What group of Christians produced the Gospel of John? That is a question addressed by the historical-critical field of Gospel community studies. In their quest to reconstruct the world behind biblical texts, critical historians have tried to understand the different Christian communities that produced the canonical Gospels. They have been especially interested in John's Gospel because of how different it is from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In this post, we will survey the fascinating topic of the Johannine community. We will see how experts detect evidence of the community in the Gospel, what reconstructions scholars have proposed, and what critics of the theories have said.
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Footnotes
1. For the two-level reading of John, see J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).
2. John 9:1-41, KJV
3. For a discussion of the blind man and the exclusion of the Jewish Christians from the synagogue, see Martyn, 35-68.
4. For Raymond Brown's reconstruction of the Johannine community, see Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
5. For the alternative view, see The Gospels for All Christians, ed. Richard Bauckham (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998).
6. To see Klink's discussion of the Johannine community, see Edward W. Klink III, The Sheep of the Fold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
