Who was John?

this is still under construction ...

The Bible is such an important and influential collection of writings that there is a whole academic industry in theorising about it.  This includes a considerable volume of literature on who did or did not write the three elements of the Bible which have traditionally been attached to the name of John.  These are the Gospel of John (also called the Fourth Gospel since the writer never actually calls himself John), the three letters of John, and the Revelation of John.  For those who like long words this is called the Johannine Literature or Johannine Traditions; however there is also a typical academic argument over which of these three elements should be included and so on and so forth ad 2000 years if not quite infinitum.

For many purposes it is totally irrelevant who wrote John's gospel; we can choose to call it that and to call the writer John simply because it is convenient and easily understood.  If that's good enough for you, then by all means, exit this page right now!  

The main reason that we call this record of Jesus' life John's gospel is because we have a record it was called this from very early, with the clear understanding that this John is the disciple mentioned in the other three Gospels.  A man called Irenaeus wrote about this in ??.  This makes quite a lot of sense if we actually read the story, because there are pointers from whe way it is written that harmonise with this assumption.

The writer of this record is interestingly careful about mentioning names.  One factor of interest is that he never once mentions John the disciple even though the other gospels mention him frequently.  But he does mention a specific individual, calling him either 'another disciple' or 'the disciple who Jesus loved', who is identified at the end of the gospel as 'the one who bears witness to these things and wrote them down'.

This incidentally also claims clearly that the person responsible was someone who had actually been present at most if not all of what was recorded here.  It is obvious to many scholars that the person who wrote this account had an excellent first-hand knowledge of the context which he was writing about.  In fact, archaeology has verified some descriptions as realistic, which previous generations of scholars had suggested demonstrated a lack of personal knowledge!  This can be quite typical of scholars who at times tended to assume the worst unless there was evidence to the contrary.  (Remember they all have to make an academic living by constantly producing new papers for publication.)

The stories themselves, when read as reflective accounts of things that happened, bear all the marks of a thoughtful eyewitness.  People who read a lot (not just the Bible) usually feel this.  More than that, the composition of the gospel has a sense of coherence which I believe precludes the idea of a sort of committee effort by people who had heard John's stories and then got together to write them down after he had died. 

This doesn't mean that he necessarily physically used a stylus on papyrus.  He may well have dictated to a scibe, which was a common practice.  Even in the last century, people writing books often dictated (via dictaphone or shorthand) to a typist.  He may even have dictated to a colleague who not only took the dictation, but made suggestions as they worked together.  Bearing in mind that the gospel was written to be wdely distributed rather than as an intensely personal communication.  This in a day when all copies would have to be hand written, could mean that several copies were made under John's supervision - possibly even more than one scribe taking the original dictation.   

All things taken together I feel pretty confident that the writer was John, one of the twelve close followers of Jesus, crafting an account of Jesus, using a careful selection of events in which he had been involved and which he considered conveyed special meaning.

For a full account of the academic arguments of the theologians with regard to authorship, look at any recent commentary on the gospel.  A particularly short and helpful summary is given in 'The Writings of the New Testament' by Luke Timothy Johnson (SCM Press, London, 1999).