The author of John believed that Jesus was a divine being who came to earth to transform humans into divine beings. To encourage others to embrace this startling vision, that author composed a gospel filled with invented materials--one in which Jesus communicates the author's views through cryptic words and symbolic gestures left for readers to decipher. Finally, to make this revisionary portrait of Jesus plausible, the author concealed his identity, attributing his Gospel to an invented, shadowy disciple of Jesus gifted with supernatural insight and able to retrieve lost memories of Jesus's life. In these respects, the Gospel of John is similar to the so-called apocryphal gospels produced in the second century, including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas.

The invention of this eyewitness was not a self-contained event, however. It was the genesis of a new and vibrant literary tradition. As the enigmatic disciple of the Gospel was folded into the same collective memory as Peter and Paul, he became a viable mask for other authors. In time, many such writers--among them, the authors of 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Revelation, the Apocryphon of John, and the Epistula Apostolorum--coopted this figure, repurposing him for new agendas and weaving countless afterlives for him. The Gospel of John: A New History traces this arc, showing how a single act of disguised authorship ignited new literary trajectories and dramatically shaped twenty centuries of Christian culture.