The Johannine Question by Martin Hengel

I recently finished reading Richard Bauckham's The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple. Throughout, he referred to Martin Hengel's book, The Johannine Question, so I thought I should give it a read. Excellent decision on my part, if I do say so. Hengel is arguably the premier scholar of our time when it comes to Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins, and his work on the authorship/background of John is excellent.

There are two major opinions with regard to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. The conservative position, held by Carson, Keener, Kostenberger, and others, is that John the son of Zebedee (or someone close to him) wrote/edited the gospel. The more progressive position, held by (the deceased) Raymond Brown and others, is that the author(s) are unknown and that the Fourth Gospel and Epistles of John tell us more about a "Johannine" community than they do about Jesus. There are, of course, mediating positions, but these two extremes are the most common views.

Hengel offers another solution to the question, namely that "John the elder," a mysterious figure mentioned by Papias (as quoted by Eusebius) wrote the Gospel and that over time he was confused with the more prominent John the son of Zebedee. According to Hengel, John the elder was a young man during the ministry of Jesus, taught in Ephesus after the resurrection, wrote the Fourth Gospel, I, II, and III John (and perhaps Revelation), and was one of the last eyewitnesses to pass away (probably at an old age). Bauckham follows this theory and adds that perhaps John the elder was a disciple of John the son of Zebedee, further adding to the historical confusion.

In my opinion, the best part of Hengel's book is his evaluation of the more "liberal" views that the Fourth Gospel is a cut-and-paste collection of anecdotes put together by a series of redactors over a long period of time. Hengel shows that this is extremely unlikely. However, I wish he had interacted more with the more conservative position. The only discussion that I saw in the book was an allusion in a footnote to a tradition that John the son of Zebedee was martyred at a young age (before the Fourth Gospel could have been written) and a reference to a 1962 JBL article written by P. Parker.

I wasn't convinced by Hengel's arguments that "John the elder" wrote the Gospel. It seems to me that if John was prominant enough in the church to have produced 4 or 5 books of the New Testament canon, more steps would have been taken to distinguish him from John the son of Zebedee. The early church went to great lengths to distinguish between James the brother of Jesus and James the son of Zebedee, and between the numerous guys named "Judas." It seems odd that this guy John the elder would fall off of the historical map. (Note also the distinction in the Synoptics between John the Baptist and John the son of Zebedee. If it weren't for the latter John, perhaps John the Baptist would just be known as "John.")

After reading The Community of the Beloved Disciple by Raymond Brown, Life in Abundance: Studies in John's Gospel in Tribute to Raymond Brown edited by John R. Donahue, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple by Richard Bauckham, and The Johannine Question by Martin Hengel, I am pretty convinced that there is good reason to attribute the Fourth Gospel to John the son of Zebedee.

The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple by Richard Bauckham

I just finished reading The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John by Richard Bauckham. Great book. I like Richard Bauckham because he is not afraid to think outside of the scholarly concensus. He offers fresh looks at old issues and makes you walk away thinking, "Now I don't know what I believe."

Case in point, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple pretty much deconstructs the scholarly concensus on reading the Gospel of John. I just finished reading two books based on Raymond Brown's interpretation of John. Raymond Brown's two volumes on John in the Anchor Bible Commentary, followed by his volume on the Epistles of John in the same series and his book, The Community of the Beloved Disciple, revolutionized the way scholars read John. Bauckham's book refutes a lot of the conclusions drawn by Brown and others.

In an essay titled "The Gospel of John: The Legacy of Raymond E. Brown and Beyond" (included in Life in Abundance: Studies of John's Gospel in Tribute to Raymond E. Brown) Francis Maloney says that the major issues in current Johannine theology are: (1) the religious environment forming the background of the Gospel, (2) the Johannine community, (3) the possibility of redaction criticism of the Gospel, (4) Johannine christology and the historical Jesus, (5) creativity in John, (6) canonical criticism of the Gospel, (7) characterization, (8) symbolism, (9) (postmodern) hermeneutics and (10) interaction with a wider range of scholarship. Bauckham deals with the first 8 of these directly. He argues that the closest literary genre to the Gospels is the ancient bios, roughly similar (yet with important differenences) to the modern biography. He adds that a "two-level" reading of John is methodologically suspect because there exists in history no literary genre dedicated to that sort of function. Further, he says that there is no historical evidence for a sectarian "Johannine community," and that the evidence from the Gospel itself suggests that it was intended to be read by a wide audience. Finally, he argues that "the beloved disciple" is not presented as an ideal disciple, but as an ideal eye-witness, strenthening the Gospel's claim to be real history. (Baukham also deals with other issues in addition to these.)

The major strength of Baukham's book is that it restores credibility to the idea that John contains real history. As I prepare for my upcoming sermon series on John, I am still going to use Raymond Brown's commentary (and probably those of Francis Maloney, Craig Keener, and D.A. Carson), but I will be more aware of some of its shortcomings. Brown had some revolutionary ideas, many of which have been validated by further research, but some of which have been shown to be questionable. I appreciate the red flags raised by Richard Bauckham.