Can we trust John’s gospel?

Fair Hearing is based around John’s gospel, one of the four accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection contained within the Bible. But can we trust it? How do we know this isn’t something concocted much later by the Church to suit its own purposes?

Barrister and Professor of Law, David McIlroy, shares why he thinks we really can trust John’s gospel.

One of the strongest arguments is just how close to the actual events John must have been written. Even though John is the latest of all four gospels, there is a fragment of parchment, showing it had already been translated into Egyptian somewhere between 117 A.D. and 138 A.D. You can go and see it for yourself at John Rylands library, Manchester. There is also another papyrus from the second century, which contains almost the whole of John’s gospel. The sources available to us for other ancient historical events, which all historians agree happened (such as key events from the life of Julius Caesar), are almost always much later copies than the records we have of John’s gospel. 

Some are dubious about the trustworthiness of John, noting how different his account is to the other three gospel writers. But as a trial lawyer I know that this actually makes John more reliable. If there’s a fight in a pub, or a car crash at a junction, reliable witnesses who haven’t conspired with one another, will often agree on key facts, but will tell the story differently from each other, based on where they were standing, and what they thought was significant. This is exactly what we have with John and the other gospel writers: they agree on the key details (e.g. that Jesus performed miracles, died on a cross, and rose again), but they sometimes provide different examples, or use different language to each other.

Others take issue with the fact that John was writing with a clear purpose and has chosen what to include in his gospel to make his point. Towards the end of his account, he says he is writing so that his readers ‘might believe’. Does this admission mean he should be struck from the witness list? Again, the opposite is true. It would be weird if John had seen and heard all that Jesus did, and still did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was! If what John records really did happen, of course he believes it and wants other people to know about it as well. 

And finally, let’s suppose for a moment John was making this up; what did he have to gain? Money? Power? No! We know by the end of John’s life, he was exiled on a remote island for what he believed and taught. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.