Book of John
The Gospel according to St. John, the fourth of the Gospels, is received by the Church as the work of the apostle and evangelist St. John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," whom she honors with the title "the Theologian," and it announces its own purpose in its twentieth chapter: "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."
For Inquirers
Most stories start where the action starts: a birth, a journey, a knock at the door. The Gospel of John starts before there was anything to happen. Its first words are "In the beginning was the Word," and it spends its opening lines looking up, past Bethlehem and past the stars, to something that was already there when the world began and that, the author says, became a man and lived among us.[^jn1] The other three books that tell the life of Jesus are like walking through a town and watching what goes on in its streets. This one is like climbing onto the roof at night to see the same town laid out under the sky.
The man the Church has said was behind it, from the second century on, is John, a fisherman who became one of Jesus's twelve closest friends, the one who leaned his head against Jesus at the last supper and who stood by the cross when almost everyone else had gone.[^jn-eye] The book never writes his name. It calls him only "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and the Church has long called him "the Theologian," which just means the one who speaks about God. Old pictures show him as an eagle, a bird that climbs high and gazes at the light with steady eyes, which is how Augustine says his book reads.[^oca-gospels][^aug-hg6] It tells fewer stories than the others, but it lingers: a midnight talk with a man who cannot understand being born again, a woman at a well in the noon heat, a man who has never seen anything and then sees, a friend four days dead. In the middle of them Jesus says "I am the bread of life," "I am the light of the world," "I am the way," and the same few words (light, life, truth, love) keep coming back around, each time meaning a little more.[^iam]
It is fair to say that this book can feel strange, even to people who love the others. Its Jesus talks in long, circling speeches, and a few of its stories do not line up neatly with the same events in the other Gospels, not even on which day He died.[^behr-42] Its hardest lines about "the Jews" have been used, across centuries, to hurt real people,[^jant-intro] and thoughtful Christians and thoughtful Jews have had to read them slowly and with care. Believers and scholars answer some of the questions about this book differently: who wrote it, how, and when. Every year, in the dark of the Easter night, the Church reads the first lines of this book aloud, often in many languages at once, as the light comes back.[^ow-pascha]
Overview
- John is the fourth of the four Gospels, twenty-one chapters long, and it opens with the Prologue: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1.1).[^jn1]
- The Church's tradition ascribes it to St. John the apostle, son of Zebedee, the "disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 13.23), who lived on at Ephesus; the text itself never names him, and says of its witness only, "We know that his witness is true" (John 21.24).[^jn-eye][^osb-intro]
- It stands fourth in the Muratorian Fragment's "The fourth of the Gospels is that of John" and in the lists of St. Athanasius and the Synod of Laodicea, though the sixth-century Codex Claromontanus lists Matthew, John, Mark, Luke; and Eusebius says it "is known to all the churches under heaven."[^mur][^eus-24][^lists]
- Its shape is the Prologue (1:1-18); a first half of public ministry, signs, and discourse that the Jewish Annotated New Testament calls the Book of Signs (chapters 1-12); a second half it calls the Book of Glory (13-21), which holds the supper and the farewell discourses, the Passion, the Resurrection appearances, and an epilogue by the sea.[^jant-intro]
- Its central themes are the eternal Word become flesh; the "I am" sayings (John 6.35; John 8.12; John 10.11; John 11.25; John 14.6; John 15.1) and the great declaration "before Abraham came into existence, I AM" (John 8.58); the "signs," beginning at Cana (John 2.11); light and darkness, life, glory, and "the hour"; the Lamb of God (John 1.29); the Spirit as Helper; baptism and the Eucharist; and love.[^osb-intro][^iam]
- Among the Gospels it is the one the Fathers call spiritual and theological: Clement of Alexandria's report is that John, "inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel," Origen counts it "the first fruits" of the Gospels, and in the Church's iconography it is symbolized by the eagle.[^clem-hyp][^orig-first][^oca-gospels]
Summary
The Gospel opens before time with the Word who was with God and was God, through whom everything was made, light shining in a darkness that has not overcome it, and then narrows with deliberate speed to a witness, John the Baptist, who is "not the light" but testifies to it, to the Word becoming flesh and living among us, and to the Son "who is in the bosom of the Father" and "has declared him" (John 1.14; John 1.18). The Baptist points out Jesus as the Lamb of God, two of his disciples follow, and the circle widens through Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael. At a wedding in Cana in Galilee Jesus does "the beginning of his signs" and reveals His glory; at Passover He drives the sellers from the temple, and a night visitor, Nicodemus, is told that no one can enter God's Kingdom without being born of water and Spirit. A Samaritan woman at Jacob's well hears that the hour is coming when the Father will be worshipped in spirit and truth, and her whole town comes out to see. Over the following chapters the signs multiply, a healing at a pool on a Sabbath, the feeding of the crowd and the discourse on the bread of life, the light given to a man born blind, the raising of Lazarus, and each one opens into a long argument in which the sign is explained and the hostility of "the Jews" hardens, until the leaders resolve that Jesus must die. Then the book changes pace. At the last supper Jesus washes the disciples' feet, gives the new commandment to love, and speaks the long farewell of chapters 14 to 17, with its promise of the Helper, the true vine, and the prayer "that they may all be one." Gethsemane, the arrest, the trial before Pilate, and the crucifixion follow in a Passion in which His mother and the beloved disciple stand by the cross and in which He dies with the words "It is finished." On the first day of the week Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty and meets the risen Lord in the garden; that evening He breathes on the disciples and gives them the Holy Spirit; a week later Thomas confesses "My Lord and my God." The twentieth chapter closes with the author's statement of purpose, and a final chapter returns to the lake, where the risen Lord eats breakfast with seven disciples, restores Peter after his three denials, and speaks of the beloved disciple, whose witness the last verses affirm.[^jn1][^jn-summary]
Author, Source, and Intention
The Fourth Gospel keeps its author at the edge of the frame. It has no preface like Luke's and no signature like Paul's; instead it shows, again and again, a figure who is close to Jesus and unnamed, and it ends by pointing back to him. Everything the Church has said about who wrote the book therefore has to be built from three kinds of evidence: what the Gospel says of its witness, what the earliest Christian writers report about John and Asia, and what the book itself reveals about its habits, its sources, and its reader. These do not always point in the same direction, and the sources that matter most are not all equally old.
Who wrote it
Within the Gospel the figure is introduced at the supper: "One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was at the table, leaning against Jesus' chest" (John 13.23). He is there at the cross when Jesus says to His mother, "Woman, behold, your son!" and to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" (John 19.26-27); the verse that follows the piercing of Jesus's side adds, "He who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true" (John 19.35). The last chapter returns to him, "the one who had also leaned on Jesus' chest at the supper," and closes with the sentence on which most of the question rests: "This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things. We know that his witness is true" (John 21.20; John 21.24).[^jn-eye] The text, then, claims an eyewitness and a writer, but it does not give his name.
The Church's answer is that this witness is John, the son of Zebedee, and it rests on a tradition that reaches back to Irenaeus in the late second century. The Synoptic Gospels show that son of Zebedee beside his brother James as a "son of thunder" (Mark 3.17), and the Book of Acts presents Peter and John to the Sanhedrin as "unlearned and ignorant men" who "had been with Jesus" (Acts 4.13).[^mk-thunder] Eusebius, writing his Church History in the fourth century, tells how this man came to be in Asia. Of the persecution under Domitian he reports: "It is said that in this persecution the apostle and evangelist John, who was still alive, was condemned to dwell on the island of Patmos in consequence of his testimony to the divine word," and after the tyrant's death he returned to govern the churches of that region.[^eus-18][^eus-23]
For the length of his stay Eusebius calls two witnesses he considers "trustworthy" because they "maintained the orthodoxy of the Church." The first is St. Irenaeus, who says that "all the elders that associated with John the disciple of the Lord in Asia bear witness that John delivered it to them," for John "remained among them until the time of Trajan," and that the church in Ephesus "is a faithful witness of the apostolic tradition."[^eus-23]
The second witness is Clement of Alexandria, whose tale of the old apostle and the young robber Eusebius preserves in full. John, back from Patmos, goes among the neighboring churches appointing bishops and, finding a promising young man, entrusts him to the local bishop with a solemn charge; the young man is corrupted and becomes a bandit chief; and when the apostle comes back and asks for "the deposit," the bishop answers, "He is dead to God." John rides out in his old age, is seized by the bandits' outpost, and cries, "Why, my son, do you flee from me, your own father, unarmed, aged? ... I will give account to Christ for you." The young man weeps, throws down his arms, and is led back to the Church, "a great proof of regeneration, a trophy of a visible resurrection."[^eus-23] The story is not evidence about the Gospel's composition, but it shows how the man behind the Gospel was remembered in Asia, as a father who runs after the lost, and the Church's own calendar still tells it on the day she keeps his repose.[^sep26]
The oldest list of New Testament books, the Muratorian Fragment, preserves a vivid account of how a Gospel by John came about. "The fourth of the Gospels is that of John, [one] of the disciples," it says. "To his fellow disciples and bishops, who had been urging him [to write], he said, 'Fast with me from today to three days, and what will be revealed to each one let us tell it to one another.' In the same night it was revealed to Andrew, [one] of the apostles, that John should write down all things in his own name while all of them should review it."[^mur] Whatever one makes of its details, and the form in which it survives is a modern translation of a late manuscript, the fragment carries a point that does not depend on them: that the Gospel is one man's name set on the witness of a company, and that its varied teaching still rests on "the one sovereign Spirit."
The next report is Clement of Alexandria's, again in Eusebius, and it is an early use of the epithet "the spiritual Gospel." "John, the last of all," Clement says, "seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel."[^clem-hyp] Eusebius's own account of the occasion, which he gives as what "they say," is more practical: the three earlier Gospels had come into John's hands, he accepted them and "bore witness to their truthfulness," but they lacked an account of the deeds done "at the beginning of his ministry," and so he supplied the period before the Baptist was shut in prison.[^eus-24] Jerome gives both reasons together. In On Illustrious Men he writes that John "most recently of all the evangelists wrote a Gospel, at the request of the bishops of Asia, against Cerinthus and other heretics and especially against the then growing dogma of the Ebionites, who assert that Christ did not exist before Mary," and that there is "said to be yet another reason," that when he had read Matthew, Mark, and Luke he approved the substance of their history but saw that they covered only one year, the year after the Baptist's imprisonment.[^jerome-dvi9]
Cerinthus belongs to the same Ephesian memory. Irenaeus describes him, in the first book of Against Heresies, as teaching that the world was made by a Power far separated from the supreme God, and that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary, on whom "Christ descended" after his baptism and from whom Christ departed before the Passion.[^irenaeus-i26] Eusebius tells, on the authority of Irenaeus and Polycarp, that John once entered a bath at Ephesus, learned that Cerinthus was within, and rushed out, saying, "Let us flee, lest the bath fall; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within."[^eus-28] Whatever the weight of the anecdote, it ties together three claims that Jerome gathers into a single account: that John was at Ephesus, that Cerinthus was there, and that a Gospel whose first lines declare that the Word was God and became flesh is an answer to the sort of teaching Cerinthus offered. Jerome's account of John's death, which he places in the sixty-eighth year after the Lord's passion and "near the same city," closes the circle, and Polycrates of Ephesus, writing to Victor, bishop of Rome, names John among the great lights of Asia who "reclined upon the bosom of the Lord" and "sleeps at Ephesus."[^jerome-dvi9][^eus-31]
Eusebius himself records a complication in the testimony: he quotes the preface of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, in which Papias lists those from whom he sought the sayings of the Lord: "what Andrew or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew ... and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say." Eusebius notices that the name John appears twice, the first time among the apostles and the second after Aristion and with the title "presbyter," and concludes that "there were two persons in Asia that bore the same name, and that there were two tombs in Ephesus, each of which, even to the present day, is called John's."[^eus-39] He uses the distinction to suggest that the Revelation may have been seen by the second John. Jerome uses it for the second and third epistles, which begin "The elder," and which he says "are said to be the work of John the presbyter," though "some think that there are two memorials of this same John the evangelist."[^jerome-dvi9][^jn23] The distinction therefore existed in antiquity, and Eusebius and Jerome, who recorded it, left the Gospel with the apostle.
Dionysius of Alexandria, in the third century, weighed style as well as testimony when he set out to decide whether the Gospel and the Revelation could be by the same hand, and his argument survives among his miscellaneous writings. He grants that the Revelation was written by "a John" and is the work of "some holy and inspired man," but not easily by "the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, and the same person with him who wrote the Gospel which bears the title according to John, and the catholic epistle." His reasons: the evangelist "nowhere else subjoins his name" while the writer of the Revelation names himself repeatedly; the Gospel and the first epistle share their opening and their vocabulary, the life, the light, grace, the commandment of love, so that "the Gospel and the Epistle are distinguished by one and the same character of writing," whereas "the Revelation is totally different"; and the Gospel is written "with the greatest elegance" in Greek while the Revelation uses "barbarous idioms, and in some places also solecisms."[^dionysius] The argument takes the apostolic authorship of the Gospel for granted and uses the Gospel as the standard against which the Revelation is measured, but it also shows that Dionysius, at least, compared texts by their internal features and was willing to let such a comparison move a question of authorship.
The Church's tradition therefore holds that the apostle John wrote the Gospel at Ephesus, an old man, in the last years of the first century. The Orthodox Study Bible gives this tradition in a sentence, adding that "St. John the Apostle (also called the Theologian because of the profundity of his gospel) was assisted by St. Prochorus in writing this gospel," that he "served as the leading authority of Ephesus for most of his ministry and wrote his gospel there," that he was "almost one hundred years old when he died, c. AD 96-100," and that the Gospel, "written about AD 96," is "usually considered the last of the four gospels to be written."[^osb-intro] The Church's synaxarion for his repose repeats it with details drawn from the same Ephesian memory: that "in the year 95, the Apostle John wrote his Gospel at Ephesus," and that he "far outlived the other eyewitnesses of the Lord."[^sep26] The Orthodox Church in America adds that the book is "undoubtedly the latest written, being the work of the beloved disciple and apostle of the Lord at the end of his life near the close of the first century."[^oca-gospels]
What lies behind it
Augustine, opening his Tractates with the Prologue, admits that even an inspired Evangelist spoke within a limit: "I venture to say, my brethren, perhaps not John himself spoke of the matter as it is, but even he only as he was able; for it was man that spoke of God, inspired indeed by God, but still man."[^aug-tr1] Elsewhere he describes the origin of the book's elevation in the supper scene: the Evangelist "drank in secret" from the breast on which he had reclined "and gave forth openly" what he drank.[^aug-tr36] Chrysostom, in the last homily of his series, asks why the apostle gives his own testimony a second time, when this "seems to be offensive to the hearers," and answers that he is said to be "the last who came to writing, Christ having moved and roused him to the work," so that his continual mention of his love for Christ shows the cause which impelled him to write.[^chrys88]
The single voice of the Gospel sometimes speaks as a company. The Gospel's last line speaks in the first person plural, "We know that his witness is true," and the Prologue speaks of "we" who saw "his glory" (John 1.14); the Orthodox Study Bible observes that the plural "we" in these verses testifies to "a strong sense of community among the disciples."[^jn-eye][^osb-intro] The first epistle ascribed to the same author begins, "That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we saw, and our hands touched, concerning the Word of life" (1 John 1.1), and the Muratorian Fragment invokes exactly this passage as proof that he professes himself "not only an eye-witness and hearer, but also a writer of all the marvelous deeds of the Lord, in their order."[^1jn][^mur] Papias, according to Eusebius, used testimonies from the first epistle of John, and Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the church of Philadelphia, says of the Spirit that "it knows both whence it comes and whither it goes," which echoes Jesus's words to Nicodemus about the wind (John 3.8).[^eus-39][^ign-phil]
On composition, the Jewish Annotated New Testament holds that the book, in the form found in "the most complete manuscripts," was "the product of a lengthy and complicated history of composition," with "pre-Johannine sources or early versions" in circulation for decades before the final form, and points to "narrative inconsistencies and awkward narrative transitions," such as the shift from Jerusalem in chapter 5 to "the other side of the Sea of Galilee" in 6:1, and Jesus's "Rise, let us be on our way" in 14:31, after which he speaks for three more chapters.[^jant-intro] Some scholars, the same introduction notes, posit "a written 'signs source'" behind the narrative, which the author then framed with discourse, and the volume judges that a group in Judea may have produced an early version before the final Ephesian edition.[^jant-intro]
Brevard Childs, a Protestant scholar and proponent of the canonical method, agrees that "most modern commentators agree that the Fourth Gospel shows abundant evidence of being a multi-layered text" but warns that to read the present Gospel by "a reconstructed theory of its levels easily results in badly misconstruing its canonical function."[^childs-john] Two of the patristic accounts of how the book came to be place a company around the writer: the Muratorian Fragment has the other apostles review what John writes, and Clement has him write at the entreaty of his friends, and neither account treats this as a threat to its apostolic standing.
The Scriptures of Israel are the plainest source the Gospel itself names. The Jewish Annotated New Testament calls them "the most important, and the only documentable, textual sources used by John's Gospel," most likely in a Greek translation, with the figure of Lady Wisdom behind the Prologue and the Abraham cycle behind the argument of chapter 8.[^jant-intro] Daniel Boyarin, writing in the same volume, goes further and reads the Prologue as a Jewish midrash, a homily on Genesis 1:1-5, drawing on Proverbs 8 and the Aramaic Memra, "the Word," that in the targums "creates, reveals, and redeems"; the Prologue, he says, is "not a hymn, but a midrash," and "until v. 14, the Johannine prologue is a piece of perfectly unexceptional non-Christian Jewish thought" that diverges from the synagogue only when it announces that "the Word became flesh."[^boyarin] Origen, reading the same Gospel, links it to Israel's earlier witnesses. He says that it "begins to speak of him at a point before he had any genealogy," and that Christ had sojourned with men before His bodily coming, in an intellectual fashion, among "the patriarchs, and Moses the servant, and the prophets who beheld the glory of Christ."[^orig-first][^orig-spiritual]
The language in which the Gospel was composed is not in dispute. The Orthodox Church in America says flatly that the texts of all four Gospels, "as that of St John, have come down to us in Greek, the language in which they were written."[^oca-gospels] Dionysius's judgment that the Gospel is written "with the greatest elegance" is an ancient comment on its style, and even he does not suppose it to be a translation.[^dionysius]
Why it was written
The book announces its purpose in the verse that closes its first ending. After Thomas's confession, the author says, "Therefore Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (John 20.30-31).[^jn20] The Jewish Annotated New Testament points out that the manuscripts divide over the verb: some read "that you may come to believe," others "that you may continue to believe," and the second reading suggests a book meant "to strengthen the faith of those already within the community." That volume judges that this "suits the overall tone and content of the Gospel."[^jant-intro] Chrysostom's emphasis is on what the writer had seen: he "was present at all, and did not desert Him even when being crucified, and had His mother entrusted to him; all which things are signs of his love for Him, and of his knowing all things exactly."[^chrys88]
The most persistent patristic answer is that John supplied what the others had left. Eusebius says the earlier evangelists "recorded only the deeds done by the Saviour for one year after the imprisonment of John the Baptist," and cites John's own note, "John was not yet thrown into prison" (John 3.24), as the sign that he is describing the earlier period, so that "one who understands this can no longer think that the Gospels are at variance with one another."[^eus-24][^jerome-dvi9] Augustine, in the Harmony of the Gospels, adds a second distinction. The three earlier Evangelists, he says, "were for the most part engaged with those things which Christ did through the vehicle of the flesh of man, and after the temporal fashion," whereas John "had in view that true divinity of the Lord in which He is the Father's equal."[^aug-hg4]
There are two virtues, Augustine says, the active and the contemplative, "the one whereby the way is taken, and the other that whereby the goal is reached"; and "those three evangelists who, with pre-eminent fullness, have handled the account of the Lord's temporal doings" were conversant with the active virtue, while John, "who narrates fewer by far of the Lord's doings, but records with greater carefulness and with larger wealth of detail the words which He spoke," formed his plan "with a view to commend the contemplative virtue."[^aug-hg5] The same chapter in which he compares the Gospels to the four living creatures gives John the eagle that "soars like an eagle above the clouds of human infirmity, and gazes upon the light of the unchangeable truth with those keenest and steadiest eyes of the heart."[^aug-hg6]
Chrysostom sets the book against a danger. The other Evangelists, he says in the fourth homily, "had dwelt most on the accounts of His coming in the flesh," and there was fear lest some, "being of grovelling minds," might "rest in these doctrines alone, as indeed was the case with Paul of Samosata," and so John "commences his narrative from above, and from the eternal subsistence."[^chrys4] In the same series he insists that the author is not offering private speculation but speaking "from the depths of the Spirit," and that his message, which the Greeks mock because the author is a fisherman of Bethsaida, "is clearer than the sunbeams."[^chrys1][^chrys2] The patristic sources thus give the Gospel three intentions at once: to complete the history, to answer the heresies about Christ's person, and to lift the hearer up to the vision of the Word.
The modern account of the occasion differs. The Jewish Annotated New Testament dates the Gospel to about 85-95, takes it to have been written "within and for a particular group," often called the Johannine community, and, while rejecting the popular theory that its three references to expulsion from the synagogue (John 9.22; John 12.42; John 16.2) encode a late-first-century curse on Jewish Christians, still holds it possible that the book's hostility toward "the Jews" reflects a stage in the process "by which Johannine believers came to see themselves as separate."[^jant-intro] The volume also notes that the Gospel's intended readers may include people of "Samaritan and Gentile origin" as well as Jews, citing the woman at the well and the Greeks who ask to see Jesus (John 12.32).[^jant-intro]
Origen puts the book first of the four. "The Gospels then being four, I deem the first fruits of the Gospels to be ... the Gospel of John," he writes, and adds that "no one can apprehend the meaning of it except he have lain on Jesus' breast and received from Jesus Mary to be his mother also." The reader must become, in some way, "another John."[^orig-first]
That demand rests on Origen's distinction between the "somatic" and the "spiritual" Gospel. A teacher responsible for the many, he says, cannot work only by the Christianity that stays in secret, and must also meet those who follow the external Christianity; but what John calls "the eternal Gospel," which "may properly be called the spiritual Gospel," "presents clearly to those who have the will to understand, all matters concerning the very Son of God."[^orig-spiritual]
The Orthodox Study Bible lists seven themes it finds in the book: the Trinity, glory, the spiritual dimension, the sacramental dimension, the Church, the paschal theme, and the redemption of the world, and says the Gospel supplements the other three.[^osb-intro] The Orthodox Church in America, for its part, says it is "sometimes thought" that the book was written "as a 'theological gospel' for those who were newly initiated into the life of the Church through the sacramental mysteries of baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the eucharist," because "all of the 'signs'... deal with sacramental themes involving water, wine and bread," and notes that in the Church's year "all of the gospel readings" from Pascha to Pentecost "are taken from the Gospel of Saint John."[^oca-gospels][^oca-post]
Fr. John Behr gives the intention a christological shape. In the Synoptics and in John, he says, the narrative culminates in the Passion, and the declaration that Christ is divine "is known only from the perspective of the Cross, dying a human death, but doing so divinely, as God, giving himself up for the life of the world"; but in John, which "from the early centuries has been regarded as the spiritual Gospel, written by the Theologian," Christ is shown differently, speaking of himself as "from above" and needing "no transfiguration for us to behold his glory."[^behr-34]
Manuscripts and the text
No autograph of John survives, as none does of any Gospel. The oldest material witness commonly cited is a papyrus fragment in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, known as P52, containing a few verses of John 18. F. F. Bruce, writing from outside the Orthodox tradition, dates it c. AD 130 and notes it came from a codex; the Jewish Annotated New Testament gives it as "dated to 135-160," and argues that because circulation from Asia Minor to Egypt "would have taken a few decades," it points to a late-first or early-second-century date for the final version.[^bruce-p52][^jant-intro] Bruce adds that another papyrus, P75 in the Bodmer collection, from the late second or early third century, was probably when complete a codex of the fourfold Gospel.[^bruce-p52] The great fourth- and fifth-century codices carry the whole text: OrthodoxWiki describes Codex Sinaiticus as written between 330 and 350, Codex Vaticanus as slightly older, and Codex Alexandrinus as a fifth-century Bible whose Gospels are "mainly of the Byzantine text-type, but there are a number of Alexandrian features," and which the critical apparatus cites in the Gospels as a "witness of the third order."[^ow-codices] Textual critics sort the later witnesses into Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine families, the last supplying the textus receptus and about ninety-five percent of all manuscripts, and observe that the Byzantine type is "ongoing in the church."[^course-lecture]
The ancient Church knew that copies differed, and it did not hide the fact. Origen, commenting on John 1:28, reports that "we are aware of the reading which is found in almost all the copies, These things were done in Bethany," and that this "appears, moreover, to have been the reading at an earlier time; and in Heracleon we read Bethany." He nonetheless prefers Bethabara, because "we have visited the places to enquire as to the footsteps of Jesus and His disciples," and Bethany, the town of Lazarus, is fifteen stadia from Jerusalem and a long way from the Jordan; the etymology also fits, since "Bethabara" yields "House of preparation" where "Bethany means House of obedience." He then draws the lesson: "In the matter of proper names the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority."[^orig-bethabara] The World English Bible prints Bethany, while the Orthodox Study Bible prints Bethabara with a marginal note.[^variants]
The Prologue carries the first of several readings that matter more than the rest. The World English Bible reads in John 1.18, "The only born Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has declared him," and the Orthodox Study Bible, following the New King James, reads "only begotten Son"; but the New Revised Standard text in the Jewish Annotated New Testament reads "It is God the only Son," with a note that other ancient authorities read "It is an only Son, God, or It is the only Son."[^variants][^jant-apparatus]
The phrase "the Only-begotten God" is at home in Gregory of Nyssa, who names the Son so in his treatise To Ablabius.[^nyssa] The same apparatus notes variants at John 1.34 ("is God's chosen one" for "Son of God"), at John 3.13 (whether the words "who is in heaven" belong), and at John 6.69 (whether Peter says "the Christ, the Son of the living God" or "the Holy One of God").[^jant-apparatus]
At the pool of Bethesda, the World English Bible and the Orthodox Study Bible print John 5.3-John 5.4, including the line that "an angel went down at certain times into the pool and stirred up the water," and the Jewish Annotated New Testament's NRSV puts the part of verse 3 and all of verse 4 in a note as an addition found in some ancient authorities.[^variants][^jant-apparatus] The Fathers read it. Tertullian, in On Baptism, builds a whole argument on "the angel at the pool of Bethsaida" as a type of the angel who prepares the water for the Holy Spirit; Chrysostom says "an Angel came down and troubled the water, and endued it with a healing power, that the Jews might learn that much more could the Lord of Angels heal the diseases of the soul."[^tert-bapt][^chrys36]
The third and most famous variant is the story of the woman taken in adultery, John 7.53-John 8.11. The Jewish Annotated New Testament says flatly that "this episode is an interpolation and therefore not part of the original Gospel": it appears after Luke 21:38 in some manuscripts, and "scribes and Pharisees is not a phrase in John's Gospel," while the note in the NRSV text says that "the most ancient authorities lack" it and that others place it after 7:36, after 21:25, or after Luke 21:38.[^jant-pericope] An essay of Public Orthodoxy on a ninth-century Byzantine minuscule, Codex 1424, observes that the codex omits the passage and says that "there is a consensus among NT scholars that the pericope adulterae was a later addition to the Gospel of John."[^codex1424] The Wikipedia article on the biblical canon lists it with the longer ending of Mark and the Comma Johanneum among passages "not found in the most reliable ancient sources."[^wiki-canon] Bruce treats the story as "an independent unit of gospel material" that "certainly does not belong to the Gospel of John" but is "eminently worthy of being treated as canonical."[^bruce-adult]
Chrysostom's Homilies on the Gospel of John pass from the officers' report at John 7.45-John 7.52 directly to "I am the light of the world" at John 8.12, with nothing on the intervening verses.[^chrys52] Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, in a review of the Orthodox Study Bible, makes the point sharply: the status of the passage "is curious and it would have been worth pointing out both that St John Chrysostom did not have it in his text and that the Gospel for Pentecost makes exactly the same omission as St John Chrysostom and the modern scholars," and elsewhere in the review he states, of the Byzantine text generally, that "the Church's text is the Orthodox text, full stop."[^lash] Augustine, by contrast, preaches a whole tractate on the passage, finding in it the Lord's "gentleness" tempted by His enemies and His wisdom in answering.[^aug-tr33] Augustine, in Against Faustus, mentions the Lord's acquittal of the woman caught in adultery as an act of His benevolence,[^faustus] and a summary line of Jerome notes that "none of the accusers of the woman taken in adultery were without sin."[^jerome-pel]
The final chapter is a different case. The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that chapter 21 "has sometimes been viewed as an addition, written by someone other than the author of chs 1-20," but that "unlike 7.53-8.11, however, the manuscript evidence does not show that it circulated separately from the rest of the Gospel or that the Gospel originally ended with ch 20."[^jant-21] The Orthodox Church in America says that the final chapter "is traditionally considered to be an addition following the first ending of the gospel, to affirm the reinstatement of the apostle Peter."[^oca-gospels] Chrysostom, for his part, comments on the last chapter's verses as the apostle's own words and answers the worry that his giving his testimony "for the second time" might offend the hearers.[^chrys88]
Translations
The Gospel passed into other languages early, with the other three. In the Syriac-speaking East it circulated in a harmony: Tatian's Diatessaron, produced after Justin's martyrdom (AD 165), wove the four Gospels into one narrative, and the Arabic form opens, strikingly, with the Prologue ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God is the Word") before it turns to Zacharias and the birth of the Baptist in Luke.[^tatian-dia][^bruce-diat] Bruce reports that the Diatessaron was the favored edition in many Syriac churches for over two hundred years, until pressure from bishops in the early fifth century brought in the separate Gospels of the Peshitta, and that Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on it that survives.[^bruce-diat] OrthodoxWiki credits Rabbula of Edessa with translating the New Testament into Syriac as the Peshitta.[^ow-rabbula]
In the West, Latin versions of the Scriptures circulated by the second century and were thought crude; Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome in 382 to produce a standard text, and Jerome began with the Gospels, arranged "in the following order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John," revising against early Greek manuscripts, which slowly displaced the Old Latin and became the Vulgate.[^ow-vulgate][^jerome-pref] Wulfila's Gothic Bible, the first translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic, survives in fragments in the Codex Argenteus at Uppsala, and the Wikipedia article on the canon notes that it included the Skeireins, a commentary on the Gospel of John in Gothic, which survives today only in fragments.[^ow-ulfilas][^wiki-canon] In the ninth century Saints Cyril and Methodius devised an alphabet in order to translate Scripture and the services into what is now called Old Church Slavonic.[^ow-cm]
English translation of the Gospels is old. English versions include the Wessex Gospels (about 990), Wycliffe (1382), Coverdale (1538), the Authorised Version (1611) and its descendant the New King James Version, which the Orthodox Study Bible uses, the Douay-Rheims (1582), the Revised Version (1885) and American Standard Version (1901), and the Revised Standard Version (1946) and New Revised Standard Version (1989; updated 2023), on which the Jewish Annotated New Testament is based, together with dynamic-equivalence and paraphrase versions.[^course-english][^ow-osb] Translations differ not only in philosophy but in the manuscript tradition on which they rest, textus receptus or Byzantine on one side and critical texts on the other. Fr. Ephrem Lash's review makes the Orthodox point that the New King James is not an Orthodox translation, but that its underlying Greek is "for the most part" close to "the Byzantine text ... accepted by the Orthodox Church."[^lash] Scripture is quoted throughout this entry from the public-domain World English Bible.
Controversy and Contestation
The Fourth Gospel was fought over from almost its first publication, before the Church had settled what to do with it. Its opening lines were claimed by teachers who made the Word one of a ladder of beings; its farewell discourse, with the promise of the Helper, was claimed by a prophetic movement; its elevated Christ was rejected, on Bruce's reading, by a Roman presbyter, Gaius, whom a later Syriac tradition says ascribed it to the heretic Cerinthus. The Church's response to each shows how she read the book, and her answers are best heard beside what the opponents said.
The Valentinian readers were the first to write a commentary. Bruce reports that the earliest known quotation of John comes in the Gnostic Basilides and that "the earliest known commentary on John was written by the Gnostic Heracleon (c 180)," and that because "some gnostic schools treated it as though it supported their positions" the Gospel took longer than the others to win universal acceptance among catholic Christians; but those who read it more carefully, like Justin Martyr, "found that it supplied more effective anti-gnostic ammunition than any other New Testament book."[^bruce-gnostic] Irenaeus preserves the Valentinian reading of the Prologue. John, they said, "wishing to set forth the origin of all things, ... lays down a certain principle ... which was first-begotten by God, which Being he has termed both the only-begotten Son and God," and the Prologue's words ("God, the Beginning, and the Word," then the Life that is "the light of men") are read as the first Ogdoad, the first eight of the Æons of the Pleroma, with "Anthropos and Ecclesia" springing from "Logos and Zoe."[^irenaeus-i8] The reading takes the Prologue's own words seriously, and it explains why a Church that wanted the book to teach one God and one Lord Jesus Christ had to work to rescue it.
Irenaeus's reply is simple. If John had meant an Ogdoad, he says, he "would surely have preserved the order of its production," and "would doubtless have placed the primary Tetrad first." He did not, and the Evangelist's actual words name one God, one Jesus Christ, one Only-begotten: "this the Only-begotten, this the Former of all things, this the true Light who enlightens every man, this the Creator of the world, this He that came to His own, this He that became flesh and dwelt among us." Therefore "Jesus who suffered for us, and who dwelt among us, is Himself the Word of God," and "flesh is that which was of old formed for Adam by God out of the dust, and it is this that John has declared the Word of God became."[^irenaeus-i9]
Origen, in his own Commentary on John, answers Heracleon at length. Heracleon, he says, argued that the aeon and what is in it "were not made by the Logos" but came into existence before him, and added to "Without Him was nothing made" the further words "Of what is in the world and the creation"; Origen calls it "a violent and unwarranted procedure," since "what he considers divine is excluded from the all, and what he regards as purely evil is, that and nothing else, the all things." Of Heracleon's reading that the life that was in Him is for the spiritual alone, he replies that Heracleon "furnishes not even the pretence of a proof."[^orig-heracleon]
A second, opposite hostility came from within the Church. Bruce reports that Gaius, a learned Roman presbyter of the late second century and an opponent of the Montanists, "apparently tried to cut the ground from under the Montanists' feet by denying the authenticity of the document on which they relied for their teaching about the Paraclete, the Gospel of John," and that those who agreed with him came to be called Alogoi, a word that meant both "those who refuse the Logos" and "irrational people." Bruce judges that this "was an excessive price to pay for the maintenance of catholic orthodoxy," and that the Gospel was defended by Hippolytus in a work against Gaius, of which some Syriac fragments survive; the twelfth-century Syriac commentator Bar Salibi reports that Gaius ascribed both the Gospel and the Apocalypse to Cerinthus.[^bruce-gaius] Eusebius's report is that Gaius ascribed to Cerinthus "revelations which he pretends were written by a great apostle."[^eus-28] The Alogi were not heretics on Bruce's reading, since they "appear to have been orthodox in all other respects."[^bruce-gaius] Their objection is at least intelligible: a book that made so much of the Paraclete would be a gift to a movement that claimed to be the Paraclete's mouthpiece. The Church kept the Gospel; Bruce adds that the Alogi's negative attitude to it "had no influence on catholic thought, in Rome or elsewhere."
The Prologue's theology was fought over a second time in the fourth century, in the Arian controversy. Chrysostom, in his third homily, answers objectors who argued that the words "in the beginning was the Word" "do not denote eternity absolutely, for that this same expression was used also concerning heaven and earth." He answers from the grammar: "what has the word was in common with the word made?" Of the earth Moses says "He made it"; of the Word John says "was." If the Word had been created, John, who knew the danger, would surely have said "In the beginning God made the Word."[^chrys3] In the fourth homily he adds that the clause "the Word was with God" shows co-eternity, since to give the Son a beginning is, by the same logic, to give the Father one: "the Father was never without the Word, but He was always God with God, yet Each in His proper Person."[^chrys4]
Athanasius's third discourse against the Arians takes up "I and the Father are one" (John 10.30). The Arians, he says, "contend that the Son and the Father are not in such wise 'one,' or 'like,' as the Church preaches": they say "since what the Father wills, the Son wills also ... therefore it is that He and the Father are One." Athanasius replies that on that reading the angels, the sun, and the stars would be sons too, and "many now too keep the Saviour's command" without any of them being "Word or Wisdom or Only-begotten Son or Image"; the oneness of John 10:30 must be referred "to the very Essence of the Son," as the radiance is one with the light.[^ath-disc3]
McGuckin, describing Nicaea, says the council's creed "is more or less entirely constructed out of the New Testament itself," with "a single, but important, philosophical term," homoousios, added to settle whether "the Divine Word of God, Son of the Father, [was] really divine, or only honorifically divine," and OrthodoxWiki's text of the Nicene Creed confesses the Son as "begotten from the Father, only-begotten ... God from God, light from light, true God from true God, ... through Whom all things came into being."[^mcguckin-nicaea][^ow-creed] Phrases of the Prologue stand in the creed's lines.
The opposite error took the same book for a weapon. Hippolytus, in his treatise against Noetus, reports that the Noetians cited John to say that the Father and Son are one person: "I and the Father are one" (John 10.30) and the words to Philip, "He that has seen me has seen the Father." Hippolytus answers that the Lord "did not say, I and the Father am one, but are one. For the word are is not said of one person, but it refers to two persons, and one power," and appeals to the prayer of chapter 17, "that they may be one, even as we are one," to show the sense in which the unity holds.[^hippolytus] OrthodoxWiki records that the Church later called this modalism Sabellianism, after the third-century Sabellius.[^ow-sabell] The Gospel stood in the middle of both debates, with "I and the Father are one" and "the Father is greater than I" (John 14.28) in the same book, and Athanasius reads the book's two kinds of statement as referring to the Son's divinity and to the economy of His incarnation, not to rival theologies.[^ath-disc3]
The book's relation to the other three Gospels is a standing difficulty, and Origen and Augustine both take it up. Origen, in the tenth book of his Commentary on John, sets out the whole of the problem of the temple. John makes the cleansing of the temple the second work of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry (John 2.13-John 2.17), whereas "the other Evangelists narrate a similar incident almost at the end and in connection with the story of the passion." He asks whether the order or the account has been changed and concludes that the reasons for recognizing a harmony between the accounts are to be sought at the spiritual level.[^orig-temple] Augustine's answer is simpler: "this makes it evident that this act was performed by the Lord not on a single occasion, but twice over; but that only the first instance is put on record by John, and the last by the other three."[^aug-hg67] Behr, being franker than either, lists the discrepancy as one of those "irresolvable discrepancies" between the Gospels, adding that "some early Christians were even prepared to see in these discrepancies divinely placed 'stumbling blocks'" to direct attention "to the higher level of theological reflection."[^behr-42]
The most visible discrepancy is the date of the Passion. The Synoptics have Jesus ask the disciples where they are to "prepare for you to eat the Passover" (Matthew 26.17; Mark 14.12) and say "I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer" (Luke 22.15). John says that the supper was "before the feast of the Passover" (John 13.1); that the leaders, taking Jesus to Pilate, did not enter the Praetorium "that they might not be defiled, but might eat the Passover" (John 18.28); and that Jesus was condemned on "the Preparation Day of the Passover" (John 19.14).[^passover-wbe]
Behr states the matter squarely: in the Synoptics Christ holds the meal "on the day when the Passover lamb was sacrificed," while "in the Gospel of John it is on this day that the crucifixion takes place," so that "Christ is fully identified with the paschal lamb, an identity announced at the very beginning of the Gospel" in "Behold the Lamb of God."[^behr-34]
A fragment attributed to Clement of Alexandria says that Jesus taught his disciples "the mystery of the type on the thirteenth day," and that "on the following day our Saviour suffered, He who was the Passover," so that the chief priests "did not enter the Praetorium, that they might not be defiled, but might freely eat the passover in the evening," with the claim that "the whole Scriptures agree, and the Gospels harmonize."[^clem-passover] Chrysostom takes the opposite side of the first half: Christ kept the Passover "to indicate by all things unto the last day, that He is not opposed to the law," and the leaders "ate it on another day, and broke the law, on account of their eager desire about this murder."[^chrys-mt] Origen thinks of the phrase "the passover of the Jews" in John 2:13 as pointing to a deeper truth, "the passover of the Lord became for those who took a low and material view of it a Jewish passover."[^orig-heracleon-pass]
The disagreement had practical weight: Socrates, the church historian, reports that "the Quartodecimans affirm that the observance of the fourteenth day was delivered to them by the apostle John," while "the Romans and those in the Western parts" assured him their practice came from Peter and Paul, and that "neither of these parties" could produce written testimony.[^socrates] Behr's own way through is to hold both accounts and to see in the difference the theological point, that Christ is the Passover lamb.
Chrysostom, preaching on John 8, defends the book's claim that the Son is "equal with the Father": when Jesus told them "you seek to kill Me because I have told you the truth," the truth, Chrysostom says, was "that He is equal with the Father. For it was on this account that the Jews sought to slay Him."[^chrys54] John's own explanation is in the text: "the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5.18).
The hardest modern controversy is over "the Jews." The Jewish Annotated New Testament, whose introduction to John is by Adele Reinhartz, states the problem with force: the term hoi Ioudaioi appears more than seventy times; "the Jews are from the outset portrayed as the people who reject Jesus (1.11), persecute him (5.16), seek his death (8.40), expel believers from the synagogue (9.22)"; and in chapter 8 Jesus tells his Jewish audience, "You are of your father the devil" (John 8.44), a verse that "has contributed to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism from ancient times to the present day." The introduction says the Gospel "has been called the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels."
The introduction insists, in fairness, that "the Gospel is not anti-Semitic in a racial sense, as it is not one's origins that are decisive but one's beliefs," that the referent of the term varies, since the crowds who hear Jesus teach in the Temple are Jews and Jesus himself says "salvation is from the Jews" (John 4.22), and that the Gospel's "difficult rhetoric ... can be understood as part of the author's process of self-definition."[^jant-intro] The same introduction notes the Gospel's deep Jewishness, its knowledge of Jerusalem, the Sabbath, Tabernacles, and Hanukkah, and its use of rabbinic-style exegesis.[^jant-intro]
Chrysostom, preaching on John 8:42-44, follows the escalation of the exchange. Christ first drives the hearers out of their relationship to Abraham, and then tells them "that they not only are not Abraham's children, but that they are even children of the devil," a charge Chrysostom does not soften, though he rests it on their murderous intent and not on their descent. His reading of the purpose is pastoral as much as polemical: Christ wished "to persuade them no longer to rest their hopes of salvation in Abraham, nor in the relationship which is according to nature, but in that which is according to the will."[^chrys54] Augustine, on the trial, makes the comment on the leaders: "They were afraid of being defiled by the pretorium of a foreign judge, and had no fear of defilement from the blood of an innocent brother."[^aug-tr114] Both Fathers tie the charge to what the leaders did, though Chrysostom's language is severe and the passage remains hard.
Orthodoxy's liturgical life, however, sometimes names "the Jews" themselves as responsible. The Gospel supplies five of the twelve Passion Gospels read on Holy Thursday evening, and in the Good Friday hymns the Idiomela four of the twelve explicitly name "the Jews" as the people responsible for Christ's death.[^ow-holyweek][^public-orth] George Demacopoulos, writing in Public Orthodoxy, argues that these hymns "were the first to blame 'the Jews' for the death of Christ," that the accusation is "historically misleading," and that earlier hymns "consistently position the whole of humanity as responsible for the death of Christ"; he traces the shift to sixth-century Palestine and asks whether it is not time to revisit hymns that "can so easily be shown to be an ahistorical, rhetorical reaction to temporary conditions that no longer exist."[^public-orth] The essay is a voice within the Church and has no standing as a ruling, but it shows that the question the Jewish Annotated New Testament poses is one that Orthodox writers also pose.
The strongest case against the story of the woman taken in adultery is the one the scholarship gives: the passage is missing from the earliest manuscripts, appears elsewhere in others, and interrupts the flow between 7:52 and 8:12, since the conclusion of the incident in verse 11 does not lead into verse 12.[^jant-pericope] The Church's own use is mixed: Augustine preaches a whole tractate on the story, while Chrysostom's homilies pass over it and the Gospel for Pentecost omits it. Lash holds that the Orthodox Study Bible ought to have said so, and the history he asks to have stated plainly sits alongside his principle, offered about the Byzantine text generally, that "the Church's text is the Orthodox text, full stop."[^lash][^aug-tr33]
Methods of Criticism
The methods modern scholars bring to John are the same as those they bring to the other Gospels, but the book tests them harder, because it is the Gospel least like the others and the one that claims most for itself. The place to begin is with the words themselves.
Textual criticism asks what the original words were, in a book whose autograph is lost and whose copies disagree. Its claims about John are the ones already named: that the pericope of the adulteress is a later addition; that 5:3b-4 is absent from some ancient authorities; that 1:18 has a well-attested reading "God the only Son"; and that the verb in 20:31 has two forms, "come to believe" and "continue to believe."[^jant-apparatus][^jant-intro] The discipline also rests on early papyri such as P52, P75, and P45, which Bruce dates between c. 130 and the early third century, and on the great codices.[^bruce-p52] It is called "low" criticism within the historical-critical schools and is said to precede translation.[^course-textcrit] In Orthodox practice, as Lash reports, the Byzantine text is "the text accepted by the Orthodox Church," the Orthodox Study Bible prints readings such as the adulteress passage and the angel at the pool, and Origen's discussion of Bethabara shows an ancient Father weighing manuscripts and geography himself. Lash's formulation, that "the Church's text is the Orthodox text, full stop," states the attitude.[^lash][^orig-bethabara]
Source criticism asks what written materials stand behind the Gospel, and for John the question is different from the Synoptic one. Where the first three Gospels are bound by a literary relationship that has produced the Two-Source, Farrer, and Griesbach hypotheses, the Jewish Annotated New Testament says that John's relation to the Synoptics "remains controversial": there are "a number of significant parallels," such as the feeding of the multitude and the walking on water, and yet "most of the stories ... are unique to the Fourth Gospel," and "insufficient evidence exists to determine whether the Fourth Gospel had access to a complete text of one or more of the Synoptics."[^jant-intro] The Fathers' own source theory is Eusebius's and Jerome's: John read the three and supplemented them.[^eus-24][^jerome-dvi9] The "signs source" proposed by some scholars is hypothetical; the JANT introduction presents it as one among several proposals.[^jant-intro] Childs warns that to read the Gospel by a reconstructed theory of its levels risks "badly misconstruing its canonical function," and allows that the Gospel possibly "arose in an environment which shared some significant features with a proto-Gnosticism," but holds that its present form "has largely subordinated this inheritance and even rendered it inoperative in conscious opposition to its theology."[^childs-john]
Form criticism asks about the small units, sayings, signs, and controversy stories, that circulated before the Gospel was written. The Jewish Annotated New Testament describes a pattern in the signs stories, the kind of observation form criticism makes, though the volume does not use the term: a problem, an expectation that Jesus will remedy it, an apparent frustration of that expectation, the miracle, and the aftermath, as at Cana, where Jesus's mother points out that the wine has run out, Jesus says his hour has not come, and then performs the miracle.[^jant-intro] One critique calls the method "completely hypothetical," because nothing survives from the period that is not already text.[^course-lecture] McGuckin accepts that recent study can distinguish "the forms of the Aramaic preaching of Jesus and his apostles in the first generation" from the preaching of "the more overtly Greek disciples of the second apostolic age," while holding that for Orthodoxy "there is no great chasm" between the teachings of Jesus and the way the apostles passed them on.[^mcguckin-28]
Redaction criticism takes the book as it stands and asks what its author or editors have done with their material. For John the question concerns the book's several hands, and the Jewish Annotated New Testament's examples are the seams already noted, the abrupt change of scene between chapters 5 and 6 and the closing of the supper at 14:31, together with the view that chapter 21 is a later addition.[^jant-intro][^jant-21] The Fathers noticed the same phenomena and read them differently. Origen's treatment of the temple cleansing asks what John's arrangement is for.[^orig-temple] Chrysostom reads the author's repeated self-reference as a clue to what impelled him to write.[^chrys88] Childs, a proponent of the canonical approach, says the descriptive work of the critic, "to describe the various layers reflected within the Fourth Gospel," is useful, but "is not to be simply identified with the canonical meaning of the Gospel," and that the pre-history "stands in an indirect, dialectical relation to its final form."[^childs-john] Behr voices the Orthodox concern that the study of Scripture has been "dominated by the presuppositions of a historical-critical method," concerned with "what it meant rather than means."[^behr-12]
Historical-critical and social-scientific study sets the Gospel in the world that produced it: a date, a place, a community. For John the most influential reconstruction has been that of the Johannine community, a group of Jewish believers expelled from the synagogue and reading the story of Jesus on two levels, and the Jewish Annotated New Testament presents it and then criticizes it: the Gospel does not encode the community's history except in the three expulsion passages, the diversity of first-century Judaism makes such exclusion unlikely, and the evidence for the Birkat ha-minim does not support the theory, so that "it is difficult to use historical circumstances as a basis for dating the Gospel."[^jant-intro] The same volume suggests a composite community of Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles.[^jant-intro]
On authorship the same volume says that the tradition identifying the beloved disciple with John the son of Zebedee "is unlikely to be correct," because "a Galilean fisherman does not match the Jerusalem-based depiction of the beloved disciple" and because "the Gospel does not identify the beloved disciple as John," so that the author is "better understood to be anonymous and probably not an original follower of Jesus or an eyewitness."[^jant-intro] Behr, an Orthodox scholar, grants the textual point: "While the beloved disciple is traditionally identified with the Evangelist himself, this is not actually an identification made by the Gospel; the only identification made here is that the one who stands by the cross of Christ and is not ashamed of him is the beloved disciple," and he proposes that this faithful disciple "becomes identified with Christ."[^behr-34] The traditional answer to the critical account rests on the testimony of Irenaeus, Clement, Polycrates, and Eusebius, which the critic weighs differently from the believer; Dionysius, who argued the authorship of the Revelation from the evidence of style, shows that ancient readers argued such questions rather than assuming them.[^eus-23][^eus-31][^dionysius] McGuckin, speaking of the first generation of the Church generally, cautions that "the detail is very sparse and highly controvertible," and that reconstruction there has given rise to "a flourishing of speculation passing off as history."[^mcguckin-29]
Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the Gospel in the form the Church received it, and John is where these approaches are most at home. The Jewish Annotated New Testament lists the Gospel's devices: repetition ("the hour is coming, and is now here"), double entendre ("lifted up" meaning both crucifixion and exaltation), misunderstanding (Nicodemus on being "born a second time"), and irony.[^jant-intro]
Childs notes that in the Fourth Gospel "the reader is continually being instructed in the true significance of a statement or of an event, and thus put into a different position from the disciples from whom the mystery was still hidden," and that John, unlike Mark, "was written consistently from the vantage point of Christ's mission as the Divine Son."[^childs-john] The Orthodox Church in America's account of the book's two parts, "signs" and "the passion of Christ and its meaning for the world," with the long discourses in which "the doctrines of Christ's person and work are most deeply explained," reads John in the same manner.[^oca-gospels] Canonical readers add the observation that the Church's liturgical reading has itself given the texts a further "canonical shaping."[^course-canonical]
The patristic and Orthodox alternative takes its stand elsewhere, and its great exemplar for this book is Origen, who calls the Gospel the first fruits and demands of its interpreter that he have "the mind of Christ," and whose commentary reads the same story, the cleansing of the temple, at the level of the history and of the soul.[^orig-first][^orig-temple] Augustine opens his tractates with an admission of the limits of any interpreter and a description of John as "one of those mountains" that receive peace so that the hills may be able to receive righteousness.[^aug-tr1]
Scholars take four patristic senses (literal, typological or allegorical, tropological or moral, anagogical or mystical) as the framework, and Chrysostom is "big on" the tropological; his homilies on John, with their constant turn from the verse to the life of the hearer, are a case in point.[^course-lecture][^chrys1] The principle of interpretation is St. Vincent of Lérins's: because "owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense," the rule must be "framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation."[^vincent] McGuckin says the same from the Orthodox side: there is no decisive distinction between Scripture and tradition, since the Gospels themselves arise from the Spirit's articulation in the illumined faith of the Church.[^mcguckin-28]
The Church lives this reading in her worship: she reads the opening seventeen verses of John at the Paschal Divine Liturgy, often in several languages, and from Pascha to Pentecost "all of the gospel readings are taken from the Gospel of Saint John," with Mid-Pentecost, the Samaritan woman, the blind man, and the paralytic each giving a Sunday its theme.[^ow-pascha][^oca-post] On Holy Thursday evening five of the twelve Passion Gospels are from John, and on May 8 and September 26 the Church commemorates the apostle, whose troparion tells him that Christ, "He on whose breast you leaned, will accept you as intercessor."[^ow-holyweek][^may8] The book's promise is that those who believe have life in his name, and its closing statement that the whole world could not contain the books that would be written of what Jesus did is the Church's license to go on reading it. The Incarnation it announces in its first chapter, the Trinity it names in its last discourses, and the Pascha it keeps at its centre are the reasons it stands where it does as the last of the four Gospels that Matthew, Mark, and Luke began.
Sources
[^jn1]: John 1.1-18 (WEB), the Prologue. [^jn-eye]: John 13.23; John 19.26-27; John 19.35; John 21.20; John 21.24 (WEB). [^iam]: John 6.35; John 8.12; John 10.11; John 11.25; John 14.6; John 15.1; John 8.58 (WEB); Origen, Commentary on John I.11. [^ow-pascha]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pascha." [^oca-gospels]: Orthodox Church in America, "Gospels." [^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to John. [^mur]: Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), Metzger translation. [^eus-24]: Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 3.24.1–13 (NPNF). [^lists]: Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; Synod of Laodicea, canon 60 (genuineness questioned); Codex Claromontanus (sixth century), in F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture. [^clem-hyp]: Clement of Alexandria, Hypotyposes, as reported in Eusebius, Church History 6.14; cf. JANT introduction to John, citing Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.7. [^orig-first]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 1, §§4–6 (ANF, vol. 10); F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 196. [^jn-summary]: John 1.29; John 2.11; John 2.13; John 3.5; John 4.23; John 12.32; John 13.34; John 17.21; John 19.30; John 20.22; John 20.28; John 21.15-17 (WEB). [^jn20]: John 20.30-31 (WEB). [^jn23]: 2 John 1.1; 3 John 1.1 (WEB). [^1jn]: 1 John 1.1-3 (WEB). [^mk-thunder]: Mark 3.17 (WEB); Acts 4.13 (WEB); Chrysostom, Homilies on John 1.2. [^eus-18]: Eusebius, Church History 3.18.1–3. [^eus-23]: Eusebius, Church History 3.23.1–19. [^sep26]: Synaxarion, September 26, "Repose of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian." [^jerome-dvi9]: St. Jerome, On Illustrious Men 9 ("John the Apostle"); also 17 (Polycarp) and 18 (Papias). [^eus-28]: Eusebius, Church History 3.28.1–6. [^irenaeus-i26]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.1. [^eus-31]: Eusebius, Church History 3.31.2–3. [^eus-39]: Eusebius, Church History 3.39.1–7, 16. [^ign-phil]: Ignatius of Antioch, To the Philadelphians 7. [^dionysius]: Dionysius of Alexandria, Books on the Promises, preserved in Eusebius, Church History 7.25, §§3–7 (ANF). [^aug-tr1]: St. Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 1.1–2. [^aug-tr36]: Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 36.1. [^chrys88]: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 88 (on John 21.24-John 21.25). [^jant-intro]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Gospel according to John" (introduction by Adele Reinhartz), 152–56. [^childs-john]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Fortress, 1985), excerpts. [^boyarin]: Daniel Boyarin, "Logos, a Jewish Word: John's Prologue as Midrash," in Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 546–48. [^orig-spiritual]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 1, §9 ("The Somatic and the Spiritual Gospel"). [^aug-hg4]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.4.7. [^aug-hg5]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.5.8. [^aug-hg6]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 1.6.9. [^chrys4]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 4 (on John 1.1). [^chrys1]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 1.2–3. [^chrys2]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 2.1–5. [^behr-34]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 34–36. [^bruce-p52]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (IVP, 1988), 127–28. [^ow-codices]: OrthodoxWiki, "Codex Sinaiticus"; "Codex Vaticanus"; "Codex Alexandrinus." [^course-textcrit]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^orig-bethabara]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 6 (on John 1.28). [^variants]: John 1.18; John 1.28; John 5.3-John 5.4; John 7.53-John 8.11 (WEB); The Orthodox Study Bible, notes on the same passages. [^jant-apparatus]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (NRSV text and notes), on John 1.18, 1.34, 3.13, 5.3–4 (167), 6.69, 7.53–8.11, 20.31. [^nyssa]: Gregory of Nyssa, To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods. [^tert-bapt]: Tertullian, On Baptism 5–6. [^chrys36]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 36 (on John 5.2-John 5.3). [^jant-pericope]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on John 7.53–8.11, 173–74. [^codex1424]: Public Orthodoxy, "New Testament Codex 1424 Returned to the Care of the Ecumenical Patriarchate." [^wiki-canon]: Wikipedia, "Biblical canon." [^bruce-adult]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 289. [^chrys52]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 52 (on John 7.45-John 7.46 through 8:12). [^lash]: Ephrem Lash, review of The Orthodox Study Bible, Anastasis (from Sourozh). [^faustus]: Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 33. [^aug-tr33]: Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 33 (on John 7.53-John 8.11). [^jerome-pel]: Jerome, Against the Pelagians 2 (chapter summary). [^jant-21]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, note on John 21.1–25, 195–96. [^tatian-dia]: Tatian, Diatessaron, sec. 1 (Arabic; Hogg translation). [^bruce-diat]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 127–28. [^ow-rabbula]: OrthodoxWiki, "Rabbula of Edessa." [^ow-vulgate]: OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^jerome-pref]: Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels (to Pope Damasus). [^ow-ulfilas]: OrthodoxWiki, "Ulfilas." [^ow-cm]: OrthodoxWiki, "Cyril and Methodius." [^course-english]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^ow-osb]: OrthodoxWiki, "Orthodox Study Bible." [^bruce-gnostic]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 127–28 and nn. 40–44. [^irenaeus-i8]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.8.5. [^irenaeus-i9]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.9.1–3. [^orig-heracleon]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 2, §§8, 15. [^bruce-gaius]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 168–69, 179 and nn. 37–39, 52. [^chrys3]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 3 (on John 1.1). [^ath-disc3]: Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, Discourse 3, ch. 25, §§10–12. [^mcguckin-nicaea]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press), 13–14. [^ow-creed]: OrthodoxWiki, "Nicene Creed." [^hippolytus]: Hippolytus, Against Noetus 7. [^ow-sabell]: OrthodoxWiki, "Sabellianism." [^orig-temple]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 10, §§15–18 (on John 2.13-John 2.17). [^aug-hg67]: Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 2.67.129. [^behr-42]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 42. [^passover-wbe]: Matthew 26.17; Mark 14.12; Luke 22.15; John 13.1; John 18.28; John 19.14 (WEB); Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on John 18.28, 19.14, 19.31–37. [^clem-passover]: Clement of Alexandria (attributed), "From the Last Work on the Passover," quoted in the Paschal Chronicle. [^chrys-mt]: Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 81.1 (on Matthew 26.17); Hom. 84.2. [^orig-heracleon-pass]: Origen, Commentary on John, bk. 10, §14. [^socrates]: Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 5.22. [^chrys54]: Chrysostom, Homilies on John, Hom. 54 (on John 8.39-John 8.44). [^aug-tr114]: Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 114 (on John 18.28). [^ow-holyweek]: OrthodoxWiki, "Holy Week." [^public-orth]: George Demacopoulos, "The Origins of Anti-Jewish Rhetoric in the Hymns of Good Friday," Public Orthodoxy. [^course-lecture]: Course lecture notes, Gospels and Acts. [^mcguckin-28]: John Anthony McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press), 27–28. [^mcguckin-29]: McGuckin, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 28–29. [^behr-12]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 12–13. [^course-canonical]: Course discussion notes, Gospels and Acts. [^vincent]: St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2. [^oca-post]: Orthodox Church in America, "Post-Easter Sundays." [^may8]: Troparion for the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian (May 8).