Why is John such a different Gospel?
By Nate Corley
First off: kudos to whoever asked this question. Casual Bible readers might not even notice the uniqueness of John compared to the other three gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). So commendations to the astute Impact student who sent this in for consideration!
John is, for sure, a different sort of gospel: both in tone and content. You can tell from the first chapter (where John launches into a breathtaking, poetic prologue that starts before creation and previews the incarnation, rejection, mission, and triumph of Jesus) that this is going to be something distinctive. And then as you go through John’s gospel, you’ll notice he does not include many of the stories/sayings we find in the other three (called the “synoptics,” meaning “from the same viewpoint,” due to their similarities). And then John DOES include many stories and sayings from Jesus we don’t find anywhere else (around 90% of John’s gospel is unique, meaning we don’t find this stuff in the other three).
So why is this? A few factors to consider.
Different writer. This one is pretty basic: if you ask four different people to write an account of the same event, there will inevitably be differences in how they tell the story. I’m not about contradictions here – just differences in what different witnesses will choose to include, what they will leave out, and what they will highlight. This is, in fact, one of the reasons we can trust the gospels in scripture: it’s clear they were written by four different writers who wrote their accounts without collaboration or collusion. So part of the reason John is different is that the gospel is a reflection of his unique personality, viewpoint, and even language (the text of John uses some of the most simple, elegant Greek in the New Testament…versus some of the most complex Greek and vocabulary that we find in Luke). It’s clear that God loves diversity – even in the His written revelation.
Different purpose. It’s very likely that John’s gospel was written last of the four (maybe 50-60 years after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, when John was an old man). And there’s also a good chance John was aware of the content of the other three gospels. In fact, an early church leader named Clement of Alexandria said this: “But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.” Meaning: John wanted to write a gospel that emphasized some of the things not already present in the existing gospels. So he did. And John even acknowledges straight up at the end of his book (maybe in a nod to the existing gospels) that his work itself was never intended to be comprehensive: “Jesus did many other signs vin the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book” (John 20:30). So John wasn’t writing with the goal of including every little thing Jesus ever did, but to share and explain what he had seen with his own eyes as a follower of Jesus for this purpose: “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).
God’s providence. It’s important to remember that John and the other disciples didn’t just write willy-nilly. The Spirit of God was intimately involved in the composition of each book of the Bible, as well as the Bible as a whole (2 Tim. 3:16-17). So maybe the ultimate answer is this: John’s gospel is different because God wanted it to be different. And so when we hold our Bible’s in our hands, with all their different writers and writing styles and emphases and personalities jumping off the page…we can rest assured we have the exact book God wanted us to have. And then we can spend the rest of our lives engaging in the joyful challenge of digging in and finding out why.