nine fragments found in Egypt suggests that the Gospel of John may have
circulated widely there. C.H. Dodd states that “whatever other elements of
thought may enter into the background of the Fourth Gospel, it certainly
presupposes a range of ideas having a remarkable resemblance to those of
Hellenistic Judaism as represented by Philo” (1953, 73). Though, more
recently, scholars have viewed the Jewish background of the Fourth Gospel
more broadly (see W.D. Davies 1996).
Some scholars suggest Antioch, on the grounds that Ignatius of Anti-
och, whom Latin writers considered to be a disciple of John, may have
drawn on the Fourth Gospel (R.E. Brown 1966, 1:ciii). More recently, it
has been argued that the Gospel of John was written in the tetrarchy of
Herod’s son Philip, in the region of Batanea and Gaulanitis (modern Golan
Heights), where the spoken language was Greek and where Jewish Chris-
tians constituted a significant portion of the population (Wengst 1983).
Any of the above-mentioned cities would have provided the conditions in
which the Johannine community would have encountered a sizable num-
ber of Jews among whom to recruit new adherents.
The history of Johannine scholarship adds to the appeal of the Johan-
nine community as a test case for Stark’s approach. The prevailing under-
standing of the community’s demography and general history conforms to
the model that Stark is criticizing. That is, most scholars argue that although
the originating members of the Johannine community were Jews, the mis-
sion to the Jews had largely been abandoned by the time the Gospel of
John reached its present form near the end of the first century CE(cf.
Culpepper 1998, 46, who comments on the large influx of non-Jewish
believers into the Johannine community after its expulsion from the syn-
agogue). By this point in time, the Johannine community included Samar-
itan and Gentile converts, and directed its outreach primarily to the Gentiles.
The pivotal moment in the history of the community is thought to have been
a traumatic expulsion of Jewish Christians from the synagogue in approx-
imately 85 CE. This event marked a severe downturn in the relationship
between the Johannine Christians and the Jewish community, which would
have precluded missionary outreach. Most important scholars of the Johan-
nine tradition view the community’s history along these lines (see, e.g., Bar-
rett 1970; R.E. Brown 1979; Martyn 1979; D.M. Smith 1984; Culpepper
1998; cf. Reinhartz 1998a).
At the same time, a small but vocal number of Johannine scholars dis-
agree with this construction and argue that the community continued to
seek Jewish converts and that the Gospel of John was intended as a mis-
sionary document aimed at convincing Diaspora Jews that Jesus is the
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