remembered not only that John was actually present for much of the period (unlike the other disciples, who had fled), but that any complex event remembered by a variety of people is bound to be described in independent but complementary fashion. This proves, in Theodore’s view, that the witnesses were not in collusion, and are therefore all the more credible. Thus, his attempts at resolution operate at the historical level.

2. More recent discussion

Limitations of space forbid me from embarking on a summary of the larger interpretative achievements and failures of the Fathers.¹ The same holds true for commentaries of the Middle Ages and of the Reformation. Whether the Fourth Gospel was interpreted so as to ground some form of Christian mysticism, or so as to make clear the truth of justification by faith, there was at least no doubt that it was the product of the apostle John, that in some ways it is the most focused of the four canonical Gospels,² and that fundamental reconciliation between John and the Synoptics can be achieved.

With the onset of the Enlightenment, historical consciousness came into its own. In the major European universities doubt regarding the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels rose like a tide from about 1750 on (though its antecedents were still earlier). Until 1835, however, John’s Gospel fared somewhat better than did the Synoptics, though for doubtful reasons. Critics noted that John reports no exorcisms. He rapidly turns from miracles to discourse: indeed, his preferred word is ‘sign’, not ‘wonder’ or ‘work of power’. All this suited an intellectual environment less and less open to the frankly supernatural, and more and more enamoured with notions of root ideas or core ideas that expressed themselves in various ‘myths’.

The turning point came in 1835 with the publication of the first edition of Das Leben Jesu. Kritisch bearbeitet,¹ by David Friedrich Strauss.² In some ways, Strauss was merely carrying a little farther the scepticism of many of his colleagues. He was a rigorous antisupernaturalist, and generously appealed to the category of ‘myth’, at that point more commonly deployed in Old Testament studies than in New, to explain how some idea could be expressed by an ancient civilization in concrete forms that Strauss’s generation (he felt) could no longer accept at the merely historical level. So far as Johannine studies are concerned, his major significance was that he applied this approach to Christology, with the result that John’s presentation of Jesus as genuinely and simultaneously God and man also falls under the category of ‘myth’, and John’s Gospel becomes the least historically credible of the canonical Gospels. For a Christ at the centre of Christology, Strauss substituted an idea, the idea that in humanity ‘the divine Spirit [certainly not understood as the personal-transcendent God of the Bible!] manifests itself, and it is humanity which is to be regarded as the true Christ’.³ At one blow Strauss laid waste any historical understanding of Christianity. The same blow relegated the Fourth Gospel, in the eyes of a growing number of critics, to the least useful work in the New Testament, from the perspective of the historian.

Strauss’s book touched off a fire-storm. He was sacked from his post, and vilified in the press. Some of the opprobrium he faced was hypocritical, for the kinds of scepticism he expressed were already well entrenched. But most biblical scholars of sceptical bent had managed to cloak their scepticism in piety, and most of them had left the person of Jesus as presented in the Gospels uncriticized. Strauss refused to play the game, and so the pent-up suspicions of a society still largely controlled by Christian beliefs fell on him. Many of his fellow academics distanced themselves from him, at least for a time, fearing for their own jobs.

Nevertheless the work of Strauss became extraordinarily influential, even amongst those who could not go quite as far as he went. Before sketching in the developments that sprang up in his wake, however, it is important to recognize that not all scholars thought he was on the right track. During the next 150 years, major figures contributed to Johannine studies within an orthodox framework. One thinks of the major commentaries of E. Hengstenberg, B. F. Westcott and Leon Morris, and of the conservative critical introductions by Theodor Zahn, J. Gresham Machen and Donald Guthrie-not to mention hundreds of less eminent contributors to the discussion who have retained their intellectual integrity while reading the Gospel of John with the conviction that they were hearing the words of an apostle of Jesus who understood his role to be that of a witness to the truth.

Even so, the mainstream of Johannine scholarship ran in another direction. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, the most influential movement was the ‘history-of-religions’ school. This attempted to tie the rise and development of all religions to purely naturalistic and historical developments. Christianity was variously construed as some sort of amalgam of ancient mystery cult coupled with vestiges of Judaism, or as the result of a fecund union between Jewish thought and Greek or gnostic thought. In this light, John’s Gospel was read as the tail end of this development, the evidence of what happened when a Palestinian sect established itself in the broader hellenistic world. Much of the power of this movement has drained away, as later scholarship has shown again and again that the simple disjunction between Jewish and hellenistic thought did not exist in the first century, that the philosophical commitment to antisupernaturalism cannot possibly listen adequately to the texts, and that theories about straight lines of religious and historical development are both artificial and empirically negated by the rise of every religious movement that can be studied at close range. Most contemporary scholars have benefited from the ‘school’, in that they have learned to ask historical questions with more rigour than would otherwise have been the case. A few still operate largely within the constraints of the movement as it manifested itself at the turn of the century.¹

So far as John is concerned, the most influential scholar to emerge from this camp in the twentieth century was Rudolf Bultmann. His major commentary on John, a wealth of learning on countless details, was characterized by four features:

(1) He insisted that the most influential background to Johannine Christianity was Mandaen Gnosticism. Certainly he was able to adduce many intriguing parallels. The difficulty with the thesis, however, is that Mandaen Gnosticism, so far as extant sources go, is a late phenomenon. None of our written sources is earlier than about the seventh century AD. Nevertheless, Bultmann held that Mandaen Gnosticism antedates Christianity and is determinative in the shaping of Johannine Christianity.

(2) Bultmann deployed systematic source-criticism on the Fourth Gospel, and separated out not only a ‘signs source’ (more on this later) and a discourse source, but other pieces as well, including the late work of a postulated ‘ecclesiastical redactor’ who tried to shape the book