And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples,
which are not written in this book:
But these are written,
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;
and that believing ye might have life through his name.
John 20:30,31
With the rise of the atheistic and/or agnostic attacks on Scripture....They escalated with John's Gospel...
"All four Gospels in the New Testament tell the story of Jesus, but not in the same way. Each evangelist presents a different portrait of Jesus. The differences among the first three Gospels, however, which report a considerable amount of common traditions about Jesus, are not as significant as the differences between them and John.
Until the mid‑18th century, such differences represented no problem for most Bible interpreters. Being the work of John, the
beloved disciple and a leading figure in the apostolic church, it was generally thought that his account of Jesus was more personal and therefore more authoritative than those of the others. Taking John as the starting point, it was then possible to harmonize the Gospels and so to minimize their differences.
In 1776, however, J. J. Griesbach broke off from such an approach, contending that all four Gospels cannot be treated together. In his synopsis of the Gospels, he ignored the Gospel of John almost completely and simply placed together the parallel accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke for the purpose of comparison.
John’s Gospel came under heavy fire. In the eyes of rationalist Bible scholars, stories like the marriage feast of Cana and the raising of Lazarus could not be true, implying that the fourth evangelist could not have been an eyewitness of the events he describes. One of the first attacks came in 1792 by Edward Evanson, who referred to the miracle in Cana as “incredible” and “unworthy of belief.”
It did not take long for alternative theories to appear. In 1835, D. F. Strauss introduced the term myth to describe the content of John; other terms that were used in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th include idea, philosophy, allegory, and theology.
The notion that John’s Gospel was not history but was written to convey a theological idea found a creative expression in F. C. Baur, in the mid‑19th century. For Baur, John was not an apostolic document, but a post‑Pauline Christian reflection whose purpose was to promote the concept of a unified (Catholic) church.
Rudolf Bultmann in the first half of the 20th century. .......of the historical-critical method, Bultmann’s interpretation of John’s Gospel was devastating:
John’s language, whenever it reflects supernatural categories, was entirely mythological;
it is not to be taken on the historical level as a source of information on the life and teaching of Jesus; its conceptual world was not Jewish, but Gnostic;
the Redeemer that came from heaven was inspired by the Gnostic myth;
the Gospel is not original, but a conflation of several previous documents;
it was not written by a single author,
but was the result of a composition process in which several editors or redactors were involved;
the text as we have it does not make sense, so it needs to be reorganized;
and to be understood, it needs to be demythologized by means of an existential interpretation.
But then things began to change,
and archaeology played an important role in this change.
The first archaeological discovery to impact the interpretation of John’s Gospel was a small fragment of papyrus, known as Rylands Papyrus 457 and listed among the New Testament manuscripts as P52, measuring only 2½ by 3½ inches and containing a few verses from John 18: parts of verses 31 to 33 on the recto, and of verses 37 and 38 on the verso. It is a material evidence that this Gospel was circulating in Egypt already at the beginning of the second century and, as such, it contradicts those theories according to which John was not written until the second half of the second century. This shows, among other things, the inadequacy of Baur’s description of earliest Christianity.
Urban C. von Wahlde indicates that of the 20 Johannine sites, 16 have been identified with certainty: Bethsaida (1:44); Cana (2:1, 11; 4:46‑54; 21:2); Capernaum (2:12; 4:46; 6:17, 24); the harbor (6:24, 25); the synagogue (v. 59); Jacob’s well (4:4‑6); Mount Gerizim (4:20); the location of Sychar (4:5); the Sheep Gate (5:2); the pool(s) of Bethesda (5:2); Tiberias (6:1, 23; 21:2); the pool of Siloam (9:1‑9); Bethany, near Jerusalem (11:1‑17; 12:1‑11); Ephraim (11:54); the Kidron Valley (18:1); the Praetorium (18:28, 33; 19:9); Golgotha (19:17, 18, 20, 41); and the tomb of Jesus (19:41, 42). Of the remaining four, two can be narrowed to within a relatively restricted area: the place in the temple precincts for the keeping of animals (2:13‑16) and the place where Pilate brought Jesus (19:13); the other two are still highly controversial: Aenon near Salim (3:23) and Bethany beyond the Jordan (1:28; 10:40).
In his concluding observations, von Wahlde makes two important statements.
The first is that archaeology has confirmed the remarkable accuracy of the topographical information in John, with a great number of details provided in some instances. As a matter of fact, he says, “It is precisely those places described in the greatest detail,” as in the case of the pools of Bethesda, the place of crucifixion, and the location of Jesus’ tomb, “that can be identified with the greatest certitude.”
The second statement is that there is “no credible evidence to suggest that any of the twenty sites is simply fictitious or symbolic.”
The final discovery to help rescue the reputation of John’s Gospel for historical reliability was the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered in 1947 near Khirbet Qumran, close to the ruins of an ancient Jewish settlement, the scrolls consist of a large number of biblical manuscripts, mostly fragmentary, and of other documents as well. Since they have been shown on the basis of paleography and carbon‑14 tests to date from the period of Christian origins (200 B.C.–A.D. 70), ...The scrolls have made it plain that even before the Christian era there already existed in Palestine a literary setting in which Jewish, Greek, and even pre‑Gnostic religious ideas were combined in a way that once was thought to be unique to John and of the second century onward.
The Dead Sea Scrolls prompted what became known as “the new look on the Fourth Gospel.” This is precisely the title of an article published originally in 1959 by John A. T. Robinson, in which
he questioned five old presuppositions related to the reliability of Johannine tradition that had mostly underlain the Fourth Gospel research in the preceding 50 years.
By explicitly referring to the Dead Sea Scrolls and other archaeological findings that vindicated John’s knowledge of the topography and institutions of Palestine prior to the Jewish war, Robinson spoke of what appeared to him to be straws in the wind, but which he was inclined to take seriously, because all of the straws were blowing in the same direction. Then, at the end of the article he expressed his conviction that Johannine tradition is not the result of a later development, but goes back to the earliest days of Christianity.
Like the Synoptics, the Gospel of John begins with the appearance of John the Baptist and ends with the passion narrative, and everything is within a chronological framework that seems much more complete and accurate than theirs. Already in 1969, Käsemann was impressed by the fact that “John felt himself under constraint to compose a Gospel rather than letters or a collection of sayings” and found this to be detrimental to some of Bultmann’s arguments. “For it seems to me,” he said, “that if one has no interest in the historical Jesus, then one does not write a Gospel, but, on the contrary, finds the Gospel form inadequate.” Moreover, John’s author claims to be a direct eyewitness of at least some of the events he records (21:24; 19:34‑35; cf. 1:14), which strongly emphasizes the importance for him of Jesus as a historical figure.
It is puzzling that though having more archaeological and topographical material than all three Synoptics combined, there are still those who consider John to be entirely non‑historical. In this case, how to account for that material? Where did it come from and why was it included?"
Wilson Paroschi, Ph.D., is Professor of New Testament at the Latin American Adventist Theological Seminary, Brazil Adventist University, São Paulo, Brazil. / ATS
