Is the Gospel of John Historical?
The Peculiarity of the Fourth Gospel
Welcome to the third post in a series on basic scholarly issues in New Testament studies guided by Nijay Gupta's book A Beginner’s Guide to New Testament Studies: Understanding Key Debates (2020) published by Baker Academic. Be sure to click and check out the previous posts:
Some Unique Elements of John
When we compare the Synoptics to the Gospel of John, we know there are differences but it’s not always easy to articulate them. There are at least eight elements that make the Gospel of John unique.
Beginnings
Perhaps the most well-known and unique element of the Gospel is the open words of its prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Compared to the Synoptics, the Gospel begins with the pre-existent Word of God who became flesh and tabernacled with humans. This Gospel begins its narrative about Jesus Christ by echoing Genesis 1.
Miracles
In John’s account, there are seven specific miracles, or “signs” as the writer calls them, that the writer draws attention to and which culminate toward Jesus’ resurrection. In the Synoptics, there are many miracles but they aren’t as selective to certain ones and some of them are only in John’s account (e.g., Lazarus’ resurrection in chapter 11).
Belief
The signs in John are meant to lead one to belief (pistis) in Jesus (e.g., John 11:15), whereas the Synoptics generally call for faith before Jesus’ miracles (e.g., Mark 5:34).
Teachings
We don’t see Jesus teaching many parables like in the Synoptics, but we get extensive and distinctive teaching blocks, such as those found in the Farewell Discourse in chapters 13-17.
Concepts
Perhaps one of the other well-known elements of the Gospel is the language of eternal life rather than the language of the “kingdom of God/heaven.” Belief and love are other examples of unique concepts in John’s account.
Sphere of Ministry
In the Synoptics, Jesus spends significant time ministering in Galilee and then turns toward Jerusalem which signals the beginning of the Passion narratives. But in John’s account, Jesus goes to Jerusalem at least three different times to celebrate major Jewish feasts and events; thus why many scholars see this as evidence of Jesus’ ministry lasting approximately three years.
Enemies
John uniquely refers to Jesus’ antagonists as “the Jews,” which can typically refer to religious leaders like scribes and Pharisees, but perhaps also Sadducees, Herodians, chief priests, etc. John also has Jesus referring to a more cosmic enemy, “the ruler of this world” (Jn 13:30). Often, “the Jews” are seen to be in league with this antagonistic cosmic power.
Christology
For the most part, the Synoptics don’t have Jesus making explicit statements about his identity, particularly his divine identity. However, in John’s account Jesus says that “The Father and I are on” (Jn 10:30) and that “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Moreover, Jesus’ fourteen “I am” (ego eimi) statements are divine self-disclosures that seem to deliberately echo Yahweh’s self-disclosure to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3.
So that’s a quick appetizer of how John’s gospel account is set apart from the Synoptics. But this hasn’t stopped scholars from asking the same sort of historical questions of John as have been asked of the Synoptics. Importantly, questions of historicity, sources, influences, aims, etc. have generally produced scholarship that divides into two broad camps.
A Tale of Two Camps
John is Historical
The first camp would say that John’s gospel account is historical and generally meant to be so, rather than a purely theological or mythic presentation of Jesus. John presents a unique historical account that differs in major ways from the Synoptics, but it’s historically useful nonetheless.
Logic and History
Its usefulness and reliability bear out in the logic and history presented in the Gospel. As a devout Jew, Jesus would celebrate the major feasts and events in Jerusalem throughout the Jewish year. While John might have unique content within Jesus’ extensive teaching blocks, this is the way Jesus also teaches in Matthew, for example, which tells us that this is probably how the historical Jesus taught. Historical figures like Caiaphas, Pointus Pilate, and others also speak to the Gospel’s historicity.
Alternative Traditions
Recalling the theories of literary-dependence with the Synoptic Problem, most scholars affirm Markan priority which means Mark was historically written first and one of the main sources for Matthew and Luke. We can consider Mark a main tradition upon which the Synoptics relied. Paul Anderson helps us see John as another main Gospel tradition, a Johannine tradition. Thus, we can think of two main, but non-competing, Gospel traditions in the New Testament.
Genre
Another point to consider when asking whether John’s Gospel account is historical is to ask another important question: what kind of literature is John’s account? For that matter, what kind of literature are the Gospels more generally? Answering this question directly affects how we read it and consider the question of historicity. We read a newspaper or news article differently than a sci-fi novel or the lyrics of a song or poem. Richard Burridge sees that all the Gospels generally read like a Greco-Roman biography. Often, the Gospels are categorically given a genre like ‘history’ or ‘myth’. First, ‘history’ is usually meant in the modern historiographical sense, not in the ancient historiographical sense. Greco-Roman biography, in particular, was considered historically credible and reliable, and yet the writers had “artistic license…to carry certain thematic threads through the person’s life or develop their narrative into a coherent and inspiring story.”1
While John’s account perhaps does this more so than the Synoptics, it doesn’t ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’, as it were, and toss out history altogether. The reality is
All four Gospels appear to frame their works as biographies of Jesus, with theological agendas, and with varying degrees of “freedom” to narrate, theologize, and provide an interpretation or explanation of what appear to be parts of the source traditions.2
John is NOT Historical
So, what about the camp that doesn’t view John’s account as historical? This view can be traced back to the early church theologian Cyril of Alexandria who called John’s account a “spiritual Gospel.”3 The idea was that John’s account wasn’t necessarily trying to be “historical” so much as a rich spiritual and theological account that was written to provide exegetical and doctrinal interpretation of Christ’s life and ministry. It’s not obvious that this means that Cyril and other early theologians disregarded John’s account as historical in some sense but that they saw a clear difference compared to the Synoptics that suggested to them that John wrote his Gospel with a very different, ahistorical, purpose and intention. Different scholars take this notion differently and offer a variety of arguments with the general tenor that John’s account is not historical.
Before the 1930s, the assumption was that John’s account was literarily dependent on the Synoptics. In 1938, P. Gardner Smith suggested that it wasn’t literarily dependent. His argument set the stage for subsequent research into John’s account being not historical. Rudolf Bultmann wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John that essentially claimed that John embedded the Gospel into a Greek Gnostic redeemer mythology. John Ashton sees John as deliberately incorporating apocalyptic elements into his account. J. Louis Martyn sees John as a drama on two levels that fuse: first, Jewish synagogues created major tensions for the Johannine community and the Gospel reflects this; but second, this level fuses with those he intended to read his Gospel as a way to address their social circumstances. One of the more radical views in this camp comes from Maurice Casey who claimed that the Gospel cannot be historical given its clear anti-Jewish bias.
To be clear, these views don’t all explicitly deny the historical elements of the Gospel, but there’s no use in studying it from a historical Jesus perspective given its lack of concern for chronology and, perhaps primarily, for its heavy spiritual tone and blatant artistic license in transmitting the Gospel. For these reasons, the Jesus Seminar was not able to trace anything back to the historical Jesus in the Gospel of John.
John as Testimony
Are these camps forever staunched in their views? What progress has been made on this issue? Well, Richard Bauchkaum has provided some important work in the area of seeing the Gospels, even John’s account, as testimony. For him, the Gospels are fundamentally, and historiographically, eyewitness testimony of the life, ministry, and message of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the kind of history the Gospels are and they invite readers to either trust or distrust their testimony. This is a key feature of the Gospels and what the first-century readers would have expected and understood. Rather than bifurcating the Gospel of John, for example, into either a concern for whether it’s historical or not, Bauckham comments that
Testimony offers us, I wish to suggest, both a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as history, and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.4
Bauchham concludes his chapter on the Gospel of John this way:
The concurrence of historiographic and theological concepts of witness in John’s Gospel is wholly appropriate to the historical uniqueness of the subject matter, which as historical requires historiographic rendering but in its disclosure of God also demands that the witness to it speak of God. In this Gospel we have the idiosyncratic testimony of a disciple whose relationship to the events, to Jesus, was distinctive and different. It is a view from outside the circles from which other Gospel traditions largely derive, and it is the perspective of a man who was deeply but distinctively formed by his own experience of the events.5
Conclusion
The historical Jesus perspective of John has made scholarship on the Gospel very concerned about sources and authorship, but this might be a dead end according to Nijay because the Synoptics suffer the same problem. So, Nijay believes that
For the present and future, what appears to be more promising is further engagement on genre and the communicative or rhetorical aims of the author.6
This is in part due to the promising work of Bauckham and Harold Attridge. Attridge, particularly, views John’s account as a biography but also wants to attend to the blending of various genres in the final form of the text. For Attridge, there’s a special and dramatic encounter with God in Jesus that the writer of John’s Gospel masterfully creates through genre-blending. He imagines the writer’s intentions as such:
“I am not going to offer you a simply historicizing account; historical recollection is not where you encounter God. I am going to offer you a dramatic encounter with the Divine Word itself; through my words you will be brought face to face with One who will change your life!”7
Despite scholars being committed to this tale of two camps, whether John’s account is historical or not, according to Nijay, paying more attention to the work of Attridge, and indeed Bauckham, seems like the most promising and fruitful path for studying the uniqueness of the Gospel of John.
Gupta, 36. And to be honest, this is still true in modern biographies (the various kinds of biographies of Abraham Lincoln are one clear example).
Ibid.
Eusebius: The Church History 6.14, trans. and comm. by Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2007), 199.
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), Kindle Edition, 5.
Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 411.
Gupta, 38.
Harold Attridge, “The Gospel of John: Genre Matters?,” in The Gospel of John as Genre Mosaic, ed. Kasper Bro Larsen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 32.