Was the Gospel of John written by someone close to Jesus?
Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Church (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) John 5:1–15 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 po