I’ve been leading a Bible study on the Gospel of John. Here are my “background” notes.
he Gospel of John occupies a unique place in Christian faith and spirituality. It has often been called the “spiritual Gospel” for its emphasis on Jesus’ divine character and its call to inner transformation. It differs from the “Synoptic” Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — both in its tone and in many of its details. Because of these features, the cultural background, editorial history, and theological significance of the Gospel of John has been subject to significant discussion throughout history.
The Gospel of John refers to an anonymous disciple “whom Jesus loved.” (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2-9.) This anonymous “beloved disciple” is portrayed as first-hand witness to Jesus’ ministry and as the source of the Gospel’s narratives. (John 19:35; 21:20-24.) Although the Gospel of John does not refer to anyone named “John,” early Church tradition identifies him (presumably, a man), as someone named “John.” The Synoptic Gospels identify “John the son of Zebedee” as one of the twelve Apostles, and this John appears in Acts as a leader of the church in Jerusalem along with Peter. (See Matt. 10:2; Acts 3:1; Acts 8:14.) It is possible that the Apostle John is the first-hand source behind the Gospel of John, be we cannot be sure.
The suggestion that the text reflects the input of a first-hand source, perhaps even the Apostle John, however, does not mean it is a simple transcript of events written by this one person. The text itself demonstrates that the version we possess went through stages of editing or “redaction.” This includes, for example, the addition of the final Chapter 21 as a sort of post-script to the events described elsewhere in the text. Like the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John likely is based on some material collected close to the time of Jesus’ life that was subsequently shaped, supplemented, and amended to reflect the concerns of a community or related communities of First or Second-Century Christians. It seems that the Synoptic Gospels relied on some common source materials, starting with the Gospel of Mark, and that the Gospel of John relied on some different source materials, which perhaps accounts for some of the differences between the Synoptics and John. At the same time, scholars have begun to note similarities as well as differences between John and the Synoptics.
Some scholars have suggested that the earliest source material behind the Gospel of John might have been a “Gnostic” source that portrayed Jesus as more “spiritual” and less human than the final canonical form of the text. The final canonical form, in this view, came to reflect a more “orthodox” Jesus than the earliest versions. In the first few centuries of church history, what came to be considered “orthodox” Christian theology existed in tension with “Gnostic” versions of the faith. Gnosticism was a family of Greek religious philosophies that elevated “spirit” over “matter” and that offered its adherents secret forms of knowledge that would allow them to access the Divine. Christian thought tried to emphasize both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, and the related goodness of the material creation, in a way that came to distinguish Christian thought from Gnosticism.
There are themes in the Gospel of John that seem more “Gnostic” than the Synoptic Gospels — not least the famous opening line, “In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1.) And there are early Gnostic Christian texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, that did not make it into the canon of scripture. Current scholarship, however, tends to hold that the earliest versions of the Gospel of John were not Gnostic texts and did not differ radically in theology from the final canonical form.
At the same time, the Gospel of John’s theological themes relate to the other “Johanine” writings in the New Testament: the epistles of 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John, the book of Revelation. It is impossible to reconstruct the community that produced the Gospel of John with any precision, but the related themes in these texts suggest there was a unique stream of Christian faith centered on participation in God’s life in Jesus, the presence of Jesus through the Spirit, perseverance through difficulty, and the practice of faith during this world and into the world to come.