Authorship of the Johannine works
[11] In the case of Revelation, many modern scholars agree that it was written by a separate author, John of Patmos, c. 95, with some parts possibly dating to Nero's reign in the early 60s.
Bruce Metzger stated "One finds in Clement's work citations of all the books of the New Testament with the exception of Philemon, James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.
Irenaeus says that these persons tried to suppress the teaching about the Holy Spirit in order to put down Montanism, and as a result denied the authorship of the Gospel and its authority.
6), we note the appearance in Italy-Rome of two representatives of this latter school who especially treasure the Fourth Gospel – namely Ptolemy and Heracleon (Hillolytus Ref.
To be sure, Justin's disciple Tatian placed the Gospel of John on the same level as the synoptics, but he also broke with the church on account of profound differences in faith – poisoned, so Irenaeus thought, by the Valentinians and Marcion (AH 1.
[32] The following table shows the number of times various church fathers cited John compared to the synoptic gospels.
[38] The Fourth Gospel may also have been written later as it was penned for a smaller group within the Johannine community, and was not circulated widely until a later date.
Scholars such as Wellhausen, Wendt, and Spitta have argued that the fourth gospel is a Grundschrift or a, "..work which had suffered interpolation before arriving at its canonical form; it was a unity as it stood.
"[45] Walter Bauer opened the modern discussion on John with his book Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum.
However, critical scholars have suggested some other possibilities, as it was common at the time to forge documents in someone else's name, or attribute anonymous works already in circulation to a famous person, for credibility.
Hugh J. Schonfield, in the controversial The Passover Plot (1965) and other works, saw evidence that the source of this Gospel was the Beloved Disciple of the Last Supper and further that this person, perhaps named John, was a senior Temple priest and so probably a member of the Sanhedrin.
This would account for the knowledge of and access to the Temple which would not have been available to rough fishermen and followers of a disruptive rural preacher from the Galilee, one who was being accused of heresy besides, and probably for the evanescent presence of the Beloved Disciple in the events of Jesus' Ministry.
[53] Schonfield agrees that the Gospel was the product of the Apostle's great age, but further identifies him as the Beloved Disciple of the Last Supper, and so believes that the Gospel is based on first hand witness, though decades later and perhaps through the assistance of a younger follower and writer, which may account for the mixture of Hebraicisms (from the Disciple) and Greek idiom (from the assistant).
[citation needed] Filson, Sanders, Vernard Eller, Rudolf Steiner, and Ben Witherington suggest Lazarus, since John 11:3 and 11:36 specifically indicates that Jesus "loved" him.
While evidence regarding the author is slight, some scholars believe this gospel developed from a school or Johannine circle working at the end of the 1st century, possibly in Ephesus.
[citation needed] Raymond E. Brown, among others, posit a community of writers rather than a single individual that gave final form to the work.
He hypothesized a Gnostic origin (specifically Mandaeanism which maintains that Jesus was a mšiha kdaba or "false prophet,") for the work.
He claimed that the many contrasts in the Gospel, between light and darkness, truth and lies, above and below, and so on, show a tendency toward dualism, explained by the Gnostic roots of the work.
[citation needed] Several of the hymns, presumed to come from a community of Essenes, contained the same sort of plays between opposites – light and dark, truth and lies – which are themes within the Gospel.
[citation needed] The resulting revolution in Johannine scholarship was termed the new look by John A. T. Robinson, who coined the phrase in 1957 at Oxford.
He considered a group of disciples around the aging John the Apostle who wrote down his memories, mixing them with theological speculation, a model that had been proposed as far back as Renan's Vie de Jésus ("Life of Jesus," 1863).
In the words of Amos Wilder, the works share "a combination of simplicity and elevation which differs from the flexible discourse of Paul and from the more concrete vocabulary and formal features of the Synoptic Gospels.
"[65] Starting with Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, however, and continuing with C. H. Dodd, some scholars have maintained that the epistle and the gospel were written by different authors.
However, modern scholars have argued that Eusebius made this conclusion based on a misinterpretation of a statement from Papias and a desire to invent a second John to be the author of Revelation.
[79] This identification, however, was denied by other Fathers, including Dionysius of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen, and John Chrysostom.
[82] A work of Epiphanius of Salamis records a Presbyter of Rome named Gaius who fiercely condemns Cerinthus, a Gnostic, and accuses Cerinthus of "lyingly introducing portents to us, supposedly shown him by angels, saying that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be on earth and that again the flesh dwelling in Jerusalem will be the subject of desires and pleasures.
It goes into more detail, saying that in this view, Cerinthus was a libertine who was a "lover of the body and quite carnal", and he wrote the book as wish fulfillment wherein the saints would enjoy similar fleshly pleasures in the future.
[86] Mainstream scholars conclude that the author did not also write the Gospel of John because of wide differences in eschatology, language, and tone.
There are differing motifs between the book and the Gospel: use of allegory, symbolism, and similar metaphors, such as "living water", "shepherd", "lamb", and "manna".
The Book of Revelation does not go into several typically Johannine themes, such as light, darkness, truth, love, and "the world" in a negative sense.
