The Areopagus

The Recent Gospel of John Controversy
“Absence of Evidence is NOT Evidence of Absence”

by W. Bruce Phillips

Through an online article in the Daily Beast entitled “Everyone’s Favorite Gospel is a Forgery,” Professor Candida Moss has recently brought attention to an academic paper by Professor Hugo Mendez of UNC-Chapel Hill, entitled “Did the Johannine Community Exist?” published in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. First some background.

  • Professor Moss is a well-respected academic who specializes in early Christianity. But a cursory look at the Internet gives the unavoidable impression that she is a person with a liberal bent. Her education was in theologically liberal institutions. And her current outlets for commentary all appear to favor the liberal side.
  • I sport no formal academic background. After a lengthy period of self-imposed exile, I returned to the faith in my late forties and fell in love with Christian apologetics. Thirty years later, I am certified as an apologist by several major organizations. So while Dr. Moss and I may agree on many things, we may divide over liberal vs. conservative.
  • I also note that Dr. Mendez is associated with the faculty of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill where Dr. Bart Ehrman was at one time Chairman. Dr. Ehrman is widely regarded as preeminent in the ranks of academics skeptical of Christian Scripture.

With that in hand, lets start with the title of the Daily Beast article. In my experience, philosophers tell you that when dealing with contingent things (things that do not have to be the way they are, as opposed to necessary things that must be the way they are) that there are always at least two explanations of the facts at hand.

So why would Dr. Moss choose, when dealing with such a contingent topic, to present her article with the provocative title that “Everyone’s Favorite Gospel is a Forgery”? Not, mind you, that new research suggests that it MIGHT be a forgery. Her start reminds me of the French intellectual revolutionaries objective to “scandalize the bourgeoisie.” So we should be on our guard that we as conservatives are a target. I’ll return to this in a moment.

One unexpected benefit of this publishing event is that I don’t need to look at my calendar. For years, decades now, the approach of Easter has brought these kinds of articles to the fore undermining Scripture, religion, or even God Himself. Time magazine used to be famous for this. If you want to find a “God is Dead” article, look for it just pre-Easter. So I am not surprised by this article nor its appearance on a liberal website.

But back to the contention in the title that the Gospel of John IS a forgery. With that kind of assertion, I would expect compelling evidence that would at least cause me to reconsider my position. But no, instead we get what seems to me to be very thin gruel.

So what is the core argument presented in the paper itself? It’s no secret that academics have speculated that the Gospel of John and the Johannine Letters (1, 2 & 3 John), while thematically similar, differ in style sufficiently to suggest that they were not written by the author of the Gospel. (Let’s not forget, of course, that there’s practically nothing some academic isn’t speculating about – unless it’s whether there’s any value in conservatism.) Along with that view of the differences in style comes the proposition that all four of these documents were the product of something called the Johannine Community – an alleged group of believers who originally gathered around the Apostle in his later years in exile.

But the current paper appears to dismiss the existence of any such community due to a lack of evidence such as no mention in other ancient writings, no archaeological traces and the like. And on this basis Dr. Mendez believes that no such community existed. But that’s not all. This dismissal leads (the article doesn’t say how) to the claim that ALL of the documents attributed to some Johannine literature are forgeries. And that somehow includes the Gospel of John! Am I alone in finding such an inference in need of more than “absence of evidence”? Unless of course the main objective is to “scandalize the bourgeoisie.”

Another painful omission, in my view, is any attempt to define forgery. Now I get it if I paint a Rembrandt-style canvas and put the artist’s name on it. Clearly I want to trick some art critic into affirming it and reap the monetary rewards that would presumably come from the sale. Now THAT’S a forgery! But if a group of disciples sat at the feet of an Apostle who walked with Jesus, heard his stories time and again and were able to interrogate him about them, decided subsequent to his death to write them down as the recollections of this disciple, is that a forgery? The complaint seems at best like an attempt to take a modern sensitivity and apply it to something incomprehensibly extraordinary that happened somewhere at the end of the first century! We’ll see another example of this misguided need to apply current sensitivities to historical events before we’re done.

Dr. Mendez notes, following Dr. Ehrman and his book “Forgery and Counterforgery”, that this kind of dissimulation was common in early Christianity. And no doubt it was. Mendez notes the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, both determined to be late forgeries at least so far as their date of authorship was concerned. But that didn’t stop academics on the left from reading these aberrant documents with their Gnostic content and claiming to see in them reflections of the REAL Christianity of the period immediately following the life of Christ! So if the Gospel of John is a forgery we have to dismiss it. But if Thomas and Peter are forgeries, we can use them to speculate about “original” Christianity and all the supposed bad things that were done to exclude these important documents from the body of Christian Scripture. How convenient.

We’re also treated to the usual inclusion of differences in accounts between the Synoptics and John. But there are differences among the Synoptics – so I suppose we need to dismiss those as well? It’s my understanding that in a modern court of law when the testimonies of eyewitnesses are too similar, the canny attorney chalks them up to collusion!

In addition, and to my mind perhaps most egregiously, Moss faults the Gospel of John for “having” Jesus call the Jews “sons of their father the Devil.” Dr. Moss intones that: “Verses like this one nurtured, if not spawned, violence and anti-Semitism from the medieval period until the present. Perhaps it’s better for everyone if Jesus never said this.” Note that we have left the topic of authorship and are now editing the text! Yet there seems to be no consideration that perhaps Jesus, a Jew himself, might actually have said this! Didn’t he say to Peter “Get thee behind me, Satan?” I suppose that was wrong as well?

And finally the Daily Beast article ends with a quote from Mendez: “It’s hard to confront the idea that the Biblical authors might have been lying or misrepresenting themselves. It’s all the more troubling when those misrepresentations frame a book as religiously and culturally significant as the Gospel of John.” Adding “As a Catholic, I’m sensitive to these concerns, but I also think that some of these concerns are misplaced. Christianity has always taught that the Bible was written by imperfect human beings, living in messy human circumstances.”

My Bible seems to say that all Scripture is God-breathed. So shouldn’t we be concerned that they were lying or misrepresenting? Is there no place for the appreciation of any level of divine inspiration? Has inspiration been overturned by the sudden realization that human beings are imperfect and live in “messy circumstances?”

But before we close, perhaps we should take a moment to hear from the “other side.”

  • All four gospels are written anonymously. Perhaps the authors were unwilling to attach their names to an account of the life of Jesus Christ, the Messiah and Son of God.
  • Papias (early 2 nd c. A.D.), Irenaeus (c. 180), and Eusebius (c. 325) all support John’s authorship. It’s hard to find a higher level of consensus from the ancient world.
  • The burden of proof should be on the skeptic. Had the authorship of this gospel been in question at the time, how is it that it was included in the Canon, accepted by essentially every church and Christian group much closer to the event than we are today?
  • And from our modern era, Timothy Paul Jones notes: “The authors connected with the New Testament gospels consistently remained the same from one manuscript to another. Why? Because, when the churches received the written gospels, they received more than mere documents. They received stores – oral histories, from the first century A.D. – about each gospel’s origins.” [Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus (2007), p. 105.]
  • But aside from all this, how can ANY ancient manuscript “prove” its authenticity? Did Caesar truly write the “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars?”
  • And finally, the article offers little evidence from Mendez’s paper. If there is such evidence and I were Mendez, I might wonder why so little of it was brought forward.

Personally, I believe there’s a lot more thinking that needs to be done here as to what’s important and what’s not and how we effectively discern between the two. Meanwhile: “When all is said and done, pass me my copy of the Gospel of John!”

Bruce Phillips is an associate director of The Areopagus. He is a Certified Apologetics Instructor with certificates from the North American Mission Board of the SBC, from BIOLA (the Bible Institute of Los Angeles) in California, and from Cross-Examined, an apologetics ministry founded through Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC.