Gospel of John

The Gospel of John is the fourth gospel of the canonical gospels in the New Testament. The first section of the gospel presents a schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven signs that culminate in the raising of Lazarus and validate the truth of his words. The second part of the text portrays the final week of Jesus’s life, recounting the Farewell Discourse and the passion and resurrection narratives.

Most scholars agree that the Gospel of John was completed between 90–100 (AD). It identifies an unnamed "disciple whom Jesus loved" as its source and, perhaps, author. 20th-century scholarship interpreted the gospel within the paradigm of a "Johannine community," but this has been increasingly challenged in the 21st century; the gospel's historical context remains debated. Most scholars treat the gospel and the Johannine epistles, along with the Book of Revelation, as a single corpus of Johannine literature, albeit not by the same author.

This gospel displays a literary unity throughout its text, and the current scholarly tendency is to approach the work as a coherent whole by a single author. It contains the clearest identifications of Jesus with the God of Israel in the Christian texts, with Jesus in the form of the Logos being paralleled in Greek philosophy and Targumic concepts of the divine.

Although the Gospel of John is distinct from the Synoptic Gospels, most scholars today accept that John knew and used the Synoptics. John's relatively free usage of Mark aligns with the compositional practices of antiquity while contrasting with the unusually conservative adaptations found by the Synoptic authors.