To Whom Was the Gospel of John Written?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Distinct in style, theology, and tone from the other three Gospels, the Gospel of John presents a portrait of Jesus that is at once intimate and cosmic, grounded in narrative yet soaring in philosophical depth. But behind its poetic language and bold claims lies a fundamental historical question: to whom was the Gospel of John written?

Exploring this question can shed light on the origins of the Gospel of John. It can also deepen our understanding of early Christianity itself—a movement far more complex, contested, and dynamic than it is often assumed to be.

Who Wrote the Gospel of John?

While the name John has been assigned to this Gospel since at least the 2nd century CE, our oldest manuscripts of it, like those of the other three Gospels, have no such title or authorial ascription. In fact, it was written anonymously, leaving us to decipher textual clues about who wrote the book and with what purpose. Because of this, biblical scholars over the last couple of centuries have formulated theories about who the anonymous author of the Gospel of John was and to whom it was written.

As Bart Ehrman points out, the first Christian author we see attributing this Gospel to the disciple known as John, the son of Zebedee, is Irenaeus, a bishop and heresy hunter who wrote around 185 CE. Unfortunately, that’s almost a century after the Gospel was written, so it’s hard to know the accuracy of such a designation. Ehrman goes on to mention how ancient readers arrived at the conclusion that John had written this book.

John 19:35 and 21:20–24 seem to say that the author was one of the 12 disciples, the unnamed “one whom Jesus loved.” Based on that assumption, Ehrman writes, ancient readers had to decide which of the disciples this author could be:

The only choice left, then, was John, the son of Zebedee. While there are many good reasons to doubt this conclusion from a historical perspective, it seems to have been the thought process by which ancient Christians came to believe in John as the book’s author. But whether John or someone else wrote this Gospel, what clues can we find in the text itself to identify its intended audience and purpose?

Modern Theories on the Intended Audience of the Gospel of John

It’s fairly certain that the Gospel of John was written with a specific audience in mind. Since John is so different from the other Gospels, most scholars believe that it is addressing a specific Christian group and their sociohistorical situation. In fact, there’s a clear statement of purpose near the end of the Gospel in 20:30–31:

The “you” in this passage is the second person plural in Greek, addressing a group. This group, whoever they were, apparently saw belief in Jesus as both transformative and life-giving. Or perhaps the author wanted the group to believe this and wrote in order to convince them.

In attempting to identify John’s audience, the first question modern scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries had to address was whether the Gospel of John was written in order to convert non-Christians or for the edification or education of an already-established group of Christians. Was it for insiders or outsiders? While early theorists believed it was written as a missionary text to convert non-Christians, by the second half of the 20th century, the scholarly consensus had determined that it was written for insiders. But who were these specific Christians?

One idea, represented well by the book History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel by J. Louis Martyn, said that they were a group of Jewish Christians who had been expelled from the synagogues for their belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Where did this notion come from? In John 16:2–3, Jesus warns his disciples of what will happen to them in the future:

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Many scholars thus concluded that the author was part of a community to which he was writing, a Johannine community, as scholars called it, which was rejected by Jewish leaders and was being persecuted by more mainstream forms of Judaism in the late 1st or early 2nd century. The purpose of the book, then, as well as the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John, was to encourage this community of believers not to despair and to maintain their Christian faith until the end despite persecution to attain eternal life.

Alternative Theories About the Gospel of John’s Audience

In 1979, scholar Raymond Brown wrote a book called The Community of the Beloved Disciple. In it, Brown argued that the story of Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman in John 4 indicated that the Johannine community included Samaritan members. He furthermore claimed that the encounter with Greeks who wish to follow Jesus in John 12:20–26 and the reference Jesus makes to “other sheep” in John 10:16 (possibly referring to future Gentile followers) mean that the group contained Gentile members as well. In other words, this was not a Jewish-only group as had been assumed.

While agreeing with Brown’s thesis about the presence of Samaritans and Gentiles in the group, Adele Reinhartz, writing in Paul, John, and Apocalyptic Eschatology, believes that the occasion of the Gospel was less about external persecution and more about infighting. Thus, she argues that while all the members believed in Christ,

In other words, Reinhartz believes that the author of John wrote his Gospel to foster unity in a diverse group in which disagreements were frequent. Part of fostering this unity was distancing themselves from “the Jews,” who frequently play the villains in John’s Gospel. Reinhartz points out that while John refers to many binaries— light/dark, life/death, above/below— the positive term in each pair is associated with Jesus while the negative is associated with Jesus’ opponents, framed by the author as “the Jews.” This created a rhetorical situation in which one can either be on the side of Jesus or on the side of the Jews, but not both. Even Jewish members, whom Reinhartz believes were the majority of group members, had to make their allegiances clear.

Another Theory: No Group at All!

While the theories I’ve discussed so far have focused on the composition and social situation of a Johannine group, a more recent work argues that such a group may have been entirely fictional. In his article “Did the Johannine Community Exist?,” and in his book The Gospel of John: A New History, Hugo Méndez argues that the combination of the Gospel of John with the three Johannine letters in the New Testament created the idea of a group which was entirely imaginary.

His theory begins with the notion that the supposed eyewitness who is claimed as the source of the Gospel (John 21:24) is likely a useful fiction, which might explain why this “beloved disciple” is never named:

If this eyewitness were in fact one of the original 12 disciples, why not name him? In fact, Méndez points out that ancient pseudepigrapha, literature written in someone else’s name, usually increased credibility by claiming an ideal eyewitness as source or author. This lends credence to the idea that this Beloved Disciple and his group may not have actually existed. However, if there were no Johannine community, who was the intended audience of the Gospel of John?

Méndez believes that the book and its ideas were the work of a single author, putting out an extraordinary claim not found in the Synoptic Gospels:

Méndez goes on to theorize that the author, while he may have been attached to a local congregation somewhere, may not have written the book for them but rather in order to disseminate his own ideas more widely, perhaps depositing the book into a local library or a literary collection. Furthermore,

In other words, perhaps the Gospel of John was not written to an already existing community, but to create a community of people who agreed with the author’s unusual perspective on Jesus.

Conclusion

It has long been noted that the Gospel of John differs from the Synoptics in a number of ways. Rather than focusing almost entirely on the Kingdom of God, the Jesus of John’s Gospel focuses more on his own identity as a celestial man and Messiah. In addition, its miracle stories are designated explicitly as “signs” of Jesus’ identity, and its structure and timeline are distinct from the other three Gospels. Noting these differences, we must ask to whom the Gospel of John was written.

While the earliest modern theories argued that the book was a tool used for evangelizing to non-Christians, more recent scholars claim that it was written instead for a group of insiders, a Johannine community. Early ideas about this community said they were Jewish Christians who had been expelled from synagogues because of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah. However, some later scholars have speculated that the community was made up of Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles, and that internecine fighting between these groups inspired the author of John to write a unifying narrative.

The most radical notion of all, though, comes from recent work by Hugo Méndez, who argues that there was no such Johannine group. Instead, he theorizes that the shadowy nature of the unknown “beloved disciple” who is supposed to be the author and/or source of the book was an invented character used to propagate the radical spiritual views of a single author. This author was ultimately able to popularize his views, which resulted in widespread copying and use of the text. There was no Johannine community, in other words, until the Gospel of John created it.