Gospel of John controversy

[Pat Mustard]

Recently read this article:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/everyones-...w-research

This seems like  really old news to me.  I can remember being a Catholic teenager and noticing certain odd things about the Gospel of John including the marked difference in style and tone from the other gospels (as if a different person were speaking).  And I was about 16 when I first heard that all the gospels were written decades after Jesus died - with the Gospel of John being written about 100 years or more later which represents several generations at that time.  

And yes, I know that ALL the gospels could be said to have murky origins and that none are historically traceable to actual followers of Jesus.  Which creates kind of an interesting question about why Jesus didn't just write his teachings down himself, or get someone to do it while he was alive - since if he were God in the flesh he would have seen that these controversies would arise.

But here it seems like scholars have known for centuries that there were particular indicators that the Gospel of John is highly suspect, yet did not openly challenge it.  Even today some scholars call the first three gospels the "historical gospels" and the 4th gospel the "spiritual gospel."  I mean FFS the guy called himself "the disciple that Jesus loved" (this always seemed weird to me even as a kid, that Jesus would have loved only one of his followers if he was in fact God - shouldn't he love everyone?).  Also, the author apparently inserted himself into stories that appear in the other three gospels, when due to the time the gospel was written he couldn't actually have been present.

For more about the "Johannine works" controversy here's the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship...nine_works

I'm interested in knowing links for any other information about this controversy.

None of the gospels are historical, because none of them are written by people with access to first or even second hand accounts of the life of Yeshua bar Yosef. Mark is accepted as the oldest, and the very earliest that was written is 75CE (whenever biblical scholars date a bible passage, that is invariably the earliest possible date, not the likeliest date) and we know that gospel was significantly different until at least the 4th century CE (Codex Vaticanus doesn't have a description of tge "resurrection" in Mark as it was added later in the century). In fact the earliest confirmed date we have for the existence of any of the gospels is late into the 2nd century CE. Older samples are scraps of no better than one or two words.