Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals in the pews —
and still many in pulpits and even a fair bit in academia — stand by the idea
that the “beloved disciple” John did.
Well, there may have been SOME John behind it. But, not that
one.
That person didn’t write the Gospel of John, nor three
letters attributed to him.
In fact, one person wrote John 1-20 (NOT counting the later "Hymn of the Logos, John 1:1-18) whether working from an
original “Signs Gospel” or not, another appended John 21, somehow, later than
that, John 7:53-8:11, the woman in adultery story got appended, and the whole schmeer,
either before or after the adultery pericope, likely had some sort of editor or two, in multiple times, fighting back and forth between pro-Gnostic and anti-Gnostic takes on the whole ball of wax.
And, a different person yet, in all likelihood, wrote the
three letters.
And, none of them wrote Revelation, and certainly didn’t
write its core. Indeed, the likely author of that has nothing to do with any of the above, I venture.
The book almost certainly has a non-Christian core. That
background has been discussed by James Tabor, as influenced by an older
contemporary, J. Massyngberd Ford.
Ford wrote the original Anchor Bible volume on Revelation.
Here's my review of the volume on Amazon.
Her idea? John the Baptizer wrote it.
James Tabor offers his reconstruction of a pre-Christian text
of Revelation
This is based on an earlier post speculating it was likely
it had such a core.
As Tabor notes, he has an academic relationship with Ford.
They both seem to be on the right track, but neither seems totally
correct.
I believe, contra Ford, that a follower of the Baptizer
wrote it after his death, not John the B himself.
Accepting Paul's comment in Galatians as true, as well as
others in Acts, John had disciples in Asia Minor. Given that its provenance has
always been considered to be there, and many of the elements in the
non-Christian core seem to fit the times of the 60s CE, that fits the idea of a
“Mandean” (to use an anachronistic word) core, but not one from John himself. For
that same reason, there’s no need to follow Tabor's specifics in trying to
anchor Revelation to his pseudo-Clementines take on the whole New Testament and
claim it is reflecting 40s-50s Judean politics.
Rather, it should be seen as the reaction of 60s-era
diaspora apocalyptic Jews to the Temple Revolt.
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