‘Young John evidently came from a fairly well-to-do family.’ Photo: Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, by John Giuliani, 1996
Who wrote the fourth Gospel? Elaine Miles considers
‘John, whoever he was, wrote good Classical Greek.’
When I read the commentaries of nineteenth and twentieth century scholars – even the more modern William Temple – it doesn’t seem to matter to them who wrote ‘John’s’ Gospel. They seem to find it of purely academic importance: here are the names, put them in a hat and draw one out. But when you read Shakespeare, it does matter that you know he was an actor, not just someone sitting at a desk. It colours our understanding of the text.
John, whoever he was, wrote good Classical Greek, and clearly had a good late-Classical education. In his prologue he uses some expressions straight from Platonic and Stoic philosophy. For example αλήθεια, ‘truth’, is not just an assembly of facts but a spiritual goal – a sense beloved by early Quakers. Is John son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, a candidate often favoured by those scholars, likely to have had such an education? No, surely not.
Another possibility is ‘John the elder’, a vague expression which reminds us that Paul invented that term for the leaders of his new congregations. So we look perhaps for someone in Asia Minor. Only one person fits that description: John, the young disciple of whom, he says in his Gospel, Jesus ‘was fond’. Young John evidently came from a fairly well-to-do family, who could afford to give him a good education. His father seems to have been dead, as his home was spoken of as ‘Mary’s house’, the house of his mother. This John was apparently free to hang about near the temple and the market in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was his home town, and his face was obviously an acceptable one in the courts belonging to the religious leaders. After the crucifixion he was smuggled away to Asia Minor by Barnabas, together with Paul. He assisted Paul occasionally but was never an apostle (as Paul repeatedly reminded him). But John was the leader of his congregation in Ephesus, and eventually became its bishop.
John evidently had the Gospels of Mark and Matthew in front of him as he wrote – there are parallel passages – but it was Matthew whom the early church scholars thought of as the greater authority on Jesus’s teaching. This is because John did not have knowledge of the important ‘Sayings of Jesus’, the parables which Jesus seems to have used in his early preaching in Galilee. Or maybe he felt no need to repeat what Matthew had collected. Either way, John’s acquaintance with Jesus, and his opportunities to listen to his teaching, were apparently limited to Jerusalem, where he lived. One thing stands out however. At Jesus’s trial and execution, the other disciples had run way. Peter is turned back by officials. Only John is present.
Comments
In The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, the distinguished Bible scholar John Shelby Spong invites is to read the fourth Gospel non-literally as a literary, interpretive retelling of the events in Jesus’ life through the medium of fictional characters, from Nicodemus and Lazarus to the “beloved disciple”.
By gturner on 14th October 2021 - 12:50
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