In a new book, George van Kooten, the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity and a specialist on the New Testament in its Graeco-Roman context, advances the theory that the Gospel of John is in fact the earliest Gospel.
First proposed in an article in the top journal of the New Testament discipline last year, van Kooten has now developed a full theory in a book on all the Four Gospels, Reverberations of Good News: The Gospels in Context.
“It is important to understand that all Four Gospels on Jesus were written in Greek,” said van Kooten. “In my book I argue that whatever else the Gospels may have been, the fact that they have been written in Greek makes them part of the Graeco-Roman world. Reading them in this way, gives them consistency and reveals their place in the surrounding world.”
Previously, because of its sophistication, the Gospel of John was seen as a late Gospel that could only have been written after a considerable development of early Christianity. Because of this 19th-century evolutional model, the Gospel of Mark, up to now considered to be the oldest Gospel, was by contrast read as a simple, primitive Gospel.
This is now all being challenged by van Kooten’s contextual reading of all Gospels in their Graeco-Roman context. Because of this, the Gospel of Mark is also being reassessed and appears to have been written by a Roman author who used important literary techniques.
The book is simultaneously published in the UK and the USA, and van Kooten has already been invited to present and discuss the book at multiple major conferences in the field this year: the British New Testament Conference, the European Association of Biblical Studies, and the Society of Biblical Literature (USA), and at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, of which he is a member.