by Sara Parvis

What difference does it make to our understanding of Eastertide if John’s Gospel is dated to 65CE?

Devout Catholics have long had an ambivalent attitude towards academic Scripture scholarship. Sometimes we have clung to an ahistorical, proof-text sort of reading of Biblical passages, along the lines of Handel’s Messiah, and been scandalised by scholarly attempts to insist on the original historical context of the Old Testament passages we are used to reading as referring to Christ. At other times, we become irritated by new scholarly readings of Scripture which are different from the ones we ourselves learned in past years on Scripture courses or at University. In my own case, my Biblical Studies colleagues are used to my satirical complaints that the Old Testament datings I was taught at Oxford in the early 1990s, which were spread across a millennium, have apparently been replaced by a new consensus that everything was written much later – on the Tuesday before the birth of Jesus, as I like to put it to them.

In the case of the Gospel of John, it is the other way around. The consensus used to be that John’s Gospel was the last of the four to be written. Scholars such as Raymond Brown argued that there were a number of different compositional stages in the Fourth Gospel, the earliest of which went back to the period 40-60CE, but that the finished form of the Gospel was completed well after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE – perhaps even as late as 110CE. John A.T. Robinson demurred, arguing that John’s Gospel was the first of the four to be written, but not many scholars accepted his argument. It seemed too clear that John’s Gospel represented a more theologically developed stage than the other Gospels.

New date

However, George van Kooten, Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, has this academic year begun to argue the case around Universities in England and Scotland that John’s Gospel can entirely be dated to 65CE. His argument is based on two points above all: that the Gospel shows knowledge of details of the colonnaded Pool of Bethzatha (which appears in John 5:2) which would be inaccessible after its destruction in 70CE, and that the Gospel also shows knowledge of an arrangement which subsisted from 44CE until 66CE, whereby the Herodians, though they did not rule Judaea, which was directly ruled by the Romans, had the right to appoint the High Priests.

The weight of these arguments can be contested, but the whole case is attractive in various ways. Van Kooten will be publishing his detailed case some time in the next couple of years. As well as being tested by scholars, however, in my view, it also needs to be tested by Catholics in general – what would be the implications of dating John to 65CE for our understanding of early Christianity? Here are my initial suggestions.

Dr Sara Parvis is a senior lecturer in Patristics in the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.