John 5:2 "There is in Jerusalem..."

Does the grammar of John 5:2 support an early date for John's Gospel? What have scholars thought about this passage across the centuries down to the present?

John 5:2 “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, having five roofed colonnades.”

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On episode 51 of The Humble Skeptic, I featured an interview with Daniel Wallace who argued that the grammar of John 5:2 points to a pre-70 date for the Fourth Gospel. Many scholars who start with a presupposition of a late date tend to dismiss the implications of the present tense language of this verse by arguing that John spoke in a vivid way “as if” the area had not been destroyed. In short, he used what they refer to as a “historic present.”¹

“Since [the verb “to be”] is nowhere else clearly used as a historical present,” Wallace writes in his Greek Grammar, “the present tense should be taken as indicating present time from the viewpoint of the speaker”² Elsewhere he says:

I believe that exegetes would do well to not neglect what seems to be the obvious indication as to the time of writing of this Gospel. In the least, it will not do to argue, as many have, that too much weight cannot be put on the present tense. That is a judgment that can only have force if it is demonstrated that the present tense here could have a variety of forces, any one of which could plausibly view it as referring to past time. Until that happens, I would urge exegetes to take the ἐστίν more seriously in John 5:2 as a significant factor in the dating of John’s Gospel.³

I’m convinced that Daniel Wallace is on to something, particularly given that he was unable to find examples of the Greek verb “to be” used as a historic present not just in the New Testament but in any Greek text. So I decided to spend some time looking through a variety of commentaries (old as well as modern) to see what scholars across the centuries have thought about the present tense language of John 5:2. Here are some of the highlights of my research.

See also: The Date of John’s Gospel: Are We Witnessing a Paradigm Shift?

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Johann Bengel (1687-1752)
John wrote before the destruction of Jerusalem. He says, there is, not was, a pool…those among the ancients who assert that this gospel was published thirty, thirty-one, or thirty-two years after our Lord’s ascension, support this view.⁴

John Wesley (1703-1791)
There is in Jerusalem—hence it appears, that St. John wrote his Gospel before Jerusalem was destroyed.⁵

John Peter Lange (1802-1884)
The ἔστι [there is] has been interpreted with reference to the porches, as indicating that, at the time of the composition of this passage, Jerusalem had not been destroyed…Yet the ἔστι may also be attributed to rhetorical vivacity.⁶

Frederick Godet (1812-1900)
Bengel and Lange have concluded from the present ἔστι [there is], that the Gospel was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. But this present may be inspired by the vividness of recollection. Besides, an establishment of this kind belongs to the nature of the place and may survive a catastrophe.⁷

Charles Taylor & Edward Robinson (1832)
Now there is—these words do not determine that the evangelist wrote his gospel before the destruction of Jerusalem, as has been inferred from them; for there are remains of the pool to this day…⁸

B.F. Westcott (1881)
There is at Jerusalem... The use of the present tense does not prove that the narrative was written before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is quite natural that St John in recalling the event should speak of the place as he knew it. It has indeed been conjectured that a building used for a benevolent purpose might have been spared in the general ruin, but this explanation of the phrase is improbable.⁹

J.B. Lightfoot (c. 1885)
The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was not so complete that a bath of medicinal waters should be destroyed. Indeed, it is not probable that St. John had seen Jerusalem since its fall.¹⁰ Though here Lightfoot seems to assume a post-70 date for the Gospel of John, later in his discussion of chapter 11 he writes, “This is the narrative of a person who was an eyewitness of the events he relates, and who writes not half a century later, but within a very few years of the occurrence.”¹¹

Hubert E. Edwards (1953)
Now there is in Jerusalem… Bishop Westcott’s comment on these words is a good illustration of the shifts to which a great and candid scholar may be driven by his own theory. He says: “As John recalls a familiar scene he lives again in the past, and forgets the desolation which had fallen upon the place which rises before his eyes.” Now if you were talking to an old man about the First World War, and he began a story with these words, “There is, in the city of Ypres¹² a very fine building of the fourteenth century, known as the Cloth Hall,” you would think to yourself, even if you were too kind to say the words: “This old gentleman is getting very senile: he has forgotten that the Cloth Hall at Ypres was destroyed by the Germans more than thirty years ago.” But it is to such a pass as this that Bishop Westcott, and other orthodox scholars, are brought when they assume the Johannine authorship of the Gospel while still clinging to a date at the end of the century for its composition.

Notice that there are three verbs in this short verse. The first two are in the present indicative, and the third is a present participle. “There is…is called…having.” If words mean anything, what we are being told in this verse is that these words were first uttered at a time when the Sheep Gate and the pool, and its five porches were still just as they had been [since the time of Jesus]. Jerusalem was still standing, and the “desolation” which the Romans left behind in A.D. 70 had not yet taken place. We look again at the words, and they tell us something more. It is evident that the speaker is not only alluding to what still exists, but that he thinks that it is reasonably probable that his hearers are familiar with the sheep gate and will remember seeing the pool. He endeavors to recall it to their minds. “It has five porches,” he says: just as you or I, in speaking of a house in our own town, might say: “It is a tall house, in the High Street, just opposite the church; and it has a green door.” This scrap of information about the porches could only be given in speaking to people who knew Jerusalem at the time when the city was still standing; people who had often come through the sheep gate and would probably have noticed the pool with its graceful “porches” as they passed.¹³

Richard Lenski (1961)
Now there is in Jerusalem… “Is” = is still, after the destruction of Jerusalem, when John wrote; it is not the “is” of vivid narrative, since the narration goes on with ordinary tenses.¹⁴

John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983)
This is one of John’s topographical details that have been strikingly confirmed in recent study. Not only does it reveal a close acquaintance with Jerusalem before 70, when the evidence of the five porches was to be buried beneath the rubble only recently to be revealed by the archaeologist’s spade; but John says not “was” but “is.” Too much weight must not be put on this—though it is the only present tense in the context, and elsewhere (Jn 4:6, 11:18, 18:1, 19:41) he assimilates his topographical descriptions to the tense of narrative…The natural inference, however, is that he is writing when the building he describes is still standing.¹⁵ Robinson concluded that all the books of the New Testament should be dated before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and he ended up placing John sometime between 40 and 65 AD.¹⁶

[I]n John there is even less than in the Synoptics that can be taken as a reference to the fall of Jerusalem after the event. Indeed the presumption is that it is still standing as the evangelist himself describes it in the three present tenses of Jn 5:2 (though nothing can be built upon them): “There is in Jerusalem a place which is called in the language of the Jews Bethesda, having five porches.” The only forecast is that the Romans would come and destroy the city and its holy place if the Jewish authorities left Jesus at large (Jn 11:48) – in fact an unfulfilled prophecy, for they did not and the Romans still came.¹⁷

D.A. Carson (1991)
The words “there is in Jerusalem...a pool” have been taken by some as evidence that John wrote his Gospel before the siege and destruction of Jerusalem (AD 66–70). That is possible, but far from certain: John frequently uses the present tense to refer to past events (the so-called ‘historic present’).¹⁸

Leon Morris (1995)
If the present tense “is” is significant it points us to a time before the destruction of Jerusalem. This cannot be pressed, but neither should it be overlooked.¹⁹ This is found in Morris’ 1995 revised edition of his commentary on John in which he appears to have modified his view of the date of the Fourth Gospel. In his introductory comments, he sides with scholars who suggest that John may have been written as early as the 50s or 60s.²⁰

Carsten Peter Thiede (1997)
Most people would say [the Fourth Gospel] dates to the late first century. Now, consider the archaeological facts we have these days. For example, in John 5:1 he describes the healing of the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda. John tells the story in the past tense. But then he tells readers where it happened as if saying: “If you want to see where Jesus did this miracle, then go to the Pool of Bethesda; it’s still there,” and he describes it. The pool was rediscovered-exactly the way he described it-earlier this century, but it had been destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Romans. So this account must have been written and was never changed before the year 70. No one after 70 could have written that there still is a pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda. So we have, for the Gospel of John, a historical, archaeological yardstick that indicates it was written before the year 70. And this is only one example of many. You could go on through the Gospels…[and] you would find argument after argument, pointer after pointer—archaeological, historical, literary, cultural, linguistic—for a date of all the Gospels and Acts before A.D. 70 and indeed much earlier.²¹

Craig Blomberg (2001)
An interesting grammatical observation that has convinced some of a pre-70 date is the use of the present tense in 5:2 — “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.” After Jerusalem’s destruction, these statements would no longer be true; one would expect past-tense verbs. On the other hand, John frequently uses the historical present tense and that may be all he is doing here, to mark out the scene more vividly. Daniel Wallace responds that he can find no other use of the historical present with the verb “to be” (Gk. eimi), but it is difficult to know how much significance to attach to this observation.²²

W. Hall Harris (2001)
A possible indication that Jerusalem was still undestroyed at the time the Fourth Gospel was written is found in Jn 5:2, which speaks of the pool of Bethesda (Bethzatha according to some manuscripts) with its five porticoes as still standing, using a present tense. The present tense is the only one in the immediate context—the writer uses imperfects for the rest of the description. This appears to give it special significance. Elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel (4:6, 11:18, 18:1, 19:41) John assimilates such topographical descriptions into the context. The natural inference from this use of the present tense is that John is writing while the building is still standing…Finally, the strong Palestinian influence throughout the gospel also suggests an early date. After John left for Ephesus and lived there for many years, such details would tend to fade and blur in memory. In conclusion, the Fourth Gospel was probably written shortly before AD 70 and the fall of Jerusalem.²³

Craig S. Keener (2003)
Scholars today often credit John with topographic reliability in matters such as the one at hand [here in Jn 5:2]; external evidence confirms the existence of a pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem before the city’s destruction, even though it is usually held that John writes over two decades after that event…The pool is near the “sheep gate” (5:2), which, like the rest of old Jerusalem, was near the temple…”²⁴

Andreas Köstenberger (2007)
[R]egarding the date of composition for John’s Gospel…only a very tiny minority of scholars argue for a pre-AD 70 date. I continue to be puzzled by Wallace’s strong interest in arguing for such a date. In my view (and also that of Craig Blomberg, D. A. Carson, and others), the tense form of a single Greek verb in John’s Gospel is hardly able to bear the heavy weight Wallace puts on it in proving the date of composition of the entire Gospel. Not that the majority is necessarily always right in biblical studies, but it must be said that there are good reasons why the virtual consensus of Johannine scholars holds to a post-AD 70 date.

Second, I continue to believe that we must be careful not to dismiss too quickly the possibility that a present tense form of eimi may be used in biblical narrative within a temporal scope that includes the past…In any case, I do not expect that many students of John’s Gospel will believe that the date of John’s Gospel can be established by a disputed use of one single verb tense in the Gospel (of course, Wallace may dispute that this point is disputed, but I dispute this!)…For these reasons, I think it is unwise for anyone to champion the view that John was written prior to AD 70, whether on the basis of the present tense form of eimi in John 5:2 or otherwise.²⁵

Thomas L. Stegall (2009)
In his article “Reconsidering the Date of John’s Gospel,”²⁶ Stegall argues that John 5:2 presents a “significant piece of internal evidence” that lends support for an earlier dating of John’s Gospe. In fact he writes, “The prima facie reading of this verse indicates that the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem and its five porticoes were intact at the time of John’s writing, thus providing a solid piece of evidence from within John’s Gospel that he wrote before the razing of the Jerusalem Temple in a.d. 70.”

William C. Weinrich (2015 )
The observation of Thyen is convincing: “According to its inner logic, the function of Jn 5:2 is to locate the less well-known [Bethesda] by referring to the generally well-known [Sheep Gate].” The Sheep Gate was destroyed by Titus in AD 70. This is implied by the report of Josephus:

Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and temple, but should leave as many of the towers standing as were of the greatest eminency; that is, Phasaelus, Hippicus, and Mariamne, and so much of the wall as enclosed the city on the west side…but the rest of the wall was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited (War, 7:1,3).

Assuming a post-70 dating of the Gospel, Schlatter writes that “there must have been a renovation of the earlier gate.”²⁷ In the introduction to his commentary, Weinrich lists several reasons why he believes the Fourth Gospel should be dated before the fall of Jerusalem and concludes with a proposal that it was “composed in Jerusalem during the 40s and [was] taken with John to Asia Minor in the early 50s.²⁸

J. Warner Wallace (2017)
In chapter 5, verse 2, John wrote, “there is in Jerusalem, by the sheep-gate, a pool (the one called Bethesda in Hebrew) which has five porticoes.” John used the present tense word “is” (ἐστιν) when describing the existence of the pool, yet the pool was destroyed in 70AD when Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans…John appears to have written this passage very early (as someone who knew Jerusalem intimately) to people who were familiar with the pool…In addition, the Muratorian Fragment, containing information dated to approximately 180AD, describes the origin of John’s Gospel and seems to take for granted the fact that John’s “fellow-disciples” (including the apostle Andrew) were still alive and present with John when he wrote his account. This would also argue for an early date of authorship…John’s Gospel most reasonably appears to have been written after the other Gospels and prior to 70AD.²⁹

James H. Charlesworth (2019)
The author informs us that there is a large pool in Jerusalem…near a place defined by sheep. If it denotes a sheep pool, it cannot be a place for washing sheep. The excavated pools are far too deep for washing a sheep…This area, north of the Temple, was mentioned by Nehemiah: “Then Eliashib the high priest arose with this brothers the priests and built the Sheep Gate…” (Neh 3:1; cf. 3:32, 12:39).

For 2,000 years, New Testament scholars have searched for spiritual nourishment by claiming to perceive a brilliant Christological creation in John 5; that is, the realization and affirmation that Jesus is the Great Healer, the Savior. Their focus on Christology led to a failure to perceive that the Evangelist may be describing, quite accurately an architectural feature of pre-70 Jerusalem.³⁰

John is not a late composition…the form in which most Christians know John is with 7:53 - 8:11; but this passage about the woman caught in the act of adultery was not part of the first edition...I am convinced that the earliest edition of John—the first edition—may antedate 70 CE. Why? It is because the author knew Jerusalem intimately, providing many architectural details which only thirty years ago we imagined were literary inventions…”³¹

John has amazing details about pre-70 CE Jerusalem and archaeologists are frequently able to prove John’s historical accuracy.³² The Pool of Bethsaida (Bethzatha) does have five porticoes and the columns can be seen today lying on the ground.³³ All the reasons that require a late date for the Gospel of John (sometime after 90 CE) have vanished. There is no longer a consensus regarding the date of John.³⁴

Items from the past do not come already interpreted. Archaeologists disagree, sometimes markedly, on the date and importance of an item. Our best method for assessing the date of John is the extant text of John.³⁵ The composition of John makes best sense if the definitive form, the first edition, was composed before 70 CE.³⁶ There is no reason to contend that it must have been composed after 70 CE.³⁷

While many scholars during the twentieth century agreed that John is late, dependent on the Synoptics, and took shape in the last decade of the first century CE, a consensus has appeared that each of these points is either inaccurate or in need of reconsideration.³⁸ Is it possible, then, to observe a paradigm shift…? Yes.³⁹

Lydia McGrew (2021)
There is a small contingent of scholars who argue for a very early date [of the Fourth Gospel], prior even to the fall of Jerusalem in 70. One of the major arguments they focus on is the use of the present tense verb in John 5.2, where the author says that there is a pool named Bethesda by the Sheep Gate. This is taken to point to a date before Jerusalem (and the Pool of Bethesda) were destroyed in 70. While I am not closed to the idea of a pre-70 date, this interesting verbal indication seems to me insufficient for a strong conclusion to that effect.⁴⁰

Jonathan Bernier (2022)
[John A.T.] Robinson addresses this passage but does not give it the full weight that it deserves. John 5:2 informs the reader that “in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha [Bethesda], which has five porticoes. The present tense is not simply an artifact of translation into English but is native to the Greek text. The relevant verbs are estin, the third-person present active indicative of the verb eimi (to be); and echousa, a present active participle of echo (to have). The most natural reading of the present tense in this passage is that this pool existed when the author was writing. Since the pool was destroyed in 70, we should prefer pre-70 composition for Jn 5:2.⁴¹

Although Robinson recognizes that this passage is most fully intelligible prior to 70, he does not fully appreciate the extent to which this is true. In fairness to Robinson, he did not have access to Daniel Wallace’s now-classic study on the matter, which appeared more than a decade after Redating the New Testament…[in which he 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. Wallace argues, however, that linguistically speaking, the historical present typically is associated with action verbs, not with verbs of being….Moreover, Wallace observes that he could not find a single instance of eimi being used as a historical present within the New Testament. In response to Wallace, Craig Blomberg writes, “It is difficult to know how much significance to attach to this observation. After all, most historical presents occur in a narrative where a specific verb of speech or action is highlighted.” Blomberg’s observation, however, seems to strengthen rather than weaken Wallace’s argument that historical presents are not typical of verbs of being, but rather of verbs of action. Considering the above, a historical present is unlikely. As such, it is probable that John 5:2 means to reference conditions as they stood at the time of composition.⁴²

N.T. Wright (2022)
On episode 144 of his podcast, Wright said, “The current Lady Margaret professor of New Testament in Cambridge, George van Kooten, is arguing in his new book on John for a much earlier date, a date I think maybe even in the 40s, or certainly the 50s. And I would say, actually, you don’t have to wait a long time to get deep theological reflection. The highest Christology in the New Testament is probably Philippians 2:6-11, which may well be a poem that’s already written before Philippians, in other words, in the late 40s or early 50s. So theological development doesn’t take place on a slow chronological line, it takes place in leaps and bounds and it’s quite possible that the traditional dating of the Gospels in scholarship, which has a late John, may well be wrong.”⁴³ Professor van Kooten’s argument for redating John is rooted in John 5:2, and his book is slated to be published in late 2024.

John Dickson (2024)
On episode 126 of his podcast, Dickson recently stated that “Most scholars date John to about the 90s AD. That’s what I’ve taught for years…but the work of a few outlier scholars in recent times has left me thinking nowadays that this Gospel could be as early as Mark’s Gospel—so, the 60s AD.”⁴⁴ Though he didn’t identify the names of those outlier scholars or the specific facts that ended up changing his thinking, his comments certainly reflect a new openness concerning the date of the Fourth Gospel.

George van Kooten (2024)
In August of 2024, Cambridge Professor Van Kooten argued in a public lecture⁴⁵ that John may be the earliest of the Four Gospels. The lecture was titled, ‘An Archimedean point for dating the Gospels: the pre-70 CE date of John, the special Lukan-Johannine relationship, the posteriority of Luke, and the nonnecessity of Q.’ Here is the way Dr. van Kooten summarized his address:

An Archimedean point for the solution of [the date of the Fourth Gospel] is now proposed in the present tense that John uses to tell that ‘there is in’ (ἔστιν δὲ ἐν) Jerusalem a monumental Herodian pool- with-five-porticoes (5:2), which was probably destroyed during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–70 CE). This argument has been proposed before by Bengel (1742), Blass (1907), Robinson (1976/85), and Wallace (1990) but is now for the first time based on broader grammatical, historical, and archaeological observations…If the Gospel of John is to be dated before 66 CE, it seems likely that John is prior to Luke and that it was Luke who was using John…Luke mainly employs John in his narrative of the trial, death, and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and it seems that he, as in a Διὰ τριῶν, makes use of all three Gospels before him, including John’s.

You can find van Kooten’s lecture handout here, and a summary of his presentation by Ian Paul here. In an interview recorded before he gave this lecture,⁴⁶ van Kooten pointed out that John 5:2 follows an existing formula in its description of the pool of Bethesda, which indicates that it was still in existence at the time of writing. “The expression ‘there is…’,” he argued, “is only used for that purpose. Historians date Greek texts on the basis of this formula.”

Richard Bauckham (2024)
“I saw no reason not to accept the late date [of John] until George [van Kooten] produced his argument about Jn 5:2…In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses I accepted the most common dating of the Gospels…So George’s argument about Jn 5:2 has disturbed me!” Concerning the date of the Synoptics, Bauckham writes, “Nowadays I am toying with a date for Mark in the 40s and Luke and Matthew (in that order) before 66.”⁴⁷

Peter J. Williams (2024)
On a recent interview on The Humble Skeptic podcast (episode #62), Williams says: “The professor in Cambridge, George van Kooten is arguing for a pre-70 date for the Gospel of John. Also, on those same grounds, I think there’s no reason why it has to be later…Because it says in John chapter 5 ‘there is in Jerusalem’ this gate, that makes more sense before the year 70.” Williams however was quick to add that though this exegetical argument based on John 5:2 seems to make more sense, “it doesn’t absolutely force my hand…For me, the question is not so much about the date of the Gospel as who’s it from…whenever the Gospels date from, they are all from people who are either eyewitnesses, in the case of Matthew and John or are close to eyewitnesses…” In his 2018 book, Can We Trust the Gospels, Williams similarly argued that “the four Gospels are so influenced by Judaism in their outlook, subject matter, and detail that it would be reasonable to date them considerably before the Jewish War.”⁴⁸

Michael J. Gorman (2024)
In September 2024, Dr. Gorman gave a series of lectures in which he argued that John and Paul share numerous thematic and linguistic features that are best explained if Paul had been influenced by the text of the Fourth Gospel. He therefore suggests that John was likely written “before the year 50 AD.” Gorman also cited the recent work of George van Kooten, and Jonathan Bernier as providing complelling evidence for a pre-66 dating of John’s Gospel, noting that both scholars highlighted the importance of John 5:2.⁴⁹

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Shane Rosenthal is the founder and host of The Humble Skeptic podcast. He was one of the creators of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast which he also hosted from 2019-2021, and has written numerous articles for TableTalk, Core Christianity, Modern Reformation, and numerous other sites and publications. Shane received a B.A. in Humanities from Cal-State Fullerton, and an M.A. in Historical Theology from Westminster Seminary California. The illustration of Jerusalem presented at the beginning of this post was created by Balage Balogh from Archaeology Illustrated, and is used by permission.

For additional resources related to this topic, click here.

1. If you are unfamiliar with the grammatical concept of a “historical present,” I strongly encourage you to listen to episode 51. This page also includes numerous books and resources for further reading on the issue of the dating of the Fourth Gospel.

2. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 531.

3. Daniel B. Wallace, John 5:2 and the Date of the Fourth Gospel...again

4. The Critical English Testament, Vol 1 ed. by W.L. Blackley and James Hawes (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1876) 573-574.

5. John Wesley’s Notes on the Whole Bible (commentary on John 5:2).

6. John Peter Lange, Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: John (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1871), 180

7. F. Godet, Commentary on the Gospel of John (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886), 455

8. Charles Taylor and Edward Robinson (editors), Calmet’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible (Boston: Croker & Brewster, 1832), 166.

9. B.F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981 reprint; 1881), 81

10. J.B. Lightfoot, The Gospel of St. John: A Newly Discovered Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 143

11. Ibid., 197

12. This city (pronounced “eeprah”) is roughly 80 miles west of Brussels in Belgium.

13. Hubert Edwin Edwards, The Disciple Who Wrote These Things: A new inquiry into the origins and historical value of the Gospel according to St. John (London: James Clarke & Co, 1953), 126-127

14. R.C.H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel 1-10 (St. Louis: Augsburg, 1961), 361

15. John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 278

16. Ibid., 352

17. John A.T. Robinson, The Priority of John (London: SCM Press, 1985), 70

18. D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 241

19. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, Revised - NICNT (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1995), 265

20. Ibid., 25-30

21. An interview with Carsten Peter Thiede, conducted by John Ross Schroeder, Good News Magazine, Dec 1, 1997.

22. Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2001), 43.

23. W. Hall Harris, The Gospel of John: Introduction and Commentary (Biblical Studies Press, 2001), 18. https://bible.org/seriespage/background-study-john

24. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary Vol 1. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 636.

25. Andreas Köstenberger, “Was John’s Gospel Written Prior to AD 70?” Wallace responded to Köstenberger by writing, “John 5.2 One More Time: A Response to Andreas Köstenberger.”

26. Thomas, L. Stegall, “Reconsidering the Date of John’s Gospel,” Chafer Theological Seminary Journal, Volume 14, Number 2 (Fall, 2009).

27. William C. Weinrich, John 1:1-7:1 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2015), 551, n. 12

28. Ibid., 44-51

29. J. Warner Wallace, “John’s Gospel May Have Been Last, But It Wasn’t Late,” published online at Cold-Case Christianity, March 13, 2017.

30. James H. Charlesworth, Jesus as Mirrored in John (London: T&T Clarke, 2019), 190.

31. Ibid., 2

32. Ibid., 155

33. Ibid., 153

34. Ibid., 47

35. Ibid., 48

36. Ibid., 47

37. Ibid., 49

38. Ibid., 41

39. Ibid., 155

40. Lydia McGrew, The Eye of the Beholder (Tampa: DeWard Publishing Co., 2021), 148

41. Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking The Dates of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 97. Though he disagrees with Robinson’s approach at various points, Bernier ends up agreeing with his overall premise that the entire New Testament was written before 70 AD. In his 2018 book, Can We Trust The Gospels?, similarly argued that all four Gospels “are so influenced by Judaism in their outlook, subject matter, and detail that it would be reasonable to date them considerably before the Jewish War” (p. 81).

42. Ibid., 98-100

43. This episode of Ask N.T. Wright Anything was released in November 2022 which you can find here.

44. Undeceptions, Episode 126, “Jesus’ Biography,” May 6th, 2024 (this quote appears approx. 12 minutes into the episode.

45. British New Testament Society Conference, Aug. 22–24, 2024 at The University of Glasgow. For George van Kooten’s address, see page 15 of this PDF.

46. Recorded on March 31, 2024. You can find an English translation of selections from this interview here.

47. You can find these recent statements by Bauckham in the comments section of an online article by Ian Paul titled, “Was John the First Gospel?” Bauckham’s comments were posted in Aug. and Sept. of 2024, however, I have not presented them in chronological order.

48. Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, Crossway, 2018), 81.

49. You can find Gorman’s lecture series here. His discussion relative to the dating of John’s Gospel is found in the third lecture (beginning at 55:43). A similar argument was also made by Crispin Fletcher-Louis. You can find the abstract of his recent SBL paper here.