Was the Gospel of John written by someone close to Jesus?
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| Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Archaeology may support the credibility of Luke, but what do scientists say about John, whose Gospel was sometimes questioned because he referred to locations that couldn’t be verified? Some scholars have charged that if he failed to get these basic details straight, then he must not have been close
to the events of Jesus’ life. Some have even speculated that John may have been written well into the second century.
These charges, however, have been turned upside down in recent years.
For example, John 5:1–15 records how Jesus healed an invalid by the Pool of
Bethesda. John provides the detail that the pool was surrounded by five
colonnades. For a long time people cited this as an example of John being
inaccurate, because no such place had been found.
However, in a more recent excavation of the Pool of Bethesda—it lies maybe 40 feet below ground—archaeologists discovered five porticoes, that is, five
colonnaded porches or walkways, exactly as John had described. And there are
other discoveries—the Pool of Siloam from John 9:7, Jacob’s Well from John
4:12, the probable location of the Stone Pavement near the Jaffa Gate where
Jesus appeared before Pilate in John 19:13—all of which have lent historical
credibility to John’s Gospel.
These discoveries challenge the allegation that the Gospel of John was written
by someone distant from Jesus and who lived long after Jesus’ ministry. In
addition to these discoveries, archaeologists have found a fragment of a copy
of John 18 that leading papyrologists have dated between A.D.100 and 150, with the earlier date being preferred. German scholar Adolph Deissman said it
should be dated to the 90s. By establishing that copies of the Gospel of John
existed this early and as far away as Egypt, archaeology has effectively
dismantled speculation that the Gospel was composed well into the second
century, too long after Jesus’ life to be reliable. / Adapted from interviews
with Dr. John McRay
