Audio only:
Discover the Shocking Truth: When Was John’s Gospel REALLY Written?
In this episode, Jimmy Akin dismantles the myth of a late-date John, blowing away skeptical arguments with powerful evidence—from the tiny Rylands Papyrus to the pool of Bethesda still standing before Jerusalem’s fall. He builds a compelling case for an astonishing early date around A.D. 65, showing the Gospel rests on fresh eyewitness memory! Don’t miss this eye-opening deep dive.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
The Gospel of John can get a bad rap.
A lot of scholars value it less than Matthew, Mark, and Luke—partly because they date it later than the other three.
But when was it really written . . . and what does the evidence actually show?
Let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
1 A Good Gospel With a Bad Rap
One of the main reasons some people place less value on the Gospel of John is that they date it later than the other three.
The thinking goes that the later a Gospel was written, the further it stands from the events it records—and so the less reliable it must be.
This is a nonsense argument.
What really matters for how reliable a work are two things: First, how reliable the sources the author had to work with are, and second, how careful the author was with those sources.
For example, Abraham Lincoln died in 1865—over 160 years ago—and there are many biographies of him still being written today.
But people wouldn’t say that these modern biographies are automatically less accurate than biographies written right after his death.
In fact, they may even be more accurate, since they are based on more sources than Lincon’s contemporary authors had available to them, and there has been more time for mature reflection on the sources.
The issue of when a biography was written relative to the person it describes is thus not an indicator of the quality of that biography.
So let’s set that issue aside.
But let’s still ask: When was the Gospel of John really written?
2 The Physical Evidence
I want to start with the physical evidence, because that’s what reshaped the whole conversation.
A couple of centuries ago, it became fashionable in biblical scholarship to assign very late dates to John.
For example, the German scholar F. C. Baur—who lived from 1792 to 1860—dated the Gospel to sometime between A.D. 160-A.D. 170, in his work The Church History of the First Three Centuries.
That’s 130 to 140 years after the events it describes.
But dates like that fell out of favor after some more recent discoveries.
One of the most important was a little document known as the Rylands Papyrus—or, to scholars, P52.
It’s held in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, England.
And it’s tiny—just three and a half by two and a half inches, the size of a credit card.
One side contains text from John 18, verses 31 to 33, and the other side has verses 37 and 38.
This fragment has commonly been dated to the first half of the second century—say, around A.D. 125—though I should note that date is disputed.
Either way, the existence of a copy of John that early pushes the composition of the Gospel back—to the beginning of the second century, or into the first century itself.
The reason is that if we have a surviving copy of part of the Gospel of John from the first half of the second century, then the Gospel itself must have been written before that.
The Rylands Papyrus is almost certainly a copy of the original Gospel, and we would expect it to take some time for there to be enough copies of John for a fragment from one of these copies to survive.
That pushes the original writing of John back further.
According to the Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, the Gospel is commonly dated today to sometime between A.D. 80-110, as he notes in his Introduction to the New Testament.
But, as I’ll explain, I don’t think a date that late is well supported.
3 Does Revelation Set the Date?
Sometimes scholars—including conservative ones—date all of the Johannine literature to the A.D. 90s.
The Johannine literature means the writings associated with John:
- Gospel of John
- 1 John
- 2 John
- 3 John
- Revelation
And the reason many propose the 90s often seems to be that they aren’t sure where else to put these books . . . and the 90s is a popular date for Revelation.
But this is problematic for several reasons.
First, the 90s date for Revelation is based on the idea that the recent persecution it refers to happened under the emperor Domitian.
The trouble is, there was no Domitianic persecution—something I’ve talked about elsewhere. The persecution scholars long pinned on Domitian simply doesn’t hold up.
That’s something I talked about in Episode 79 if you’d like to check it out.
Second, we actually have good reason to date Revelation considerably earlier, to the late 60s.
Specifically, it was written in the second half of A.D. 68.
That’s something I talked about back in Episode 68, so you can check that out for more.
And third, people’s literary careers can span decades.
There’s no necessary connection between when Revelation was written and when the Gospel was.
For example, the American author Mark Twain published between 1865 and his death in 1910. That’s a span of 45 years.
So Revelation doesn’t give us a good anchor for dating John’s Gospel.
4 What About John’s Advanced Age?
Another argument for a late date appeals to John’s advanced age.
Near the end of the Gospel, the Evangelist goes out of his way to correct a rumor.
A story had spread that John—the beloved disciple—would not die before the Second Coming.
John 21 reads:
John 21:22-23
Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” The saying spread abroad among the brethren that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”
Some have taken this to mean that John must have been very old, sensing his own death approaching, and wanting to put the rumor to rest before he died—so it wouldn’t cause distress among the faithful once he was gone.
But that doesn’t require a date in the 80s or 90s.
If John wrote in the mid 60s—which is where I think the evidence points—he would already have been quite mature, even if he’d been one of the youngest of the disciples.
And remember the climate he was living in.
Christians were being persecuted with increasing intensity, and apostles were being martyred, or facing martyrdom.
James son of Zebedee, James the Just, Peter, and Paul had all been killed by the mid-to-late 60s.
Watching that unfold, John could easily have felt the need to answer the rumor by the mid 60s.
5 The Situational Arguments
Then there are what I’ll call the situational arguments.
These claim that John must be late because of the situation the Church seems to be in when it was written.
For one thing, the Gospel has a very high view of Christ’s divinity. As the very first verse says:
John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The argument is that it took decades for the Church’s understanding of Jesus to develop to that level, so John must be late.
John also refers to believers being put out of the synagogues, saying:
John 16:2
They will put you out of the synagogues; indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.
This is said to reflect a time after the final break between Christianity and Judaism, which is often dated to around A.D. 85.
And third, John repeatedly refers to “the Jews” as a separate and frequently hostile group—as though the Church and the synagogue had already gone their separate ways.
Now, I think arguments like these are quite weak.
Take the high Christology. Any generation can produce theological giants—savants—who sound decades ahead of their contemporaries.
John and Paul are exactly that kind of figure, and there’s nothing in John’s Christology that you don’t already find in Paul, who was writing back in the 50s.
For example, in Romans 9:5, Paul writes that:
Romans 9:5
To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
Paul wrote Romans in A.D. 54 or 55, yet he also calls Jesus God, so you don’t need to date John in the A.D. 90s to have him saying the same thing.
The argument also quietly ignores the role of Jesus himself.
If Jesus had a high view of his own divinity, then we’d expect at least some of his disciples—like John—to talk about it!
As for being persecuted in the synagogues, that was a familiar experience for Jewish Christians throughout the entire New Testament period.
Jesus himself was put to death, and there’s no reason to think some of his followers weren’t being ostracized even earlier. In fact, we’d expect them to be.
And the language of “the Jews” as a distinct, often hostile group? We find that in other New Testament books that everyone agrees were written near the middle of the first century.
Paul writes to the Corinthians:
2 Corinthians 11:24
Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews forty lashes less one.
And the second letter to the Corinthians also was written in A.D. 54 or 55.
We find the same kind of language in the book of Acts, written around 60, and in 1 Thessalonians, written around A.D. 50.
So the situation John describes fits the middle of the first century just fine.
6 Before the Fall of Jerusalem
Now let’s turn to a stronger line of evidence—the fall of Jerusalem.
In A.D. 70, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the temple to the ground.
And, like the Synoptic Gospels, John never mentions it.
With the Synoptics, that silence is telling, because they record Jesus explicitly predicting the temple’s destruction—so you’d expect them to note it if it had already happened.
That means the fact that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t contain a notice that this prophecy was fulfilled points to them being written before A.D. 70.
John is trickier, though, because it doesn’t contain that kind of straightforward prediction.
Jesus does allude to the temple’s destruction when—in John 2—he says:
John 2:19
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
And in John 11 the high priest, Caiaphas, makes a worried conjecture:
John 11:48
If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.
But Jesus’ reference is only implicit—he’s really speaking about his own body—and Caiaphas can be understood as making a conjecture.
In neither case does the Gospel of John come right out and say the temple will be destroyed, the way Jesus forthrightly says it in the Synoptics.
So without an explicit prophecy, we wouldn’t expect a “this was fulfilled” notice, and the fact that John doesn’t give us one is only a weak argument from silence.
But there’s another verse—and this one does point to a date before 70.
John is describing a healing, and he mentions a particular pool in Jerusalem:
John 5:2
Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Hebrew called Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes.
That pool, by the way, is also known as Bethesda.
Here’s the key. The Greek word John uses for “Is”— Estin—is in the present tense.
He’s saying that the pool, with its five porticoes, exists in Jerusalem at the time he is writing.
And he would not have said that after Jerusalem fell.
Listen to what the Jewish historian Josephus tells us about what the Roman general Titus did to the city:
Josephus, Jewish War 7:1:1-2
[Titus] ordered the whole city and the temple to be razed to the ground, leaving only the loftiest of the towers, Phasael, Hippicus, and Mariamne, and the portion of the wall enclosing the city on the west.
After that kind of devastation, the pool’s five porticoes weren’t standing there for anyone to point to.
So John 5:2 gives us good reason to think the Gospel was written before the destruction in A.D. 70—a point the scholar Daniel B. Wallace has argued in detail in an article called “John 5, 2 and the Date of the Fourth Gospel.”
If that’s right, then A.D. 70 is the upper boundary—the latest John could have been written.
So what’s the lower boundary? How early could it be?
7 John and the Other Evangelists
Here the early Church helps us.
The early Church Fathers consistently regarded John as the last of the four Gospels to be written.
The Gospel itself doesn’t quite say that, but its very last verse hints that other books about Jesus had come before it:
John 21:25
But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
That suggests John knew of several earlier books about what Jesus did—and those likely included one or more of the other Gospels.
There’s quite good evidence that John knew the Gospel of Mark.
In fact, there’s evidence that he used Mark as a kind of template—a framework to organize his own Gospel around. I’ve argued that elsewhere, and so has the British scholar Richard Bauckham, in a chapter titled “John for Readers of Mark,” in a book called The Gospels for All Christians.
There are also reasons to think John knew Luke’s Gospel.
I’ve long been struck by the way John expands on events that Luke mentions only briefly—especially in Luke’s account of the Resurrection.
Take Luke’s description of Peter at the empty tomb:
Luke 24:12
Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home wondering at what had happened.
John takes that one verse and opens it up into a whole scene, in John chapter 20, verses 1 to 10, where Peter and John run to the empty tomb together.
Or take this moment, where the risen Jesus eats with the disciples:
Luke 24:41-43
And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.
John expands that into the great breakfast scene by the Sea of Galilee, in John chapter 21, where they have broiled fish for breakfast.
There’s another clue, too.
Luke focuses entirely on appearances of the risen Jesus in and around Jerusalem, while Matthew and Mark focus on appearances up in Galilee.
That’s led some authors to say that Matthew and Mark contradict Luke about where the Resurrection appearances occurred.
But John includes appearances in both places—Jerusalem and Galilee—as though he’s aware of both traditions and is filling in the picture.
So it looks like John knew Mark, which was composed around A.D. 55, and Luke, which was likely published around A.D. 59.
We talked about their dates in Episodes 63 and 64.
And if John knew Mark and Luke, that would put the writing of John between 59 and 70—in other words, in the A.D. 60s.
But there’s one more Gospel we have to deal with.
8 What About Matthew?
What about Matthew?
Fewer scholars have thought that John shows awareness of Matthew than of Mark and Luke.
But the case that he does has recently been argued by James Barker, in a book called John’s Use of Matthew.
I’m still evaluating that argument. I’m genuinely open on the question of whether John shows traces of Matthew or not.
On independent grounds—which we’ll cover in a future episode—I’ve argued that Matthew was written in the A.D. 60s—say, around 63 to 65—which is very close to when I’m going to end up concluding John was written.
So John may not have seen Matthew’s Gospel yet and thus couldn’t respond to it.
Or, if Matthew was written right around the same time, and a copy did make its way into John’s hands, John may have had very little time to absorb it.
That could explain why Matthew seems to have left a lighter mark on John’s Gospel than Mark and Luke did.
Given the present state of my research, I thus don’t think that we can confidently use Matthew to help us date John.
9 The Book of Revelation Returns
Now the book of Revelation comes back into the story—Revelation Redivivus, if you like, Redivivus being Latin for come back to life.
I mentioned earlier that we have evidence Revelation was written well before the 90s date it’s so often given.
Specifically, it looks like Revelation was written shortly before the temple fell in A.D. 70—during the brief reign of the emperor Galba.
There’s a passage in Revelation about a series of kings, where the text says that five have fallen, one currently “is,” and another has not yet come.
Revelation 17:10 says:
Revelation 17:10
They [the heads of the beast] are also seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes he must remain only a little while.
These kings are Roman emperors, and the five who have fallen are Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.
That means the one who “is”—the emperor reigning at the moment John wrote—appears to be Galba, and Galba reigned only from June 8, A.D. 68-January 15, A.D. 69. In essence, in the second half of 68 or within a few weeks just before or after this.
We also know that Revelation was written while John was in exile on the island of Patmos. Revelation 1:9 states:
Revelation 1:9
I John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
And that exile probably explains something that has puzzled readers for a long time—the very different quality of the Greek in Revelation compared with the Gospel of John.
While he was in exile, John may not have had the kind of editorial help he could draw on when he wrote the Gospel.
In other words, on Patmos he may not have had a skilled secretary—an Amanuensis—to polish his Greek.
We don’t know much about exactly when John’s exile on Patmos began or ended.
But it’s likely he was already in exile before Galba’s short reign began, and that he was still there through the chaos of A.D. 69—the famous Year of the Four Emperors.
So he was probably in exile for at least the last two years of the 60s.
And that means the Gospel itself—which reads like the work of a man with good editorial help—would have been written in the early or mid 60s, before John was exiled.
10 Peter’s Martyrdom
There’s one more factor that may help us pin down the date, and it has to do with the apostle Peter.
Near the end of the Gospel, Jesus says something to Peter about how he is going to die:
John 21:18
Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.
And then John adds a comment:
John 21:19
This he said to show by what death [Peter] was to glorify God.
Now, that comment is usually understood to mean that John was writing after Peter had already been martyred—that is, John is looking back on Peter’s death.
In an as-yet-unpublished study, I’ve dated Peter’s martyrdom to the mid 60s—most likely Mid-65 or Mid-66.
If John wrote after that, the Gospel would fall into a very narrow window—say, 66 or 67.
But I think there’s good reason to question the assumption this argument rests on.
Most English translations of John 21:19—including the RSV I just quoted—make it sound like Peter’s death is already in the past. They speak of the death by which Peter “was to glorify God.”
But the Greek doesn’t actually have a past tense there.
The verb is Doksasei = He will/shall glorify.
It’s future tense.
And some of the most literal English translations render it that way. Here’s Young’s Literal Translation:
John 21:19 (Young’s Literal Translation)
And this he said, signifying by what death he shall glorify God.
I’m not entirely sure why most translations don’t follow the Greek here. It may simply be that translators just assume John was written after Peter’s death and rendered the verse to match.
But the verb is future tense.
And if the literal translation is right, then at the moment John is writing, Peter’s martyrdom is still in the future—or it has happened so recently that word of it hasn’t reached John yet.
News of Peter’s death would have traveled fast in the Christian world, but it still would have taken months to make its way all around the Mediterranean.
If John was in Ephesus at the time, he’d probably have heard within a few weeks.
There’s actually a wonderful resource for this—the ORBIS database at Stanford, which calculates ancient travel times. It puts the minimum trip from Rome to Ephesus at just over twelve days in the spring and summer months, which is when Peter was likely martyred.
So even on the literal reading, the latest possible date for the Gospel would be within a few weeks of Peter’s martyrdom—which still lands us in the 65-66 range.
11 Conclusion
So let’s pull it all together.
I estimate that John’s Gospel was written somewhere between the publication of Luke, in A.D. 59, and the martyrdom of Peter, in 65 or 66—probably toward the end of that period to give time for John to encounter and decide to expand on things in Luke’s Gospel.
For convenience, I’ll round it off to about A.D. 65.
And that fits into a remarkable picture of when the historical books of the New Testament were written:
Mark, around A.D. 55.
Luke, around 59.
Acts, around 60.
Matthew, around 63 to 65.
And John, around 65.
Look at that span.
It means the Gospels and Acts—the historical books of the New Testament—were all written within about a decade of one another.
And all of it comfortably within the lifetimes of people who knew Jesus and witnessed the events firsthand.
That’s a very different picture from the one you’ll often hear—of Gospels composed long after the fact, by people far removed from what they described.
When you actually follow the evidence, the four Gospels turn out to be early—early enough to rest on living memory.
* * *
Before I go, if this kind of thing fascinates you—where the Bible came from, who wrote it, and when—then I’d like to recommend a book of mine.
It’s called The Bible Is a Catholic Book, and it tells the story of how the Bible came to be—how it grew out of the life of God’s people, and why it’s the Church’s book from start to finish.
If you’ve ever wondered how we got the Scriptures, and what role the Church played in writing, preserving, and recognizing them, I think you’ll really enjoy it.
I hope you’ll get a copy, and be sure and let me know in the comments what you think . . .
* * *
If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing
If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that—unlike the date of the Gospels—you’ll never be in any doubt about when my next video drops
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years into the future—and can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Thank you, and I’ll see you next time
God bless you always!