Speed-Dating A Gospel: A Brief Jaunt Into Technical Stuff

From the Mailbag:

In Monday's post you stated:

         

"John, writing in the first century after Christ (I tend to date the book a bit earlier than most scholars),...."

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"He's (possibly after the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E.) explaining..."

 

Reading these words fills me with happiness. ....But, before I get too happy, I must ask: Do I correctly understand what you have written? ......How much earlier than most scholars would you be willing to date the book? Why? Based on what? Textual clues? Other sources?......Please, share this information with me.

  

Also, do you know of any source or evidence that might support the idea that part of the book was written before the destruction of the temple?... I have always thought that the book was written much earlier than 90 or 95 C.E. but have been unable to find any evidence to support my intuition.

 Good questions! I can't provide evidence to support your intuitions: I don't think there are any smoking guns in dating the gospel of John. 

My preference for an early date really rests mostly on the fact that I'm unpersuaded by the arguments for late dates.  I just think they're based on assumptions that are doubtful.

 (I should say right away for comparison that I tend not to be reactionary on these things: I support a fairly late date for Daniel and a late date for Revelation, certainly after the Neronian persecution and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.)

 For instance, a "high christology" is taken as a mark of a late date, but I just don't think that is supported by either common sense or the evidence.  Paul's christology even in his early epistles couldn't be a lot higher, but really, that argument (from John's "high christology") is rooted in a doubtful understanding of what John's up to and what his capabilities were.  It assumes that christology sort of evolved from a political revolutionary understanding of Jesus in Mark up to "my Lord and my God" of Thomas in John.

 I'm pretty sure that's a defective way to look at the matter.

For starters, John's writing an allegory or myth based on what we might impressionistically call a cosmic understanding of Jesus.  Other scholars more qualified than I am to talk about the matter have suggested similarities (for instance) between John and the Dead Sea Scrolls: I've read the passage from the Rule of the Community: "And by His knowledge, everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, He established by His purpose; and apart from Him nothing is done."  Very resonant of John's understanding of Jesus, and also very first century: if John introduced such language as that of the logos he would have been establishing the evangelical Christian habit of sporting fashions a few decades too late.

But John's gospel owes a great deal to a very significant early first century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher called Philo (died in 50 C.E.).  John's logos project is only limited I think by the lowest date of the intersection of Jesus-stories with Philo.  And I believe that both traveled freely around the Med in the second half of the first century.  As a vision of Jesus-as-Logos, I've yet to read the argument that suggests that must be a late development.  More to the point, I've never understood why a sophisticated allegory needs seventy years to incubate.

A stronger case for a late date would be the anti-Semitism and the apparent references to 70 C.E.  But I think that argument cuts both ways.  I can't see why John doesn't have Jesus being _more_ explicit about the nature of God's "judgment" on the Jews... Unless Jesus is meant allegorically to stand for Judaism at his death, which is a possible reading I haven't thought too hard about but should.

It's quite evident to me that John's gospel might have been heavily redacted after about 90: there is some confusion about the textual tradition (for instance, the "Woman caught in adultery," who doesn't appear in early manuscripts). 

But the core of its composition and its major burden strike me as being perfectly capable of composition within the first forty or fifty years of Jesus' death.