Behind the Fourth Gospel

The effort to get behind the fourth gospel is no mere literary-critical game. The value we place upon it is inseparable from the way in which we understand its origins. The true relation to the Gospel to the beginnings of Christianity remains unsettled question of New Testament scholarship.

Barnabas Lindars discusses the attempts to identify continuous sources, among them the ""discourse source"" emphasized by Bultmann, and the ""signs source"" recently reconstructed by R. T. Fortna. A more promising approach, he thinks, lies in considering John's technique as a writer who builds upon the primitive tradition--first in the discourses, then when miracle stories are used in conjunction with discourse, then in extended narrative. This provides the vantage point for a survey of the Gospel as a whole, from which its unknown author emerges as essentially a preacher, who presents the authentic challenge of the message of Jesus in a work of immense creative skill and compelling theological power.