An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Dating the Fourth Gospel, Part II: Other Evidence

Abstract

The fourth gospel is notoriously difficult to date. In this two part inquiry – after considering a) the evidence provided by P52, b) the fourth gospel’s internal testimony to have been completed by people who knew the eyewitness ‘beloved disciple’ behind the bulk of its testimony, and c) the external testimony and evidence from Papias, Ignatius and Irenaeus – the author retains the two-stage composition theory, allowing the literary origins of the gospel to stretch back to the 60s AD or even earlier, whilst tentatively concluding that the final form of John’s gospel was probably published in Ephesus c. 96-98 AD.