A tide of books about the Gospel of John are now hitting the shelves, marking a trend that is perhaps worthy of a biblical text that opens with the phrase, “In the beginning was the Word.”
These recent and forthcoming books consider new and different theological, historical, and cultural perspectives on the book that is often called “the fourth gospel”—distinct in tone and authorship from the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
In John, Jesus speaks not in parables, but in first-person discourses that are more theological in nature than in the other, more historical gospels. John also focuses more on miracles during Jesus’s ministry, and less on messages about the “kingdom of heaven” highlighted in the other three gospels.
“Is John having a moment? Yes,” says Beatrice Rehl, publisher at Cambridge University Press, which in December published The Epistles of John: Origins, Authorship, Purpose by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill associate professor of religious studies Hugo Méndez.
Rehl attributed this surge of attention to “a new generation of scholars that is challenging the entrenched views of older generations about who wrote these texts, why, and how.” She said she received several proposals in 2025 for books about the Gospel of John and commissioned one for the publisher’s Cambridge Companion series.
Méndez also had a book on John published by Oxford University Press in July 2025, The Gospel of John: A New History. In his books with both publishers, Méndez argues that John was “a made-up character,” says Steve Wiggins, senior editor at Oxford, who acquired and worked on the title. Wiggins, who calls Méndez “a rising star,” says his novel idea opens up new ways to “approach constantly-shifting assessments about the composition of the New Testament."
Archaeological finds spark fresh ideas
According to Trevor Thompson, executive editor at Eerdmans, the Gospel of John “has been regarded as the least historical and most ‘spiritual’” of the four gospels, “the one that views the life of Jesus from the sky.” Eerdmans will publish Paul N. Anderson’s Archaeology, Jesus, and the Gospel of John: What Recent Discoveries Show Us in May.
Using “emerging archaeological evidence from excavations in Jerusalem, Judea, and the Galilee,” Thompson says the book “pushes back against the thesis that the Gospel of John is removed from history and argues that it needs to be taken seriously as a reliably historical document of the life of Jesus.”
Anderson is a professor of biblical and Quaker studies at George Fox University, where he was a founding member of the John, Jesus, and History Project, a group of scholars in the Society of Biblical Literature with a special interest in studying John. Anderson's presentation at the SBL's 2025 conference in Boston, The Wisdom of Jesus and Solomon in Johannine Perspective, was “standing room-only,” according to Thompson.
Timely and timeless conversations
Though Anderson’s book has been in the works for a decade, Thompson calls it “an absolute serendipity” that it will be published “while there’s a resurgence of interest in John, and also while there’s a broad global conversation going on about the very geographical territory in which these events are taking place.”
Cornell University’s Near Eastern studies professor Kim Haines-Eitzen’s The Gospel of John: A Biography (Princeton Univ., Feb.) is not about John’s theology or historicity. Rather, it is “called a biography because it concerns the life of this text,” says Princeton publisher Fred Appel. The book is part of the Lives of Great Religious Books series, led by Appel, that has explored Hebrew Bible and New Testament texts as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Lotus Sutra, and the Book of Mormon, among dozens of others.
With its stories such as the raising of Lazarus and the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, the Gospel of John “has been inspiring to artists, composers, playwrights, novelists, and short story writers” who are drawn to its “cinematic” drama, says Appel.
A small sampling of many works prompted by John would include Bach's St. John’s Passion oratorio and John's telling of the miracle at Cana has inspired dozens of works including mosaics, paintings by artists is such as Tintoretto and Hieronymous Bosch, and a series of woodcuts by Gustave Doré.
The text “lends itself to dramatic tellings and re-tellings” across eras from post-biblical times to the Crusades and the Reformation, to contemporary American evangelicalism, Appel adds.
Fourth or first?
Eerdmans in particularly has been enthusiastic about the John revival, publishing two books with new perspectives on John this past fall with a third in the works for 2027.
In its 2025 title The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Duke University religious studies professor Mark Goodacre argues that John should be considered authorially connected to Matthew, Mark, and Luke—books that are classically referred to as the “synoptic gospels.” And in last year’s other John-related title, Reverberations of Good News: The Gospels in Context, Then and Now, George van Kooten, who holds the prestigious chair of Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, posits that John’s was actually the first gospel. This assertion, Thompson says, “will create a lot of controversy” at academic sessions such as the next annual SBL meeting in November.
Under contract, tentatively scheduled for 2027, is a book that Thompson foresees will be Anderson’s “magnum opus,” provisionally titled Jesus in Johannine Perspective: A Fourth Quest for Jesus.
Overall, this wave of interest in John reflects the “ebb and flow” pattern of biblical scholarship, says Thompson. “When you’re dealing with ancient history, if you don’t have new sources brought to bear, you kind of exhaust the questions.” But archaeological discoveries and the perspectives of “fresh PhDs,” Thompson says, prompt “scholars look again and wonder, ‘did we get that right?’"
