[2] Anderson's Glasgow thesis on The Christology of the Fourth Gospel (1996, 1997, 2010) found diachronic theories of John's composition insufficient in terms of stylistic, contextual, and theological evidence; and because 85% of its material is distinctive, with none of the contacts with other gospels being identical or verbatim, John's tradition is not derivative from Synoptic traditions.
Anderson's monograph thus identified four sources of John's theological tensions: the dialectical thinking of the evangelist, the Jewish agency schema (Deut.
(1) In terms of composition, Anderson follows Lindars and Ashton inferring a basic two-edition theory, seeing John's first edition as the second gospel narrative constructed (ca.
These dialectical engagements within the emerging Johannine situation are largely sequential but somewhat overlapping, as issues never totally disappear but are displaced by more acute crises.
Anderson has criticized the views of New Testament scholar Hugo Mendez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) who believes that the "beloved disciple" in the Gospel of John is a fictional character created by the evangelist to claim proximity with Jesus.
Anderson has countered this claim, stating that the beloved disciple was an actual historical figure in Jesus's following.
[7] This calls for a Fourth Quest for Jesus, in Anderson's view, as the first three have programmatically excluded John from the mix, and problematically so.
[13] On Anderson's work reassessing and challenging the traditional view that the Gospel of John features anti-Semitic tendencies, R. Alan Culpepper writes that "In a tour de force Paul Anderson challenges widely held understandings of the gospel and proposes a reassessment of its relationship to its Jewish setting.