False Claims About John's Gospel

Lydia McGrew recently posted a good video on the subject. Her book on the fourth gospel is due out soon.

On the theme of similarities between John and the Synoptics, here's a post I wrote that discusses Jesus' use of the phrase "the light of the world" in Matthew 5:14 and in John's gospel, how Matthew and John treat Jesus' fulfillment of Isaiah 9 so similarly, and some other common ground. Here's a post on the soteriological similarities among the gospels, including John. That post addresses some similarities between Jesus' language in the Synoptics and his language in John, but it discusses other kinds of similarities as well. Or see this post on how John agrees with the Synoptics on issues related to Jesus' childhood. Here are fifty agreements among the resurrection accounts, with many of them involving John. And there are a lot of other posts in our archives discussing how John and the Synoptics overlap in other ways.

Keep in mind that the earliest Christians of the patristic era who had a close relationship with John (his disciples, churches who had been in contact with him, etc.) held a high view of the Synoptics, which is best explained by John's having held such a view himself. Papias even quotes a man he refers to as "the elder", probably John, speaking highly of Mark's gospel (cited in Eusebius, Church History, 3:39). My post on Papias just linked documents some examples of Johannine characteristics in Papias' language, which even those who (wrongly) deny that Papias was a disciple of John should acknowledge to be evidence that Papias was highly influenced by the Johannine literature. And Papias thought highly of the Synoptics. See here regarding an account Clement of Alexandria received from some early elders in the church regarding how highly John thought of the Synoptics. And here's a post about how Christians were distributing copies of the gospels in the late first and early second centuries, a practice that makes more sense if John held a more positive view of the Synoptics than many people suggest today. You wouldn't expect Christians to be distributing copies of the gospels in that manner if the gospels came from authors who were antagonistic toward one another, from competing communities, etc. See section 103 of Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho for Justin grouping the four gospels together in a conversation he sets around the year 135. In section 67 of his First Apology, he refers to how the gospels, collectively, are read during church services. Beliefs and practices like these were widespread long before Irenaeus and other later sources wrote, later sources who are often portrayed as having been more influential than they actually were.