John: A Different Kind of Gospel

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nobody signed it. It says its witness was the disciple whom Jesus loved, who is never named (John 21:20–24). By about 180, tradition said he was my apostle John, son of Zebedee. Most scholars think the book came out of a community that traced itself back to that disciple, and that it was written and reworked over years.

When: Probably in the 90s, the last of the four gospels.

Written for: A community of my followers late in the first century, many of them Jews who had been put out of their synagogues. It was written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (John 20:31).

What it remembers of me: Long speeches about who I am, seven great signs, the raising of Lazarus, and the night I washed my friends’ feet. It has almost none of the parables, and it puts my scene in the Temple at the start of my work instead of the end.

How close it stays to me: Close on serving and the stranger. Far on enemies, in how it speaks of “the Jews.”

If you only read three chapters: John 1, John 9 and John 13.

Words to Know

The Word — in Greek, Logos. It meant word, reason or the ordering principle of the world. John uses it as a name for me.

Signs — John’s word for my miracles. They point to something beyond themselves.

Synoptic gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke. The word means seen together, because their stories can be laid side by side.

The disciple whom Jesus loved — an unnamed follower who appears only in John, and whom the book names as its source.

Put out of the synagogue — expelled from the local Jewish community. The phrase appears only in John.

The Book in Brief

John begins before the world was made, with the Word, who was with God and was God, and who became a human being. John the Baptist calls me the Lamb of God, and some of his followers come after me.

Chapters 2 to 12 tell of my public work, through signs and long conversations. At a wedding in Cana I turn water into wine. At Passover I drive the traders out of the Temple with a whip. Nicodemus comes to me by night, and I tell him he must be born anew. At a well in Samaria I talk with a woman, and her town comes out to hear me. I heal a sick man at the pool of Bethesda. I feed five thousand, walk on the water, and call myself the bread of life, and many followers leave me.

In chapters 7 to 10 I go up to Jerusalem for the feasts, where leaders try to stone me. In a story missing from the oldest copies, I refuse to condemn a woman caught in adultery. I give sight to a man born blind, and the Pharisees throw him out. I call myself the good shepherd.

In chapter 11 I call my friend Lazarus out of his tomb, four days dead, and the council decides that I must die. In chapter 12 Lazarus’s sister Mary anoints my feet, and I ride into Jerusalem on a young donkey.

Chapters 13 to 17 take place on my last night. I wash my friends’ feet and give them a new commandment, to love one another. I speak about my going away and the Spirit who will come, and pray to my Father.

In chapters 18 and 19 I am arrested in a garden. Peter cuts off a servant’s ear, and later denies me three times. I tell Pilate that my kingdom is not from this world. He has me flogged, and I carry my own cross to Golgotha. From the cross I give my mother to the disciple I love, and I die saying that it is finished. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus bury me.

In chapter 20 Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty, then meets me in the garden. That evening I come to my friends behind locked doors and breathe the Holy Spirit on them. A week later Thomas, who doubted, sees my wounds. The book, it says, was written so that you may believe.

Chapter 21 adds a morning by the Sea of Tiberias: a great catch of fish, breakfast on the shore, and three times I ask Peter whether he loves me. It ends by saying that the world could not hold all the books about what I did.

The first three gospels are cousins. They share stories, order, even sentences. John is a different family.

In the first three, I speak in short sayings and parables, about the kingdom of God. I cast out demons. I go up to Jerusalem once, at the end, and turn over the tables in the Temple, and within a week I am dead.

In John, I speak in long, flowing speeches, mostly about myself. There are no parables of the kind the others remember, no mustard seed, no sower, no good Samaritan. There is not a single exorcism. The phrase kingdom of God, which the other three use constantly, comes up only twice, in one conversation (John 3:3, 3:5). I go up to Jerusalem again and again, for feast after feast, and the Temple scene comes in the second chapter, at the very beginning.

How long?

Here is a simple thing you can check.

The first three gospels mention only one Passover during my work, the one at which I died. John mentions three. The Passover of the Jews was at hand (John 2:13). Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand (John 6:4). Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand (John 11:55).

That is where the idea that my public life lasted about three years comes from. It comes from John. If you only had the other three, you would think it lasted about one.¹

Which day I died

They also disagree about the day I was killed.

In Mark, Matthew and Luke, my last supper is the Passover meal itself, eaten on the evening the feast began. I die the next afternoon, on the feast day.

In John, my last supper happens before the feast of the Passover (John 13:1). I stand before Pilate on the Preparation Day of the Passover, at about the sixth hour (John 19:14), around noon, the day before the feast. In John I die that afternoon, at the hour when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple.

John chose that on purpose, or kept it on purpose. At the start of his book, John the Baptist points at me and calls me the Lamb of God. At the end, I die with the lambs.

Both versions cannot be right. Many historians actually prefer John’s date here, because a trial and execution on the Passover feast itself seems unlikely.² So John is not simply less historical than the others. On some points, he may be more.

Go deeperWhich year I died

None of the gospels gives the year. Between them, they narrow it down.

Pontius Pilate governed Judea from about 26 to 36, so it was in those years.³ Luke dates the start of John the Baptist’s preaching to the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, about 28 or 29 (Luke 3:1).¹ John adds a clue of his own. At my first Passover in his book, people in the Temple say, It took forty-six years to build this temple! (John 2:20). Josephus says that Herod began rebuilding it in the eighteenth year of his reign, about 20 BC. Forty-six years from then comes to about 27 or 28.⁴

All four gospels agree that I died on a Friday, the day before a Sabbath (Mark 15:42; John 19:31). The Jewish months began with the new moon, and astronomers can work out when the new moons fell. In the years Pilate governed, the day John gives, the eve of Passover, fell on a Friday in only two years: on 7 April in the year 30, and on 3 April in the year 33.⁵ In 1983 two Oxford scientists, Colin Humphreys and W. G. Waddington, argued for 33. Many historians prefer 30.⁶

Neither date can be proved. Nobody knows exactly how the priests in Jerusalem fixed the first day of each month, so the calculations carry some uncertainty. But notice that both dates rest on John’s calendar, not on the other three. That is one more reason historians take him seriously here.

The speeches

The biggest difference is how I talk.

In John I say things about myself that I never say in the other three. I am the bread of life (John 6:35). I am the light of the world (John 8:12). I am the good shepherd (John 10:11). I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me (John 14:6). I am the true vine (John 15:1). And, most startling, before Abraham came into existence, I AM (John 8:58), using the name God gave Moses at the burning bush.

In the other three gospels, I talk mostly about God and God’s kingdom, and I am careful about who I am. In John, I talk mostly about myself, openly, at length, from the first chapter.

Here is what most historians conclude, and I will tell you plainly. These long speeches are John’s meditation on me, written in his own voice. The way I speak in John sounds exactly like the way the narrator speaks, and exactly like the letters of John. Long before modern scholars, around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria said that the other gospels had set down the outward facts, and John wrote a spiritual gospel.⁷

I am not telling you those words are worthless. A community spent sixty years thinking about who I was, and this is what they came to say. I am telling you that they sound like the man who wrote the book, not like the man in the other three. When someone quotes one of these speeches to settle a question about what I taught, you should know that.

In the beginning was the Word

John does not begin with my birth or with John the Baptist. He begins before the world.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).

In the beginning are the first words of Genesis. John is starting the story over. The Word was a term Greek thinkers used for the reason that holds the world together, and Jewish writers had already spoken of God’s Wisdom as being with God at creation, the way Proverbs does. John took both and said they had come to earth: The Word became flesh, and lived among us (John 1:14).

That sentence did more to shape what Christians later believed about me than almost any other. Three centuries later, the great councils that defined me as fully God and fully human were arguing, line by line, over the gospel of John.

But John himself holds things together that later readers pulled apart. In this same book I say, I and the Father are one (John 10:30), and I also say, the Father is greater than I (John 14:28). Both are in John. Each side in the fourth-century arguments had its favorite.

What John may get right

It would be easy to conclude that John is all theology and no history. That is not quite fair.

John knows Jerusalem well. He describes a pool, which is called in Hebrew, “Bethesda”, having five porches (John 5:2). For a long time, readers took that as symbolism. Then archaeologists uncovered a large double pool near the old sheep gate, with colonnades on four sides and one across the middle. Five porches.⁸

He sends a blind man to wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:7). In 2004, workers repairing a sewer pipe in Jerusalem uncovered the steps of a large pool from my time near the place where the pool of Siloam had long been placed.⁸

His repeated trips to Jerusalem, his date for my death, and some of his place names may all preserve real memory. John is a strange mixture. The details on the ground are often good. The words in my mouth are mostly his.

Go deeperThe oldest scrap of John

The scrap of John known as Papyrus 52 is often called the oldest piece of any New Testament book that anyone has found.

It is a bit of papyrus about the size of a credit card, torn from a book written on both sides of each page, not from a scroll. In 1920 the scholar Bernard Grenfell bought it in Egypt, with a batch of other papyri, for the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, where it still is. In 1935 Colin Roberts, who had taken over the work, published it. On one side are a few words of John 18:31–33, and on the other a few of John 18:37–38. They come from my trial before Pilate.⁹

Roberts compared the handwriting with dated documents and placed it in the first half of the second century, and many books still give a date of about 125. That mattered. In the 1800s an influential school of German scholars, led by F. C. Baur, had placed John in the second half of the second century. A copy of John already in Egypt by the middle of that century meant the book was older than they thought.¹⁰

Since then, many experts have warned that dating by handwriting is rough. Styles of writing lasted for generations. In 2005, and again in 2020, the scholar Brent Nongbri argued that the fragment could just as well have been copied late in the second century, or even in the third. Others still prefer an earlier date.¹¹

Either way, the scrap tells you something plain. Not long after the book was written, someone in Egypt owned a copy of John, bound as a book, and was reading the story of my trial.

The washing of feet

At John’s last supper there is no bread and cup. The words This is my body are not there. Instead, John gives you something none of the others has.

I arose from supper, and laid aside his outer garments. He took a towel and wrapped a towel around his waist. Then he poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5).

Washing feet was a slave’s job. Peter refused at first. When I had finished, I said, If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). And then, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also love one another (John 13:34).

Of everything in John, this is the scene I would ask you to keep. The other three remember a meal. John remembers a towel.

Lazarus

Only John tells you about Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Mary and Martha, who had been dead four days when I came. Standing at his tomb, Jesus wept (John 11:35), the shortest verse in your English Bible.

In John, it is not the Temple scene that gets me killed. It is Lazarus. Word spreads, and the council meets in fear. If we leave him alone like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. And the high priest, Caiaphas, answers, it is advantageous for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish (John 11:48–50).

That is how people with power talk when they are frightened of Rome. Better one man than all of us. John saw it clearly.

The woman at the well

The longest conversation any gospel gives me with a single person is in John, chapter 4. It is with a Samaritan woman at a well, at noon.

She is surprised that I speak to her at all: How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman? John adds, For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans (John 4:9). When my friends come back, they are astonished to find me talking with a woman. She goes back to her town and brings the whole village out to hear me.

A woman, a foreigner, of a despised people, becomes the first person in John to carry my message to a town.

“The Jews”

Now the hardest thing about John.

In John, my opponents are very often called simply the Jews. The phrase appears about seventy times, far more than in any other gospel.¹² It is strange, because nearly everyone in the story is Jewish. I am Jewish. My mother, my friends, the man born blind and his parents are all Jewish. And yet the book says that the blind man’s parents were afraid because they feared the Jews (John 9:22).

At one point, in an argument, I say to a group of Jews who had believed in me, You are of your father, the devil (John 8:44).

Here is what most scholars think happened. The community behind John’s gospel was made up of Jewish followers of mine who had been thrown out of their local synagogues, a generation or two after my death. John says so three times, using a word found nowhere else in the Bible: put out of the synagogue (John 9:22; compare 12:42 and 16:2). That was their experience, not mine. During my life, nobody was being expelled from synagogues for following me. John wrote the pain of his own community back into my story.¹³

It was a family quarrel, and a bitter one. But family quarrels written down outlive the family. When the gospel was read by people who were not Jews, the Jews became a name for the enemy of Christ. That one word has been used for centuries to justify hatred of my own people, including by men who quoted John 8:44 while they did it.

I was a Jew. I died a Jew. Whatever John’s community suffered, I would not have them write my people out of my family.

My kingdom is not from here

Before Pilate, John has me say, My Kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

People have used that sentence to argue that I did not care about this world, about bread, or rents, or rulers. Read the whole verse. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight, that I wouldn’t be delivered to the Jews. But now my Kingdom is not from here.

The point is where my kingdom comes from and how it works. It does not come from Rome, and it does not come by the sword. That is why my servants do not fight. It was never a statement that the kingdom is somewhere else.

Pilate’s answer is the most famous question in John: What is truth? (John 18:38).

Who said John 3:16?

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).

It is probably the best-known verse in your Bible. You will often see it printed in red, as words I spoke to a Pharisee named Nicodemus.

Greek manuscripts have no quotation marks. In John 3, my conversation with Nicodemus slides into the narrator’s own reflection, and nobody can say exactly where one ends and the other begins. Some Bibles end my words at verse 15 and print verse 16 as John’s comment. Others carry my words through to verse 21.¹⁴ The red ink in your Bible is a printer’s decision.

Go deeperWhere red-letter Bibles came from

Printing my words in red is a modern custom, little more than a century old.

It began with Louis Klopsch, a German-born publisher who ran a popular religious weekly in New York, The Christian Herald. In 1899, reading the verse in Luke where I tell my friends at supper that the cup is the new covenant in my blood (Luke 22:20), he had the idea of printing my words in the color of blood. His friend the preacher T. De Witt Talmage encouraged him. Klopsch brought out a red-letter New Testament that same year, and a whole red-letter Bible in 1901. Within a few years other publishers, among them Holman and Thomas Nelson, had their own.¹⁵

Readers liked them, and they are still everywhere. But every red-letter Bible rests on a long list of decisions that the Greek does not make for you. Where do my words to Nicodemus end? Should the red include what I say from heaven to Paul in Acts, or the letters I dictate in the visions of Revelation? Should it include the story of the woman caught in adultery, which may not belong in John at all? Different publishers answer differently, and some leave the red out altogether.

So treat the red as a printer’s judgment, not as part of the text. The words in black around it are just as much a part of the story, and sometimes they are the part that tells you what I meant.

Two endings

Read the end of chapter 20. 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 (John 20:30–31).

That is an ending. It sounds like an ending. And then the book starts again, with chapter 21, a fishing scene in Galilee, a breakfast on the shore, and a conversation with Peter.

At the very end of chapter 21, someone writes about the beloved disciple, This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things. We know that his witness is true (John 21:24).

We know. That is someone else talking about the disciple. The book was finished by people who came after him. Most scholars think chapter 21 was added to the gospel, perhaps after the beloved disciple had died.¹⁶

And somewhere along the way, a beloved story was added too: the woman caught in adultery, which is missing from the oldest copies of John. It is a true picture of me. It is not a true part of John.

Go deeperThe story of the woman caught in adultery

Most Bibles print the story between John 7:52 and 8:12. Men bring me a woman caught in adultery and ask whether she should be stoned. I write on the ground with my finger, and then I say, He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her (John 8:7). They leave one by one, and I tell her, Neither do I condemn you. Go your way. From now on, sin no more (John 8:11).

But the story is missing from the oldest copies of John that survive: two papyrus books from around 200, known as Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, and the two great codices of the 300s, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The first Greek copy of John that has it is Codex Bezae, from about 400.¹⁷

The story itself is older than that. Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor in the early 100s, told a story of a woman accused of many sins before me, which may be a form of the same story, and the church historian Eusebius, who reports this, says it was in a book called the Gospel according to the Hebrews. A church handbook from the 200s, the Didascalia, uses the story to urge bishops to be merciful to sinners who repent, without saying where it came from.¹⁸

For a long time it seems to have had no fixed home. Some manuscripts put it after John 7:36, others after 7:44, others at the very end of John, and one family of manuscripts puts it in Luke, after Luke 21:38.¹⁹

By the late 300s it was in the Latin Bible, because Jerome kept it in his translation, the Vulgate, which became the Bible of the Western church. In 415 he wrote that it was found in many Greek and Latin copies. Augustine suggested that some men had cut it out of their copies, afraid that it would give their wives permission to sin.²⁰

Blessed are those who have not seen

In John, the first person to see me after my death is Mary Magdalene, alone, in a garden. She thinks I am the gardener. I say her name, Mary, and she says, Rabboni! which means Teacher (John 20:16).

Then there is Thomas, who would not believe until he could touch the wounds. When he does, I tell him, Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed (John 20:29).

John wrote that for his readers, sixty years later, none of whom had seen me. It was written for you.

Check It Yourself

Look up: John 2:13, John 6:4 and John 11:55.

You will find: three Passovers in John. The other three gospels mention only the last one.

Then compare Mark 14:12 with John 19:14. Which day did I die?

The Short Version

• John is unlike the other three gospels: long speeches about myself, no parables of the usual kind, no exorcisms, three Passovers.
• Most historians think the “I am” speeches are John’s meditation on me, in his own voice.
• John sometimes preserves good history: the pools of Bethesda and Siloam, and possibly the day I died.
• His community had been put out of the synagogue, and his harsh use of “the Jews” has been used against my people ever since.
• His last supper has no bread and cup. It has a towel and a basin.