by Amezarak | 2025-08-27 09:50:27+00:00
> Hmm - we're going to have to disagree about your confidence in the authorship of the book of John, because wikis from rational to pedia, and deeper tomes I've read on the subject, the consensus appears to be that 'we don't know'.

I'm not saying the book is written by John. In fact, I'm saying it's unknowable. What I'm doing is laying out the arguments for and against:

For: The book internally claims to be written by John, and very early authors claim to have been told that traditionally.

Against: John was the latest of the Gospels, and since John was written last based on it's style and on the traditional commentary, and since Mark was written after 70AD because we think it alludes to the Siege of Jerusalem, and because we're told in Acts that John wasn't particularly scholarly, John could not have been written by John because he was most likely dead by the time it was written and he wasn't sufficiently scholarly.

You can see that neither one of these are logical proofs. That's the nature of this type of historiography. There's nothing even close to proof. Consensus, such as it is, is just based on the opinions of the current people in the field, who have to publish or perish (thus we're subjected to papers like "Xenophon couldn't have been at the battle of Cunaxa because his description of Cyrus's head wound differs very slightly from the doctor's"). "Everyone was right" is not publishable, so the debate goes on forever and the fashion changes. Of course some arguments can be stronger than others! For example, a common type of argument goes like this:

Passage X is an interpolation. It exists in tons of the later texts we have, but none of the earlier ones.

This is a probabilistic argument: we can never be certain. It could be the case that Passage X was included in the original manuscript, but that an early, popular copyist elided the passage and his copy spawned many others. But this is how it all goes. We're not making certain arguments. It's really more of a persuasive sport. Assuming you have read a given text carefully and are reasonably well-informed on contemporary history, there is no particular reason you have to accept the current consensus. It isn't based on super obscure expert knowledge. If as a layman, you (reasonably!) want to just accept the current academic consensus, that's fine! It's just important to understand what it is actually based on, and that it doesn't constitute anything close to knowledge or certainty.

> As to before / after 70 CE, I guess we'll have to move on from there also, as I don't have a horse in that race.

That's actually a very important point for the dating of the gospels, which is in turn a major point in the authorship debate.

> Clement - a religious (read indoctrinated and partisan) person born 120 years after Jesus was meant to have died, is neither 'close in time' nor relevant.

Unless you know anyone closer in time and nonpartisan, people like him and Irenaeus are all we've got. And that's typical. Disinterested parties don't usually write popular surviving historical works. This is reminiscent of a popular line of historiography: X isn't true because the author was motivated to believe it. Of course this is always possible but it's a very tiresome argument in the absence of some other evidence.