Did John write the gospel of John?

Did John write the gospel of John?

The first four gospels are responsible for giving the world the story of Jesus Christ. However, the book of John supposedly is an eye witness account, the testimony of a man who is allegedly Jesus’ cousin but has never meet him. While reading the book of John I realized that John’s book has some of the same questions that the book of Matthew had open for discussion. Who is the author? Did Matthew write the first gospel and did John write the fourth gospel? In contrast to Matthew, John did not copy any of the other gospels content. Scholars believe that John had a better vantage point than any of the other disciples. More interestingly, in my opinion, is the uncertainty of the beloved John being literate. Bart, on the website http://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-the-gospel-of-john-attributed-to-john/ explains that there was a probability that John could not write. Bart goes on to say that John was a fisherman from rural Galilee.  Fishermen were uneducated.  They were very low class peasants. John would never have gone to school. Being that John would have never gone to school the claim can be made that he couldn’t have written a sophisticated narrative in Greek. This information lead me to believe that there is a narrow chance that a peasant with low cognition could have written the gospel.

 

Education is important for primitive and contemporary writers. So why did an unidentified author slash editor give John of Zebedee credit for writing the gospel of John? If we addressed the question from a Christian perspective we will receive and answer similar to this: Who wrote the Gospel of John is a question that remains unanswered, though noted theologians throughout the ages maintain that it was indeed the disciple John who penned the famous Biblical book. Something to remember is that individuals with this outlook believes that all the content in the bible is factual. However, this traditional perspective isn't enough evidence for me to believe in full that John wrote his gospel book.

 

If you pose the same question to an individual living during the era of King James they would tell you that Shakespeare was the author of this highly questionable text.  In my opinion, the gospel of John couldn’t have been written by John because the text never identifies its author. The only information the gospel allocates about the author is   “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”   Furthermore, we have no proof of the original scripts of the eye witnesses that theologians claim the book belongs to. In my study I found research that supports my beliefs.  Today the majority of scholars do not believe that John or any other eyewitness wrote it and trace it instead to a “Johannine community” which traced its traditions to John; the gospel itself shows signs of having been composed in three “layers”, reaching its final form about 90-100 AD.

 

We may never truly discover who indoctrinated or wrote the gospel of John, any more than we can identify the authors of the books of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The conclusion we can come to is that the book of John is a gospel that has content that is isolated. Yet the other three books have so many parallels that they came to be known as the Synoptic Gospels. Those being so similar create a problem known as the synoptic problem.  John doesn’t have the same details as the other gospels which compel me to wonder if John’s gospel was historical at all. In order to understand religion we have to understand history. Doing my research on the history of John brought me to the discovery that not everything that happened in biblical history was recorded. Possibly this is why the writers of the bible left out who actually wrote John. On the other hand, in my opinion John didn't write the gospel of John because history tells us that he would have been illiterate due to his living conditions at the time. Bart on the website http://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-the-gospel-of-john-attributed-to-john/ claims that low class peasants wouldn't have time for school and even if he did a written novel would be far fetched.

 



John relaxes one hand on his debatable gospel book

In conclusion, someone had to know about the other three gospels to write the gospel of John.  It’s only logical that an eye witness’s story should be presented first to set a foundation for information to come. Without an eye witness account all evidence that is offered is debatable. The gospel of John was last, which leads me to think that the unidentified editor read from some other source prior to writing the fourth gospel. It is also possible that the author of John did not have the same experience as his fellow disciple mark. Consequently the evidence he presented is falsifiable. However, we can only hypothesize on the identity of the author of the book of John. Possibly history can help unveil the truth about who wrote the gospel of John.