This is the fifth of my FIVE FAVORITES — reposts of blog posts from years ago, in part to celebrate the new launch of the blog and in part to encapsulate some of the kinds of posts that can be found in the archives.  The archives go back to April 2012 and are easily searched.  As you can see, you can simply do a word search for any issue; you can get a list of posts for any category; you can actually go back to any month and year and see a list of posts.  Ain’t life grand?

Here is a post from 2016 on what is, for me, a topic of long-standing interest.

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In my previous post I explained why the author of the book of Revelation, someone named John, was not claiming to be John the son of Zebedee and in fact probably was *not* John the son of Zebedee.   I also showed why this author was not the same one who produced the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John (see https://ehrmanblog.org/the-author-of-revelation/) Now I want to talk about the Gospel to show that it too was probably not written by John.

The first thing to stress – it can’t be stressed enough – is that like the other Gospels of the New Testament, the Gospel of John (as I’ll continue to call it, for the sake of convenience, since that is, after all, the title that was later given to it) is completely anonymous.  The author does not tell us his name or identify himself in any way.

I have already explained why people in the early church came to *think* the book was written by Jesus’ earthly disciple, John the son of Zebedee (see https://ehrmanblog.org/who-wrote-the-book-of-revelation-and-the-fourth-gospel/ from a few days ago).  There are very good reasons, however, for thinking that this view is wrong.

It is interesting to note that John the son of Zebedee is never (ever)…

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