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Not too long ago, I was reading through a summary of the Gospel of John, looking at the evidence for and against John the Apostle as the author. Scholars have long wondered who the “beloved disciple” might be, and whether or not this disciple is indeed the author of the Gospel. External and internal evidence points to John, but there are other possible candidates.

During my reading, I was struck by one of the arguments made against John as the author: he was nicknamed a “son of thunder” and once, during Jesus’ ministry, wanted to call down fire from heaven on a town that had not received Jesus’ message. So, the logic goes, a hot-tempered young man who gets nicknamed “thunder” cannot possibly be the Apostle of love, author of the Gospel and of 1 John.

Do you notice the underlying presupposition of this argument? People can’t change. If you’re a fiery, judgmental young man, you can’t grow up to be Christlike and filled with love. In this line of argumentation, the possibility of gospel-transformation is excised from the picture.

Now, it may be that hot-tempered young men rarely turn out to be filled with the love and patience of Christ… at least apart from the gospel. Yes, apart from the gospel, that argument against John’s authorship makes a lot of sense.

But it’s the “apart from the gospel” assumption in many circles of scholarship that bugs me. The tendency is to put forth scholarly arguments centered in a naturalist understanding of human behavior, instead of letting our scholarly assumptions be gospel-formed.

Regardless of who you think wrote the Gospel of John, don’t say that John couldn’t have been the author because a son of thunder can’t become the Apostle of Love. That line of argumentation denies the power of the gospel to change a life.

Some might say that the Apostle Peter could never have preached on the day of Pentecost. Why not? Because just weeks earlier, he was denying Jesus and fleeing from persecution. But again, this kind of interpretation makes sense only if we do not believe in the gospel’s power.

It is vitally important that we approach matters of scholarship in a way that affirms our belief in gospel transformation. We are a gospel-formed people. Our assumptions and our approach to scholarship should be gospel-formed as well.

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