Hi Bob X —
But none of that precludes John from being a first-person witness. Indeed, he is the only one to make such a claim,
The book says "This is the one who
told us these things and wrote them down." That sentence, at least, is obviously by somebody writing after John is dead, by an anonymous "us" (the "Johannine community" lead by people like Papias and Polycarp in Asia Minor). It can be read as saying that John wrote the whole book, as well as orally teaching these things; but I would read it as saying that the book is a mixture of an old writing plus oral traditions which they believed to go back to John-- with all of the "Chinese whispers" problem that involves.
and that claim was believed by the tradition.
Which impresses you much more than it does me. The early Christian tradition showed little concern about whether texts were authentic or pseudepigraphic, only about whether they liked the ideological content. "2nd Peter" is the most notorious case along this line: Origen pointed out that it had no chain of provenance going back to Peter, but approved it as doctrinally sound; Jerome marked it with asterisks, like the spurious ending of Mark and the "Esdras" books and "Prayer of Manasseh"; Eusebius says that its authorship by Peter was "flatly rejected by the ancient sources"-- but it was canon by then. Nearer to this particular subject, the Muratorian Canon says "We receive an epistle saying it is by John, and one with 'John' in the superscription, as we receive the Wisdom of Solomon, written by men of friendly spirit in such name." I read this (others would not translate the sentence quite as I have; I am giving my usual tendentious opinion) to mean, "Sure, 1st and 2nd John are pseudepigrapha, but then we know the book of Wisdom isn't really by Solomon, and so what?"
There is no evidence to suppose otherwise.
Writing c. 100 on the subject of what books there are for Christians to read, Papias contrasts the narrative gospel of Mark with the "sayings" gospel of Matthew, and says nothing about any "Luke" or "John"; rather, he says that he does not put much stock in any books at all, preferring the "living tradition". Polycarp, writing in an answer to the Philippians' question specifically about what books they should read, commends the epistles of Paul, which he assumes they already have, the epistles of Ignatius, which he says he is enclosing, and the preachings of Zosimus and Rufus, whoever they are. Neither of them seems to have heard of the gospel of John, or else, don't think it worth mentioning-- and these were the leaders of the Johannines at the time. I do not think the Johannines bothered to put their gospel into written form until later than this.
But it would not have been much later: we do have a papyrus fragment from the 120's (approx.) with a few lines from the trial before Pilate, echoing some verses from John but notably,
skipping some verses. Pilate says "Are you a king? What is the truth?" without a break. In John as we have it, after "Are you a king?" we get some "Discourse" material, "Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world; if it were of this world, my disciples would have fought for me." This is clearly a later interpolation, and the same is likely to hold true for ALL the "Discourses" material. The gospel and epistles of John, more than any NT books except Acts, remained "open" books for a long time: that is, one to which copyists felt free to add new material rather than copying faithfully. The "women taken in adultery", added in the 5th century, and the "three witnesses in heaven", added to 1st John in the 7th (!) century, are the most blatant examples; but there is also the creation of "3rd John" (not sure when that popped up, but early sources don't know of it), the addition of the "Logos" hymn to the beginning sometime after Tatian in the mid-1st century (he quotes it with the phrase "as it is
said" rather than "as it is
written"; the Logos hymn is old, probably the liturgical hymn referred to in Pliny's letter to Trajan, but its addition to the gospel text was late); and chapter 21 certainly looks like a late tack-on (chapter 20 ends with a conventional "wrap-up").
The ideology of the 2nd century was there in the 1st, indeed it's there in pre-Christian Hellenic (and presumably Hebrew speculative) thinking.
No, it really wasn't. The notion that the "demiurge" (God's instrument for creating the world) became prideful and thought of itself as the true God, turning into an enemy of God, is the specific ideological thrust that John is combatting with the identification of Jesus as both God's instrument of creation and supremely holy rather than misguided. And this particular ideology is a 2nd-century development, with the propagandistic motive of accepting monotheism from the Jewish tradition while repudiating the Jewish God as a "fake" God; it is part of the fallout from the bar-Kochba rebellion, when it became politically difficult to be a patriotic Roman and a Jewish sympathizer at the same time.
D).