This post contains an original short post at BSA and very substantive responses by Schaun Wheeler, Schaun’s responses are the reason for this posts. All emphasis and subheadings are mine.
The next post is Part 2 and contains two responses by Claude.ai with the first summarizing Wheeler’s thesis below and the next comparing it to the positions of Ehrman, Tabor, and Goodacre. Below that is a extract from Bart’s blog where scriptures are cited to show a belief at that time in existence before life and after life; i.e. Reincarnation.
Original Post at BSA by Bruce A. Bergen on 11/7/2026. – I’ve read about the change in Jesus’s message as shown in the first three gospels versus the idea of being reborn and going to heaven, in John. How does biblical scholars like Dr. Ehrman understand the reason this happened?
Keith P. Myers – John’s gospel contains quite a bit of Greek thought/philosophy. You might say it is the most “Hellenized” Gospel. The whole idea of the Logos is from Greek philosophy. The idea of an immortal soul that goes immediately to heaven above after death is from Greek philosophy.
Reply to Keith by Schaun Wheeler
Keith P. Myers – John does use ideas a Greek-educated reader would recognize – especially the Logos – but I’m not sure most “Hellenized” gospel is a useful category. By Jesus’s time, Greek ideas had already been thoroughly absorbed into Judaism, so when John uses something that sounds Greek, it’s hard to say whether it came straight from Greek philosophy or through Jewish writers who had already taken it up.
The Logos is actually a good example, I think. The word has a long history in Greek philosophy, going back to Heraclitus and the Stoics – an impersonal divine reason running through the universe. But John’s Logos is closer to how Jewish writers talked about God’s Wisdom. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is with God at creation; in the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is a reflection of God’s own light. And Philo was already using the word Logos for something close to that role of a go-between through whom God creates and relates to the world. John’s Logos comes out of that blend, not out of Greek philosophy alone.
And I don’t think any Greek philosopher would have said that the Logos “became flesh.” Some of John’s other distinctive language has Jewish parallels too. The Dead Sea Scrolls contrast light and darkness, and a spirit of truth with a spirit of deceit, much as John does.
Regarding the idea of an immortal soul…I agree the idea is mainly Greek in origin and made its way into Jewish writing by around Jesus’s time. But John doesn’t teach it. John never describes anyone going to heaven when they die, and it still expects believers to be raised “on the last day.” He does say believers already have eternal life and that those who believe “will never die,” but that’s a claim about a life that death doesn’t interrupt, not about a soul leaving the body. If anything, Luke comes closer to the idea with the parable of Lazarus and the promise to the man on the cross.
Reply by Schaun Wheeler to the Original Post
Can I push back on your framing? As I read the evidence, we can’t say that the first three gospels share one message, and we can’t say that John is about going to heaven. I do think John differs from the others in important ways, just not mainly the ways you’ve mentioned.
Matthew and Luke share much of Mark’s order and wording. When one of them departs from Mark’s order, the other usually keeps it, and they rarely depart from it together. The usual explanation is that both used Mark. It’s true that the three fit into one story without much trouble, especially when they’re taught event by event or theme by theme, as (in my experience) most church curricula do. John doesn’t fit into that as well – the temple scene comes near the start, there are three Passovers, Jesus dies before the Passover meal rather than after it, there are no words over the bread and cup, etc. John’s differences are so hard to miss, that I think that makes it easy to miss how the first three differ from each other.
For example, in Mark 10:17–19 a man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers, “Why do you call me good?” and then “You know the commandments.” Matthew retells the scene (19:16–17) as “Why do you ask me about what is good?” followed by “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Matthew’s version puts the weight on keeping the commandments, which fits other changes Matthew makes.
That example is part of a larger pattern. Read on their own, Matthew, Mark and Luke each argue a different thesis:
Mark says that knowing who Jesus is doesn’t make someone a faithful follower. Jesus tells his disciples plainly, more than once, that he will be killed, and they still fail him when following him starts to cost them something. In the oldest manuscripts, the book ends with the women at the tomb told to spread the news and saying nothing, which leaves the message with the reader.
Matthew says the law of Moses stays in force, as Jesus interprets it, until the end of the age. Everyone, including Jesus’s own followers, will be judged by whether they actually keep it, and being forgiven by God obligates you to forgive others.
Luke says God is turning the social order upside down and has already started. God’s favor goes to the poor and to outsiders, and the comfortable are warned that they may already have had all the comfort they’re going to get.
So it’s not that Mark, Matthew, and Luke have one argument about Jesus and John has another. Each of the four teaches its own thesis. The greater overlap in material among the first three, and the way it’s typically taught in devotional settings, makes that harder to see.
I’m not sure I can even agree that Matthew, Mark and Luke have no expectation of being “born again” in the sense of accepting Jesus in your heart. Each makes a person’s response to Jesus matter:
- Mark (following when it costs you): “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” The next verse says whoever loses their life for his sake will save it (8:34–35).
- Matthew (Jesus’s teaching as the Torah you live by): “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me” (11:29). Later Jewish teachers spoke of taking on “the yoke of the Torah” (Mishnah Avot 3:5) and “the yoke of the kingdom of heaven” (Berakhot 2:2) in the same way.
- Luke (God’s welcome reaching outsiders first): Zacchaeus, a rich tax collector the crowd calls a sinner, “was happy to welcome him” into his house, and Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house” because “he, too, is a son of Abraham.”
The parable of the sower likewise describes the message being taken in, or lost, inside the person who hears it – that’s in all three synoptics. Mark 10:15 and Matthew 18:3 also both contain a version of the saying that only those who become like little children will be able to receive or enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew says “kingdom of heaven”), which is close to what John says about being born from above. It’s true that none of them talk about Jesus living inside a person. That specific wording appears in John, where Jesus talks about being born from above (not necessarily being born again – that’s Nicodemus’s misunderstanding) and says that he and the Father “will come to them and make our home with them.” But absence of specific wording can just be a difference in how each writer chose to express themselves rather than a fundamental difference in teaching.
I’m not convinced that Matthew, Mark and Luke have no expectation of going to heaven. Luke in particular describes where people are right after death. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man Lazarus is carried to be with Abraham while the rich man suffers in Hades. On the cross, Jesus tells one of the men crucified with him that they will be together in paradise that day. Luke never calls either place heaven, and the Lazarus story is a parable, but it’s more than John says on the subject. The born-again passage is the only place John uses the phrase “kingdom of God.” So being born again is John’s way of talking about entering the kingdom, which is what the other three talk about too. “Eternal life” isn’t John’s invention either: Mark uses “entering life” and “entering the kingdom of God” to mean the same thing. And John still expects a resurrection and judgment at the end, with Jesus promising to raise believers “on the last day.”
Every time heaven comes up in John, it’s about something coming down from heaven (heaven opening, a voice from heaven, etc.) Even in the “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” passage, Jesus says he will come back for his disciples, and a few verses later he says that he and the Father will come and make their home with the believer, and the word translated “home” is the same Greek word translated “dwelling places.” Earlier in John, Jesus also calls the temple “my Father’s house,” and then speaks of his own body as the temple. So I don’t think that passage is as clearly about heaven as it sounds, though John does seem to hope that believers will one day be with Jesus where he is.
Where John really is different, I think, is on the subject of when eternal life starts. In John, a person who believes already “has eternal life” and “has passed from death to life.” When Martha says her brother will rise again on the last day, Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection and the life.” John’s focus is on having that life now, and on God living in the believer now, more than on a place you go after you die. That shows up in John’s vocabulary too – for example, he never uses the word “repent,” and uses “believe” almost three times as often as Matthew, Mark and Luke put together.
As far as I know, scholars disagree about why John moves in that direction. I often hear the explanation that the end of the world didn’t come as soon as early Christians expected – the last chapter of John even corrects a rumor that the disciple Jesus loved would not die before Jesus returned – but Matthew, Mark, and Luke already have some of this present-tense language, such as Jesus saying “the kingdom of God has come upon you.” So John seems to be developing something that was already there rather than taking an entirely new direction.
I’d argue John is no more different from Mark or Matthew or Luke than Mark and Matthew and Luke are different from one another. Each gives its own answer to who Jesus is: [bullets are mine]
- In Mark, he’s the one people fail to follow even when they know exactly who he is.
- In Matthew, he’s the teacher whose rulings bind his followers the way the Torah does.
- In Luke, he’s the one through whom God is overturning who’s on top.
- In John, he’s the one who brings the life of the age-to-come into the present.
Sure, there are differences in which events they use, the extent to which they use parables, and other language choices, and the first three borrow from each other far more than John does. But in the end, all four are making a different argument about who Jesus is and why he matters.
End of Schaun’s second response.
