Purpose[edit]

This article is modeled after New Testament people named Mary, which tackles the similar problem of sorting out the various Marys. Sorting out the Johns is still more troublesome, because it is entangled with the question of the authorship of the Johannine literature.

Previous editors have done an excellent job of splitting out the not-necessarily-identical Johns into separate articles. Someone created a Template:John to make it easier to see how they were all connected, which several commenters found helpful.

Still, many editors felt that the separate pages tended to attract a lot of duplicate treatment, on the one hand, while fragmenting discussion of the issue of mutual identity, on the other. Thus, the need was felt for some central treatment. A first attempt was at Talk:Names of John, which now uselessly redirects to John (given name).

A second attempt was made at Talk:Authorship of the Johannine works. The latter, at present, scarcely touches on the topic that motivated its creation, such as whether or not John the Evangelist was John the Apostle. Rather, the article treats the authorship of the Gospel itself at length, rehashing old theories about how some hypothetical Johannine community fabricated the work in the second or third century, plus separate short treatments of the Epistles and Revelation. I pointed out there that actual authorship is one question, while sorting out the Johns to whom the Johannine literature is attributed is another. So, my inclination is to dissolve that article and treat authorship of each work separately—or, if a common treatment is warranted at all, as in "this work is/isn't so similar to that one as to imply/disprove common authorship"—treat such matters briefly in the common article and refer to individual articles for the rest.

So, this third attempt focuses specifically on the various people named John in the New Testament, including both narrative figures and authors, and especially on the question of their mutual identity. And, actually, this works out well, as there are five narrative Johns (excluding John the Revelator), of whom three have been seriously proposed as Johannine authors (namely, John the Apostle, John Mark, and John of the High Priest's family), and John the Baptist has even been proposed as somehow the source of Revelation. So, it really does all cohere as a tangled mess.

External links modified (February 2018)[edit]

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