Chronology of Jesus' ministry: John and the Synoptics

Question

I've heard that there is a recent trend to see the Fourth Gospel - despite its obvious theological purpose as compared to especially Luke - as actually more chronological than the Synoptics. Wikipedia seems to rely pretty heavily on arguments by John Robinson for this position. Are there other more recent pieces of scholarship that support this position?

Answer 1

A few sources that might be helpful on this are as follows:

1. Andreas Köstenberger A Theology of John's Gospel and Letters: The Word, the Christ, the Son of God
2. D. A. Carson The Gospel According to John
3. Mark Strauss Four Portraits, One Jesus

Köstenberger argues extensively for the historicity of John's gospel. He surveys the history of scholarship in Johannine studies in his first chapter, "Johannine Theology and the Historical Setting of John's Gospel and Letters." Particularly helpful sections in this chapter include 1.3 Prolegomena, 2.1.2 The Quest for the Historical Setting of John's Gospel, and 2.1.3.2 Chronology of Jesus' Ministry in John's Gospel. He spends more time on the historical setting of the gospel itself than he does on the relationship to the Synoptics. If he does cover that question in more detail elsewhere, I can't remember it. I highly recommend Köstenberger's work to anyone interested in Johannine studies. He also has a commentary on John's gospel, but I don't have ready access to that.

Carson includes a ten page discussion of the relationship between John's Gospel and the Synoptics (pp. 49-58). I have only skimmed this section, but it really appears that Carson argues for the interlocking nature of the historical events recorded in the Synoptics and John's gospel. For instance, see below:

The lessons gleaned from this pattern of interlocking traditions have some bearing on the larger array of perceived chronological and other contradictions that lie between John and the Synoptics. In particular, one must constantly ask whether there is some larger historical reality that supports both the witness of John and the witness of one or more of the Synoptics. (p. 55)

And then later:

More generally, though the Christological distinctiveness of John's gospel should not be denied, it should not be exaggerated. True, only this Gospel explicitly designates Jesus 'God' (1:1, 18; 20:28); but this Gospel also insists not only on Jesus' humanity but on his profound subordination to the Father (cf. especially the notes on 5:16-30). Conversely, the Synoptists, for all their portrayal of Jesus as a man, portray him as the one who has the right to forgive sins (Mk. 2:1-13 par. -- and who can forgive sins but God alone?), and relate parables in which Jesus transparently takes on the metaphorical role most commonly assigned to God in the Old Testament. (p. 57)

Carson concludes as follows regarding the relationship of John's gospel to the Synoptics:

In short, the variegated relationship that John enjoys with the Synoptic Gospels, far from calling into question the Fourth Gospel's essential authenticity, on close inspection either supports it or allows for it on every hand. (p. 58)

I only mentioned Strauss because he has some helpful (though basic) discussion of the chronology of Jesus' ministry that incorporates material from both John and the Synoptics, including some helpful charts that highlight chronological references in John and how they fit within an overall chronology (pp. 405-408).

Answer 2

If such scholarship exists, I don't know about it. But there is a slightly nuanced position that suggests that the material in the Fourth Gospel has at least as much, if not more, historical weight than the Synoptics. What you seem to be asking for is scholar who takes John's chronology over, say, Mark's every time. That seems a tall order since the prevailing theory seems to be that no New Testament text was as uptight about chronology as we are today.

An excellent example of a scholar who puts a great deal of faith in the historical accuracy of the stories in John is Ben Witherington III who has proposed the rather novel theory that the Beloved Disciple is Lazarus. If so, the material in John is as intimate a portrait of Jesus as could possibly be imagined. How many biographies are written by someone the subject has raised from the dead?

Almost everyone believes that John was written independently of the Synoptics and may not have even had access to them. That means that John provides important confirmation of details of Jesus' life when it includes stories that overlap. (For instance, the story of the woman anointing Jesus' feet in John 12:1-8 and Mark 14:3-9.) But where they disagree, we must pick and choose based on the evidence (and our theory of the how the texts came to be written).

Most scholars that I've read, hold that John was compiled rather late (but no later than 125 and probably much earlier). Thus the order of the stories do not reflect the historical chronology as well as they might in Mark. (The cleansing of the Temple might have been moved to the front of the Fourth Gospel for thematic reasons, for instance.) On the other hand, if the stories in John are from an early source (whether Lazarus or John son of Zebedee or some other eyewitness), it may have more authentic details related to chronology. Perhaps the most important timing difference is John 13:1 (ESV):

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

Mark 14:12 (ESV):

And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?”

So was the Last Supper a Passover meal or was it the day before the Feast of the Passover? If you take John's material as largely ahistorical, the answer is it was a Passover meal. However, if the stories recorded in John have a historical basis, there's a strong case to be made that Mark and other witnesses misunderstood that Jesus celebrated the feast early or had a meal that only resembled the Passover meal. (And of course there are many attempts to reconcile the stories as well. These also assume the detail in John is reliable.)

[But perhaps there is scholarship I don't know about that supports even a chronological ordering in John.]