I have often stated that I believe the Gospel of John is a false gospel, and by that I mean it is not written by the real apostle John, and even more than that, I do not believe it was even written by a Jewish person.
Warning: this one will be longer than most of my messages.
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I think we first have to remember that what started out as a movement within the Jewish people, one where Yeshua was being recognized as anything from a prophet to the Messiah, had originally been (except for a very few exceptions) only within the Jewish population . It wasn’t until about 3-4 years after his resurrection that Shaul (Paul) changed his mind about Yeshua and began to open the path to salvation through Yeshua (now recognized as the Messiah) to the Gentile population throughout the Middle East and Asia. This was a paradigm shift in lifestyle for those Gentiles, and Shaul was bringing them into Torah observance at a pace they could handle.
The problem was that the Jews were rebelling against Roman rule and, as such, the Gentile believers started to get worried that their conversion would target them along with the Jews, so that by the end of the First Century, when most of the original Jewish leaders had been martyred or dead and the majority of Jews who would believe in Yeshua had come and gone, the movement that was Jewish mutated into a new religion called Christianity, which by the middle of the Second Century (after the Jewish rebellion had been put down, once and for all around 132 AD), this new religion was targeted by Rome, anyway, because the one thing Rome hated more than rebellion was a religion other than their own in one of their territories.
Okay, so now we have the historical background to support why this Jewish movement was moving away from Judaism by the time John wrote his gospel.
According to scholars, John was exiled to Patmos around 93 AD, spent anywhere from 18 months to 3 years there, then was released and eventually returned to Ephesus, He died there around 100 AD at the approximate age of 92. He wrote about his vision of the Apocalypse while on Patmos, but his gospel wasn’t written until after he returned to Ephesus.
According to scholars, the three narrative gospels were each written sometime within 40 years or so of Yeshua’s death and resurrection around 30 AD: Mark wrote his gospel around 70 AD, Matthew and Luke were written around 80-85 AD.
Now what is funny here is that when you look up when Matthew was supposed to have died, it is sometime between 68-70 AD, some 10-15 years before he was supposed to have written his gospel! And if the other gospels were written within 40 years or so of the resurrection, why did John wait over 60 years?
I contend that no one really knows when the gospels were written, they only have guesses. And we know that many times scribes would write letters from notes made by someone, signing that person’s name. This is suspected to have been done with a number of Shaul’s (Paul) letters.
(You can check that out in the teaching series I have written regarding the Epistles- here is a link to that series of teachings: the Epistles.)
So, with these questionable issues about any and all of the gospels, let me go into some of the reasons I feel that John is not a valid gospel, at all, and written by a Gentile using the name of John.
One reason is that he doesn’t write about the Torah or the Jews correctly. What I mean is that a Jew would never call the people “the Jews”, which John does nearly 60 times throughout this gospel; to a Jew, the other Jews are “the people”. And a Jew would never, ever refer to the Torah as “their Torah”, which John does in his gospel.
Another reason I doubt the validity of John is because it fails the test of Hermeneutics, which is the exegesis tool that says every part of the Bible should not contradict any other part of the Bible, since it was all (allegedly) inspired by God, who never changes.
How John fails this test is, for one, where he refers to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). The other three gospels are clear that Yeshua says he has come only for the children of Israel (Matthew 15:24) and explicitly says to his disciples not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (Matthew 16:20, Mark 8:30, and Luke 9:21), yet here in John he not only tells this Samaritan woman he is the Messiah (failing to match what the other gospels said), but he stays in her town and teaches there for 2 days (again, totally against what Yeshua says in the other gospels)!
And when it comes to the idea of the Trinity (which arguments for or against will not be part of this discussion), almost every justification for saying Yeshua is also God comes only from John’s gospel. Nowhere in any of the other Gospels does Yeshua even hint that he is God. And I also will go as far as to say the miracle of making wine from water (John 2) is designed specifically to show that Mary has some level of authority over Yeshua!
Think about it: the Roman Catholic Church (which was the only church until about 1054) has constantly had people pray to Mary to intervene with Jesus. This miracle indicates that she has that power, since he first said he didn’t want to do anything, but she went ahead and had him do it, anyway. And another thing: every miracle that Yeshua performed in the other three gospels had to do with healing of one sort or another- but in John he makes wine from water for a party! Why? I believe it is only to indicate the authority that Mary has over Yeshua and within the Catholic Church.
Another thing about John is that the writing is stylistically not “Jewish”. Even as confusing as Shaul’s letters are, John is full of double-talk and overly spiritualized metaphor that makes it almost impossible to tell when Yeshua is talking literally or figuratively.
I am Jewish and understand Jewish logic, which is that we Jews will tell you everything something is not before we tell you what it is, but John is written so confusingly that you don’t know what is real and what is not:
If you know me you know him, but you don’t know him so you can’t know me, and that is why you don’t know me because you don’t know him, yadda-yadda-yadda…
One last thing, and I appreciate anyone who has stayed with me this long: by the end of the First Century, the one thing that the Jews and (now called) Christians had in common was this: neither side wanted any more Jews joining this movement. Even Shaul recognized this shift by stating that the Jews will no longer accept Yeshua until the time of the Gentiles is over (Romans 11:25).
By the time John was supposed to have been written, already Christianity was separating itself from its Jewish beginnings by changing the Shabbat to Sunday (Ignatius of Antioch proclaimed that around 98 AD) and by the time of Tertullian’s influential writings (which, for the record, is where the term “trinity” originated) in the middle of the Second Century, Christianity had changed from a Jewish movement inviting Gentiles to a totally new Gentile religion that rejected the Jews and “their” Torah.
John’s gospel is written in a way that would turn-off any self-respecting Jew from even wanting to hear anything more about Yeshua. That is how I was raised, as many Jews have been for millennia, being taught that Jesus was a Jew but turned against Judaism and created Christianity.
Of course, that is untrue- Yeshua was, and still is, Jewish but he did not create Christianity! Men did, and they did so by misusing the letters Shaul wrote and doing everything they could to keep Jews from wanting to know anything about this new godhead of theirs called Jesus Christ.
And that is why I believe, for the reasons stated above, this so-called gospel was written by a Gentile leader of the new religion called Christianity designed specifically to keep Jews away and to further separate this new religion from its Jewish roots.
Thank you for staying through this, and I am sure it is very uncomfortable for many, especially Gentiles, to hear what I am saying. I am not telling anyone to change what they believe, only what I believe and why- you make up your own minds.
That’s it for today so L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!