2025/05/20 by Hugo Méndez · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Archaeology and Historical Studies #Biblical Studies and Interpretation #Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/9780197686157.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2025/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/05/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/27
Abstract The Gospel of John casts itself as a memoir of “the disciple whom Jesus loved”—a mysterious figure who allegedly watched Jesus die on the cross and stepped into his empty tomb. But The Gospel of John: A New History argues that the text is something else: a falsely authored book that inspired an entire library of falsely authored works in its wake. Like the author of the Gospel of Thomas, the author of John wrote a Gospel rich with invented materials, including imagined cryptic dialogues and artificial, symbolic stories. To make this revisionary portrait of Jesus plausible, the author disguised his identity, attributing his Gospel to an invented, shadowy disciple gifted with supernatural insight and able to retrieve lost memories of Jesus. The invention of this eyewitness, however, was not a self-contained event; it was, instead, the genesis of a new and dynamic literary tradition. In time, other writers co-opted John’s invented narrator, deploying him for new agendas and fleshing out so many afterlives for him—among them, the authors of 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Revelation, the Apocryphon of John, and the Epistula Apostolorum. The book traces this arc, showing how a single act of disguised authorship dramatically shaped twenty centuries of Christian culture.