Art Resource

Parchment on his knee, John the Evangelist composes his Gospel in a 12th-century Byzantine illumination from a manuscript now at the National Library in Athens. Long thought the last of the Gospels to have been written and the most Greek in its philosophy, the Gospel of John is now the subject of intense new study. Thanks to new manuscript finds—prominent among them the Dead Sea Scrolls—Johannine studies is undergoing a revolution. James Charlesworth, himself an important catalyst in that revolution, details the new scholarly understanding of the Fourth Gospel and explains why John is now considered to have been written nearly a century earlier than previously thought and to be the most Jewish of the Gospels.