The authorship of the Gospel of John has long been a controversial topic in New Testament studies. Over the past two centuries, three options have emerged as prominent: authorship by the Apostle John, authorship by the Elder John, and anonymous authorship. The conviction that John the Apostle wrote this Gospel conforms to the testimony of the Church Fathers from the third through sixth centuries and served as the consensus belief of the church from that time until the modern era. The most celebrated defense of apostolic authorship was furnished by B. F. Westcott (1894). A considerable number of recent exegetes, including John A. T. Robinson (1985, pp. 93â122), D. A. Carson (1991, pp. 68â81), Robert Gundry (1994, pp. 252â54), Leon Morris (1995, pp. 4â24), Herman Ridderbos (1997, pp. 672â83), Andreas KĂśstenberger (1999, pp. 22â25), Craig Blomberg (2001, pp. 22â41), Craig Keener (2003, vol. 1, pp. 82â104), and C. G. Kruse (2003, pp. 24â30), have found the hypothesis of apostolic authorship most attractive.
The view that John the Elder composed the Fourth Gospel stems from Papiasâ identification (c. 110 ce) of an Elder John, separate from the Apostle John, who was still living in the 80s ce after the apostles had died and providing eyewitness recollection of the Jesus traditions in the churches of Asia Minor. Other factors in favor of this view include the self-identification of âthe elderâ as the writer of other literature known to bear the same authorship as the Gospel of John (2 John 1; 3 John 1)1 and the testimony of Polycrates (190â195 ce) and most probably Irenaeus (c. 180 ce) that a John other than the Apostle John composed the Fourth Gospel. This evidence has convinced Jean Colson (1969, pp. 85â108), Martin Hengel (1989, pp. 24â73), Claude Tresmontant (1989, pp. 310â18), Maria-Luisa Rigato (1990, pp. 451â83), and Richard Bauckham (2007, pp. 33â72) that the Elder John was the author of the Gospel.
Despite this support for either the Apostle or the Elder John, the wide majority of scholarly opinion favors anonymous authorship, typically at the hands of a community originally founded or influenced by either the beloved disciple, an eyewitness to Jesusâ ministry who may or may not be the Apostle John, or an early Christian preacher. There are two classic examples of this approach. The first comes from Raymond Brown, arguably the leading Johannine scholar of the second half of the twentieth century. Brown proposed five stages of redaction in the formation of the Gospel: (1) material from the beloved disciple, (2) its development over decades of preaching in the community which the beloved disciple founded, (3) its organization into a consecutive Gospel, (4) its thorough editing by an anonymous evangelist, and (5) its final reworking by a later redactor (1966, pp. xxxivâxxxix). The second example comes from J. Louis Martyn. Martyn suggested three layers of the Fourth Gospelâs accumulation: (1) material from a messianic group within the Ephesian synagogue inspired by the sermons of an early Christian preacher, (2) material from the group following its excommunication from the synagogue and encounters with martyrdom, and (3) material from the group after establishing its distinct identity both from the synagogue and from other Christian communities (2003, pp. 147â168).
Scores of scholars, including Oscar Cullmann (1976, pp. 63â85), Ernst Haenchen (1984, vol. 1, pp. 20â67), George Beasley-Murray (1987, p. 415), James Charlesworth (1995, pp. 24â26, 46), Gail OâDay (1996, pp. 491â96), D. Moody Smith (1999, pp. 399â400), Andrew Lincoln (2000, p. 153), and Robert Kysar (2007, pp. 18â19), have followed the general tenor of one of these two approaches and so conclude either (1) that the beloved discipleâs witness either stands merely at the source of the tradition which decades later, in other quite creative hands, produced the Fourth Gospel or (2) that the beloved disciple has nothing to do with the group responsible for fashioning the Fourth Gospel.
Following Colson, Hengel, Tresmontant, Rigato, and especially Bauckham, this chapter will propose against the majority view that the internal and external evidence converge in their support of John the Elder as the author of the Fourth Gospel. In so doing, I will explain and then challenge the assumptions which lead adherents of anonymous authorship and adherents of authorship by the Apostle John to dismiss the notion that the Elder John composed the Gospel. Along the way, I will employ the supposition of the Fourth Gospelâs authorship by the Elder John to bolster a traditional date for the Gospelâs composition. I will conclude by explaining how the theses advanced in this chapter might stimulate future research of two issues. These are the relationships between the Fourth Gospel and eyewitness testimony, and the relationships between the Fourth Gospel and the Temple establishment.
Internal Evidence for the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel
The Fourth Gospel begins and ends with an ancient literary device, which Bauckham has termed the inclusio of eyewitness testimony. This device constituted a form of citation where an author indicated an eyewitness source of a narrative by listing that person as the first non-public figure and the last non-public figure in the narrative. While that source may not be the only one the author used in constructing the narrative, it is clearly designated as one of the most important sources for the intervening material between the two listings and an eyewitness source at that (Bauckham 2017, pp. 124â47).2 In John, the first non-public figures are two anonymous disciples of John the Baptist: âThe next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, âLook, here is the Lamb of God!â The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesusâ (John 1.35â37). While the Gospel immediately proceeds to identify one of these disciples as Andrew (John 1.40ââOne of the two who heard John speak and followed [Jesus] was Andrew, Simon Peterâs brotherâ), the other disciple remains anonymous until the end of the book.
It should be pointed out that this disciple occurs several times as a character throughout the Gospel under the elusive monikers âthe disciple whom Jesus lovedâ (John 13.23; 19.26â27; 20.2; 21.20), âone of his disciplesâ (John 13.23), âanother discipleâ (John 18.15), âthe one having seen thisâ (John 19.35), âthe other discipleâ (John 18.16; 20.2, 4, 8), and as one of âtwo others of his disciplesâ almost certainly alongside Andrew (John 21.2); we shall later examine each of these references in detail. The last non-public figure named in John is this beloved disciple, who is finally identified as the author of the Gospel:
Notice how the narrative is carefully crafted so that the beloved disciple, not Peter, is the last non-public figure to be named in the Gospel under the third-person âThis is the discipleâ (John 21.24) and the first-person âweâ (John 21.24) and âIâ (John 21.25), thus marking out the inclusio of eyewitness testimony. Hence, the eyewitness source of the Gospel specified by the inclusio âthe beloved discipleâis further identified by its final reference as the Gospelâs author.Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus as the supper and had said, âLord, who is it that is going to betray you?â When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, âLord, what about him?â Jesus said to him, âIf it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!â So the rumor spread among the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, âIf it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?â This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21.20â25)
A key reason which has led most scholars to reject a straightforward reading of this identification is the Gospelâs highly advanced Christology, which supposedly could not have been articulated by an eyewitness to Jesusâ life but emerged only after the eyewitnesses had left the scene. As a result, these scholars ha...