Gospel of John

The Gospel of John is the fourth of the New Testament's canonical Gospels. It contains a schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus and seven "I am" discourses culminating in Thomas's proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God". The penultimate chapter's concluding verse set out its purpose, "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."

John was written between AD 90–100. The gospel identifies an unnamed "disciple whom Jesus loved" as its source and perhaps author. Twentieth-century scholarship interpreted the gospel within the paradigm of a "Johannine community", but this has been increasingly challenged in the 21st century, and the gospel's historical context remains debated. Most scholars treat the gospel and the Johannine epistles, along with the Book of Revelation, as a single corpus of Johannine literature, albeit not by the same author.

John contains a prologue, an account of the ministry, and the passion and resurrection. John displays a literary unity throughout its text, and the current scholarly tendency is to approach the work as a coherent whole by a single author. The gospel displays a high Christology with some of the clearest identifications of Jesus with God in the New Testament writings. Jesus is identified as the Logos, paralleled in Greek philosophy and Targumic concepts of the divine Word. Although the John is distinct from the Synoptic Gospels, most scholars today accept the Synoptics as sources for John. John's relatively free usage of Mark aligns with the compositional practices of antiquity while contrasting with the unusually conservative adaptations found by the Synoptic authors.