John's Gospel and The Early Fathers

Early Church Father on Who Wrote John

Justin Martyr

In the memoirs [=Gospels], which I say have been composed by the apostles and those who followed them…¹

Irenaeus of Lyons

Then [after the publication of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke] John, the disciple of the Lord, who had even rested on his breast, himself also gave forth the Gospel, while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.²

Muratorian Canon of Rome, nos. 9–16

The fourth of the Gospels is that of John, [one] of the disciples. To his fellow disciples and bishops, who had been urging him [to write], he said, “Fast with me today for three days, and what will be revealed to each one let us tell it to one another.” In the same night it was revealed to Andrew, [one] of the apostles, that John should write down all things in his own name while all of them should review it.³

Clement of Alexandria

Of all those who had been with the Lord only Matthew and John left us their recollections (hypomnēmata ), and tradition says that they took to writing perforce…. John, it is said, used all the time a message which was not written down, and at last took to writing for the following cause. The three gospels which had been written down before were distributed to all including himself; it is said he welcomed them and testified to their truth but said that there was only lacking to the narrative the account of what was done by Christ at first and at the beginning of the preaching…. They say accordingly that John was asked to relate in his own gospel the period passed over in silence by the former evangelists.⁴

Tertullian of Carthage

We lay it down as our first position, that the evangelical Testament has apostles for its authors…. Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instill faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards.⁵

Another John?

In recent years, some scholars have proposed a new theory about who wrote the Gospel. According to this view, the Gospel was not written by John the apostle but by another disciple named “John”: the so-called “John the Elder.”⁶ Now, it is true that the letters we know as 2 and 3 John are attributed to “the elder” (2 John 1; 3 John 1), and that they sound a lot like the Gospel of John. And it is also true that some fourth-century church fathers such as Eusebius of Caesarea believed that the book of Revelation was not written by John the apostle , but by another man named “John the Elder.”⁷ Yet none of the early church fathers—including Irenaeus—ever claims that this “other John” wrote the Fourth Gospel.⁸ Even Eusebius makes it quite clear that the Gospel of John was written by one of the “the apostles” (Eusebius, Church History , 3.39.5). In other words, although there was some debate among the church fathers about who wrote 2 and 3 John and the book of Revelation, there was no debate about the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of John.⁹

Early Church Father on When John Was Written

Once again, when it comes to the question of date, there is some disagreement. On the one hand, the earliest witnesses—Irenaeus, the Muratorian Canon, and Clement—claim that the Gospel of John was published after the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. On the other, Tertullian claims that the Gospels of Matthew and John were “prior” to Luke and Mark (see Tertullian, Against Marcion , 4.5). In either case, the Fathers agree that the Gospel was written while the apostle John was still alive.

Early Church Father on Why John Was Written

According to the earliest Fathers, there were two main reasons. First, according to several Fathers, the Gospel of John was written to supplement the information about Jesus contained in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 36 Second, and perhaps even more important, the Gospel of John was written to defend the divinity of Jesus against the teachings of a man named Cerinthus and a group known as the Ebionites, both of whom denied that Jesus was divine.¹⁰ In the words of Irenaeus:

Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 3.11.1–2

John, the disciple of the Lord, preaches this faith, and seeks, by the proclamation of the Gospel, to remove that error which by Cerinthus had been disseminated among men…. According to the opinion of no one of the heretics was the Word of God made flesh…. Therefore the Lord’s disciple, pointing them all out as false witnesses, says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” [John 1:14].¹¹

Early Church Father on How Was the Gospel of John Written

In this regard, it is fascinating to note that some church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, describe the apostle John as “simple…in speech” and having “neither the knowledge nor the desire to represent the teachings of the Master in persuasive or artistic language” (see Eusebius, Church History , 3.24.1–7). This dovetails with what we saw in the last chapter about Peter and John being described as “uneducated” or “illiterate” (Acts 4:13). On the other hand, John’s apparent simplicity does not mean he wasn’t the author of the Gospel. In fact, one ancient Christian text claims that the Gospel was dictated by John to a secretary:

Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel of John, Recension 2

This Gospel therefore, written after the Apocalypse, was also given to the churches in Asia by John while still living in the flesh, as the bishop of Hierapolis, Papias by name, a dear disciple of John, has related in his “exoteric,” that is, in [his] last five books, who wrote out this Gospel, John dictating it to him.¹²

Footnotes

1. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho , 103.8 (author’s translation). Although some scholars claim that Justin did not know the Gospel of John, Stanton, Jesus and Gospel , 76, rightly points out that (1) Justin implies that there were four Gospels and that at least two of these were written by “apostles” and (2) elsewhere Justin clearly quotes the Gospel of John 3:3. See Justin Martyr, 1 Apology , 61.4: “For Christ also said, ‘Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ ” ↩︎

2. Cited in Eusebius, Church History , 5.8; compare Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 3.1.1. ↩︎

3. Translated in Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament , 305–7. ↩︎

4. Cited in Eusebius, Church History , 3.24.1-13. ↩︎

5. Tertullian, Against Marcion , 4.2., trans. ANF, 3.347. ↩︎

6. See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses , 438–68, following Martin Hengel, The Johannine Question , trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1990). Note that Bauckham and Hengel’s view is different from that of Pope Benedict, who holds that “the ‘presbyter’ John” is “evidently not the same as the Apostle.” Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth , 1.226. ↩︎

7. See Eusebius, Church History , 3.39.1–8. ↩︎

8. Bauckham’s attempt to make Irenaeus’s repeated references to the author of the Gospel as John “the apostle” refer to someone other than the son of Zebedee is unconvincing in large part because it fails to explain the presence of the Beloved Disciple with the twelve at the Last Supper. See Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses , 461–63. ↩︎

9. See Joel Elowsky, John , 2 vols., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament IVa–b (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006–2007), 1.xxvii: it was “the consensual understanding among the ancient exegetes that John the apostle and disciple of Jesus was the author of the Gospel.” ↩︎

10. See Anti-Marcionite Prologue to John 2; Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 9, cited in Orchard and Riley, The Order of the Synoptic Gospels , 204–5. ↩︎

11. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies , 3.11.1–2, trans. ANF, 1.426–27. For more on Cerinthus, see also Irenaeus, Against Heresies , 1.26; 3.3, 11; Eusebius, Church History , 3.38.2; Epiphanius, Against Heresies , 28. ↩︎

12. Translated in Orchard and Riley, The Order of the Synoptics , 151. ↩︎