So the Ortlund rebuttal of the O’Connor rebuttal of Huff on Youtube pointed me to the 2019 book Jesus Mirrored in John by Charlesworth (Princeton Seminary), who argued that the present tense of John 5.2 means it was written before 70. (“Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda[a] and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.”)

The best counter-argument would be that this is what they call the “historic present” as if to say in a modern novel, “now we follow our hero into the castle, this is where soldiers march with spears and shields…”

Then the 2022 book Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament by Jonathan Bernier (Regis theological school of the Society of Jesus) challenged the view that “in John 5:2 eimi constitutes a historic present, such as we find when Josephus refers to the temple while using the present tense decades after the temple’s destruction.” He counters that this is the only time the historic present was ever used in the Bible.

OK, so two points for Early John?

But I was wondering:

(1) Is the academic consensus coming around to Early John or is it just cherry-pickin-apologists making this argument?

and

(2) doesn’t Mark (the original Greek here) switch back and forth from present-tense to past-tense rather liberally?

and

(3) doesn’t the very next verse (John 5:3 in the past-perfect tense: “Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed”) show the opposite?