The various positions and arguments can get tedious and complex. And it may be that absolute certainty is unattainable. For those that may be interested and willing to deal with some of the technicalities and minutia, I recommend John A. T. Robinson's book, Redating the New Testament. This book, on the basis that the fall of Jerusalem is never mentioned in the New Testament writings as a past fact, argues that ALL the books of the New Testament were written before 70AD. Also by the same author, The Prioity of John argues compellingly for the primitiveness and therefore the Hebraic paradigm of John's Gospel.

 

Without going into a lot of detail; before reading this book, I had already arrived at the position that John's Gospel was written before 70AD. I based it in part on John 5:2:

 

Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porticoes.

 

Spoken in the present tense as if Jerusalem was not a heap of ruins. Robinson says,

 

"This is one of John's topographical details that have been strikingly confirmed in recent study. Not only does it reveal a close acquaintance with Jerusalem before 70, when the evidence of the five porches was to be buried beneath the rubble only recently to be revealed by the archaeologist's spade; but John says not 'was' but 'is'...The natural inference...is that he is writing when the building he describes is still standing."

 

There is great and accurate detail concerning pre-70 Second Temple Judaism, as well as the topography of Jerusalem and the surrounding environs, and a detailed understanding of the nuances of the political situation, especially in John's narrative of Jesus' trial. This detail and nuance would be missed by Gentile readers - as it is to this day - yet is not explained at all. The writer assumes his readers understand his terms without explanation; Greeks, the Jews, Galileans, Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, the Sanhedrin, etc. - and I reiterate that ALL these terms refer to Jews of one group or another.

 

This put together with all the material previously covered compellingly leads one to a pre-70 date. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, the relevance of the Jewish issues and categories of thought (working on the Sabbath, who is the Messiah, is Jesus THE prophet? being put out of the synagogue, etc) which permeate this Gospel basically go away. The split between Judaism and Christianity, which up to that time was seen as a Jewish sect,  renders much of John unintelligible to Gentile readers, who eisegete their own paradigm into it (e.g. understanding "the Jews" to be generic and "Greeks" to be Gentiles rather than dispersed Jews or taking "sheep not of this fold" to be Gentiles rather than dispersed Jews - and, of course, the biggie - understanding "logos" from a Greek philosophical paradigm rather than an Old Testament Hebraic paradigm).

 

I previously mentioned Unger's entry for "logos"; "...studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls have led a number of scholars to the conclusion that the background of John is Jewish rather than Hellenistic." On this subject Robinson says,

 

"The more recent evidence...from the Qumran scrolls and the Gnostic library at Chenoboskion, has merely had the effect of undermining the grounds for putting John late. The Qumran material comes from the heart of southern Palestine before the Jewish war. Though certainly not suggesting or establishing any direct contact with or influence upon John, it has killed any dogmatism that the fundamental Johannine categories must be Hellenistic and must be late. Equally study of the new Gnostic material has served to demonstrate the gulf rather than the similarities between the fourth gospel and the second-century Gnostic systems."

 

F.M. Cross in The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies says,

 

Some have suggested  that John may be regarded no longer as the latest and most evolved of the Gospels, but the most primitive, and that the formative locus of its tradition was Jerusalem before its destruction. (p.161)

 

CONCLUSION

 

John was writing to non-believing Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The fact that there is no hint of actual war between Judea and the Romans would indicate a date before 66 - that was when the war began that resulted in the destruction of the Temple in 70. The "Greeks" are characterized (in Acts) as devout Jews and they came to worship at Jerusalem for the feasts. The fact that they spoke Greek and not Aramaic or Hebrew does not mean that they were "Hellenized" in the sense that they thought in Greek categories as opposed to Hebraic categories. The Jews are famous (some would say infamous) for not assimilating into the various cultures where they find themselves. The Jews, by-and-large, rejected Philo of Alexandria's integration of Judaism with Plato. Why? Because devout Jews who hear Moses and the Prophets read aloud every Sabbath - in this case from the Septuagint - still operate from Hebraic categories of thought, and so the fact that they would reject Philo is not surprising. For the same reason, they would understand "logos" from the Hebraic paradigm, not the Greek philosophical paradigm. They would be very familiar with "the word of the Lord" as it is presented in the Old Testament - they hear it every Sabbath.

 

So there are all kinds of indications that John was written from the perspective of Judean Jewish Christianity before the war with Rome that began in 66. It is concerned with testifying to Greek-speaking Jews that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ. To this end John writes down many "signs". Gentiles are not part of this paradigm. Nor is a Greek philosophical understanding of "logos" part of this paradigm. The paradigm of John's Gospel is completely Hebraic. Therefore, "logos" should be understood from Old Testament categories of thought rather than Hellenistic categories of thought.

 

Back to Arguments Index