Dating John's Gospel and the Ancient Witnesses

The Gospel of John probably was not completed until the late 1st century. So how early would one expect quotes from the book to appear? If Ignatius of Antioch references John, that would be quite early (ca. 110 CE); Irenaeus of Lyons probably uses John's Gospel and he wrote around 180 CE. What we also have to consider is that it's not enough for a Gospel to exist, but it also had to be considered authoritative by the early church and apostolically rooted. So if early fathers already impute that kind of weight to the Fourth Gospel, then it should speak volumes, not to mention Origen's thorough discussion of the Johannine Prologue and later, Augustine of Hippo and John Chrysostom's discussions. And let's not forget that the 2nd-century Muratorian Canon likewise recognizes John's Gospel?

From what we know of the Gospels, the Prologue could not have been written that late. One other thing: the pre-Nicenes wrote for a reason. So not all of them needed to quote the Johannine Prologue in order to accomplish their purpose for writing.

Stanley Porter, after a rigorous analysis of the papyrological evidence, offers the following proposal:

If the timeline I have just articulated is correct, and if a reasonable time for transmission of a document was thirty years (this seems to be a rule of thumb used by a number of scholars),⁸⁰ then it is worth reconsidering the date of composition for John's Gospel. I cannot go into detail here, but the sequence would fit both ends of the trajectory noted above. Beginning with the latest date, if P.Rylands Greek 457 was copied around 120, then a reasonable date of the composition of John’s Gospel would be around 90. So far, this conclusion matches the standard and usual dates for the composition of the two documents, as indicated above. If P.Rylands Greek 457 was copied around 100, however, then the date of composition of John's Gospel might have been as early as 70. This scenario also would fit within the parameters of some of the suggested dates for John's Gospel mentioned above. If we were to be highly speculative and posit a date for copying of P.Rylands Greek 457 that was earlier than 100, then that would quite possibly, even if not necessarily, push the date of composition of John's Gospel even earlier, possibly even earlier than the fall of Jerusalem. Even though the usual arguments for such an early date are not convincing, as noted above, an argument from the surrounding manuscript data may just make such a hypothesis at least worth considering and not dismissing too easily. I will note that there is no early papyrological or transmissional evidence that stands in the way of an early dating. In fact, the timeline above might well encourage such a recalculation.

See Porter, John, His Gospel, and Jesus: In Pursuit of the Johannine Voice