I. Setting, Date, Authorship

1. Setting

The issue of the setting of the Fourth Gospel is really a kind of condensed history of a particular Christian community in the first century. The best efforts to reconstruct that history result in at least a three-stage view.

At the first stage, the Johannine community constituted a part of a Jewish synagogue. That is, the earliest Johannine Christians were Jewish Christians who believed that the Christian faith was continuous with the Jewish faith and who were content to live within the context of a Jewish community. At this first stage we may suppose that their beliefs were not radically different from Jewish beliefs. Their view of Jesus was that he was the Messiah who had come and then promised to return to fulfill the hopes of the Jews as well as the Christians.

The second stage of this history brought the split between the Christians and the Jews of the synagogue. It appears that the Johannine community experienced an expulsion from their religious home in the synagogue for at least two reasons.

First, their increasingly successful missionary efforts among their colleagues in the synagogue began to pose a threat to the leadership of the synagogue, and an earlier emphasis on what the two groups had in common was steadily giving way to an emphasis on the differences. Involved in this may also have been the effective missionary work of the Johannine Christians among Samaritans (Jn 4).

The second reason for the expulsion was the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in A. D. 70 and the resulting crisis of faith. The destruction of the temple brought a kind of identity crisis for the Jews－what is Judaism without a center of sacrificial worship?－and may have resulted in purging sympathizers of Jesus of Nazareth from some synagogues. (In three places in the Gospel the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogue is echoed－Jn 9:22; 12:42; 16:2). This informal and localized expulsion of the Christians (like those remembered in the narratives of Acts, e.g., 19:8f.) was possibly (later) formalized and made a common practice by the Council of Jamnia (ca. 90 A. D.).

This expulsion had a mighty effect on the Christian community, producing a trauma of faith of major proportions. It was amid this crisis that the fourth evangelist gathered the traditions of the community and interpreted them so as to address the needs of the newly isolated community. It was then that the major themes of the Gospel took shape, providing the Johannine Christians with assurance and confidence in the midst of the uncertainty of their recent experience of deprivation. Furthermore, it was in the subsequent, and perhaps violent, debate with the members of the synagogue that the Gospel found its setting (e.g., Jn 16:2).

The third stage of the history of the community was close to, if not identical with, the setting for the publication of 1 John. While the crisis of the expulsion from the synagogue had been resolved and the community was an independent Christian body, there appeared some internal conflicts over the interpretation of the original Gospel of John in general, and proper belief and practice in particular. Moreover, relationships with other Christian communities had become important (cf. Jn. 21). Certain additions to the Gospel appear to address this situation.(1)

2. Date and Authorship

The task of dating the gospel has become a question of dating the stages in the history of the Johannine community and in reality has become less important for the interpretation of the document than its setting.

For the most part, scholars still date the gospel in the last decade of the first century. Those who hold that the expulsion of the Johannine Christians from the synagogue was a result of the formal decree of the Council of Jamnia (ca. 90 A. D.) must date it within a few years after that council. The first stage of the history of the community sketched above should be dated 40-80, the second 80-90, and the last 90-100.

The identity of the fourth evangelist is hopelessly lost in anonymity. He was not an eyewitness and is not to be identified with the "beloved disciple." It is more likely that the evangelist (whom we shall continue to call John for the sake of convenience) writes of a revered founder of the community whose witness is the basis of the community tradition. The writer speaks of this honoured figure as "the disciple whom Jesus loved." While some scholars have attempted to identify this figure with someone known to us from the gospels (most often John, son of Zebedee, or Lazarus), it seems wiser to admit that we do not know.(2)

1.Robert Kysar, John. Augsburg Commentaries (Minneapolis : Augsburg Publishing House, 1986) 14-15.

2.Ibidem 15-16.