Many books were called "Gospel" in ancient days, of which many were set to a narrative. The classic gospel, pioneered by Mark, is largely narrative with some "secret" material. I have written about another genre of narrative gospel, a visionary gospel with bare-bones "public" material, as we find in the Gospel of Mary. What distinguishes the two is to some extent a matter of degree.
The Gospel of John is unique among gospels in that it splits the difference. It is based on a narrative, but contains much more secret material than the average. For example, John 3 is given to Nicodemus in private, and John 13-17 purports to be Jesus's speech at the Last Supper.
Koester follows a majority opinion, pioneered by Rudolf Bultmann (p. 250), that John derives from one or more prior sources, including (depending on the scholar) a "Signs Gospel", the Egerton Fragment (p. 211), and a Passion Narrative. My pet theory is that these represent three ways of looking at the same point of origin.
John has additional material, though, that does not match the deutero-synoptic material it shares with Mark, Matthew, and Egerton against Luke. This material is made of dialogues and discourses, and matches the Epistles of John and, to a fainter degree, the Enochian literature of Judaism. One example is the term "works of the Father", as I discussed here.
Take John 3 and 13-17, mentioned above. The third chapter
was a Johannine expansion of an Egertonian quote removed from its context. Helmut Koester wrote
concerning John 17, "no satisfactory solution has been found for the placement of this chapter
"
as of 1992. He felt additionally that 15-16 belonged between John 13:35 and 13:36. (p. 249)
John 3 and 13-17 are foreign to the narrative source of John.
The Johannine teachings in John are there for a reason. They have been granted the status of secret teachings of the living Jesus, not exclusively the risen Jesus as in Mary and Secret James.
Unlike Mary, John was not content to set his teachings in narrative events. He chose additionally to rewrite those events in his image.
As shown here, John 13-17 replaced a deutero-synoptic Passion around Mark 14:41-42==John 14:31. This portion of this Passion-source had already let Jesus speak to his disciples in private. John would have had no difficulty expanding this according to his own beliefs.
John's ambition extended to Jesus's public speeches.
John took the Egerton Gospel's speeches against
Jesus's Pharisaic enemies, and expanded them with references to Johannine belief.
One example I discuss here, where John turned Egerton 1
into John 5:39-47 and 9:28-29. Helmut Koester runs a synopsis of John and Egerton in pp.
209-210, with his conclusions as to where John made the changes. They include John 5:40,
"come to me to have eternal life
"; 5:42, "you have none of God's love in you
";
5:43, "I've come in my Father's name
". John also replaced Jesus's "lawyer" accusers
with "Jews", as shown here.
This amounted to a re-writing of John's source(s) into a new gospel. In this John followed the path trodden by Matthew, with Mark; and The Traditions of Matthias and/also-known-as POxy 840, with Matthew. When a Christian rewrote an existing gospel, he legimitised his own beliefs while at the same time affirming the core of what other Christians believed. The plagiarist was, in short, a hijacker.
POxy 840 did not succeed in replacing Matthew, and Matthew only partially succeeded against Mark. But John claimed the ultimate victory. John 3, 13-16, and 17 became canon on the back(s) of the Egerton, Signs, and deutero-synoptic community/-ies.
By the end of the first century CE, even non-Christian historians accepted the "falsifiable" claims of the Christian proclamation. The Jew Josephus, as an example, adopted a predecessor of Luke 24 in the "Testimonium Flavianum", which asserted that Jesus was born, lived, preached, worked wonders, and was crucified.
Ignatius wrote soon after Josephus. He continually referred to Johannine
ideas, as Sam Shamoun noted here.
Ignatius was also adamant that Jesus was "conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David,
but by the Holy Ghost. He was born and baptized
"
(Ephesians 18:2).
Jesus even "suffered the ointment to be poured upon His head
"
(Ephesians 17:1) -
but contra Shamoun, this came from Mark 14:3-9 == Matt 26:6-13, as opposed to John 12:1-8 where the ointment went
on his feet.
Ignatius was therefore one of those Johannines who relied on a Christian creed that assumed Jesus's ministry - but did not have access to the Gospel of John as we know it.
It should now be possible to reconstruct why the Gospel of John was necessary for the Johannine community.
John's community was one of the "risen Jesus". Up to that point, as the letters of John show, the community was not interested in what Jesus said during his life, but on who Jesus was. At most, the sayings of the Lord came to the disciples in secret. This could be done in visions or, if a nod to the human Jesus was required, in post-resurrection appearances.
But then came the narrative Gospels. At the time John was writing, it was widely accepted that Jesus was once human, but the human Jesus of contemporary Gospels had said little, up to then, that would justify the Johannine message.
John set out to show that his community's teachings were endorsed by Jesus. At that time in Christian history, the way to do it was to get those teachings into a narrative gospel. So John searched for the most self-proclaiming Jesus available, and found Egerton, possibly others. He then promoted Jesus from a powerful Messiah to the Gate of the Sheep, the True Vine, and so on. But some teachings still could not be assigned to a public appearance, and so they remained secret words for the initiated.
John is therefore a visionary gospel and a narrative gospel in one.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
This project was announced in 9 June. The first version was written 9-11 June, initially out of cast-offs from the "vision" projects. I posted it 11 June. 12 June, improvements. 22 June, the time before John.