Dr. Bart Ehrman answered the question as asked by one of his blog followers. Below is an extract of his post here. Any emphasis below is mine.
June 24, 2026
I’ve [Bart] received some interesting and important questions involving the Gospel of John — who actually wrote it and whether it’s record of Jesus’ claims to be divine are likely historical. Here are the questions an my attempts to answer
READER’S QUESTION: I heard Mike Licona say the other day, that he seems to think Tertius wrote Romans in the same way a literate Greek-speaking secretary wrote the Gospel of John on behalf of John, the son of Zebedee. So strictly speaking, these are his words and the letter ought to be called, the Letter to the Romans according to Paul.
What is your understanding of Rom 16:22 – ‘I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord”? Was Tertius simply taking dictation or did he put his interpretation of Paul’s thoughts into words?
Dr. Ehrman’s RESPONSE:
I’m afraid I don’t think Mike is right about this at all. Romans 16:22 certainly does come as a surprise to many modern readers of Romans. What?? Someone named Tertius wrote this letter? I thought Paul wrote it?!?
An ancient reader would have known exactly what the verse is saying. Tertius was a scribe who was taking dictation from Paul. He was literally “writing” the letter; but the words were the ones Paul was dictating.
The problems of thinking that the same was true of the Gospel of John are rather significant (and am a bit surprised Mike doesn’t acknowledge them).
- The Gospel of John itself says nothing about having been written by a scribe/secretary.
- If it was (we have no way of knowing) then the book would have had to be dictated by John. But John did not speak Greek but Aramaic. That means he could not have dictated the Gospel we have, which was composed in Greek. The implications of that are rather serious. Among other things, it would mean that John must have dictated it in Aramaic but his scribe composed it in Greek. That’s not what happened with Romans. Paul dictated it in Greek and his secretary Tertius wrote down what he said.
- If John did dictate it and someone else wrote it, it means that his “dictation” was highly elegant rhetorically. In antiquity that kind of rhetorical elegance could be produced only by authors who had received extensive education in composition when they were young. And the only ones who received that kind of education were upper-class urban elites. This is not speculation – we know a lot about education and the art of literary composition from antiquity. I don’t know if Mike has actually read the literature on the topic or not. But John the son of Zebedee was not from the wealthy urban elite class. He was an uneducated fisherman said even in the NT to be illiterate (Acts 4:13 — the literal translation of the Greek word).
- If Mike is thinking that John just told some secretary stories and the secretary put them into highly literate Greek, I’d say he’s being highly anachronistic, thinking of the kind of thing that happens today when a celebrity (or anyone who can afford it) employs a “ghost writer” who actually composes their work. We have zero evidence of that happening in antiquity. We have gazillions of references to writing practices in our sources. None analogous to this.
I myself was deeply interested in that topic about ten years ago or so, and read all the important scholarship on it and I looked up every reference I could find to the work of secretaries in Greek and Latin writings from antiquity. I could not find a single instance of this kind of thing. To my knowledge, no one else has either. (People who haven’t looked into the matter often claim it happened: but next time they do, ask them for some examples! Or just one example of an extended literary narrative that was composed by a ghost writer.)
5. I suppose I should point out, as well, that the author of the Fourth Gospel does not claim to be John the son of Zebedee.
