On “The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church” by Charles E. Hill *****

I thought I'd read one of the best books one could possibly read with Culpepper's bio and exploration of all the different tales about John through history, but Hill's book managed to provide something new and thoughtful. (I was drawn to the book having been impressed by many of his scholarly articles and realized his book-length work might be intriguing, and it is.) The book is a long one, longer than Culpepper's, and the point much more narrow, but I get the sense that Hill had to be so thorough because his views do not seem to be very popular among contemporary scholars. Essentially, the whole book is devoted to slapping down one argument—namely that the works of John, and most especially his Gospel, were not accepted by the early church because they started out as works more popular among Gnostic sects. As such, it was not until Irenaeus adopted John for the mainstream church that John's materials were acceptable for the canon. Hill quotes early text after early text, looking at just about every allusion to John that likely exists.

Hill shows how the "Johannophobia" of the early church, as he terms it, is simply not true. He shows that John's work was written mostly to counter Gnostic-type ideas and that most Gnostic sects understood his work in that way. Although one can find references to John's work in Gnostic literature, it is not complementary. It usually argues against John; if it uses John, it does so in a way that such groups would have used any such scriptures: that is, by finding analogies to their various aeon systems and so forth that would not have spoken to anyone who was not already initiated into and in agreement with such a system.

Furthermore, Hill goes on to show, most early church officials did accept John's work, most especially the Gospel, but also Revelation and 1 John, as apostolic and used it in their writings. (2 and 3 John are rarely used., but their brevity would preclude much usage—and the mere fact that they were preserved suggests that others thought them the work of the same author and bound them together.) Hill's claim with regard to usage of John's writing in general is a bit tricky but also well founded—that is, often early church writers didn't directly quote John, but to be fair, they rarely directly quote any of the New Testament. That just wasn't how authors wrote at the time, as many had to quote things from memory, not having a book before them. (Indeed, the work I recently finished reading about Eusebius noted that as one of his great innovations: the degree to which he quoted authors directly.) As such, the “quotes” of John are usually paraphrases of a sort, but the ideas seem very much contingent on his work. The implication is, further, that John was the author of all of the works generally attributed to him—that was certainly how writers in the first two centuries treated the works and attributed them (irrespective of whether John actually wrote them, which Hill doesn't take a hard stand on). It was only really in Eusebius's time that John's writings began to be called into question—and most especially, his apocalypse, because millennialism had fallen out of favor and Revelation is heavy on it. That critique has since found its way into modern scholarship, but it is nothing new, even if it didn't arise in the earliest centuries.