Authorship of The Johannine Works - History of Critical Scholarship

History of Critical Scholarship

The modern era of critical scholarship on the works opened with K.G. Bretschneider's 1820 work on the topic of Johannine authorship. Bretschneider called into question the apostolic authorship of the Gospel, and even stated on the basis of the author's unsteady grip on topography that the author could not have come from Palestine. He argued that the meaning and nature of Jesus presented in the Gospel of John was very different from that in the Synoptic Gospels, and thus its author could not have been an eyewitness to the events. Bretschneider cited an apologetic character in John, indicating a later date of composition. Scholars such as Wellhausen, Wendt, and Spitta have argued that the fourth gospel is a Grundschrift or a, "..work which had suffered interpolation before arriving at its canonical form; it was a unity as it stood."

F.C. Baur (1792–1860) proposed that John was solely a work of synthesis of thesis-antithesis according to the Hegelian model—synthesis between the thesis of Judeo-Christianity (represented by Peter) and the antithesis of Gentile Christianity (represented by Paul). He also cited in the epistles a synthesis with the opposing dualist forces of Gnosticism. As such, he assigned a date of 170 to the Gospel.