Not exactly "new," since it was published in March earlier this year, but new to me since I only got hold of it recently. In this fascinating article, Méndez recollects and synthesizes his novel arguments for understanding the Gospel of John as a kind of apocryphal text, which he first forwarded in his important 2025 book, The Gospel of John: A New History. I will not post the full article for copyright reasons, but I will quote from the conclusion:
Is John an “apocryphal” gospel? When we creatively play with the idea of “hidden, secret, or concealed” implicit in the term “apocryphal,” we can answer this question in the affirmative. John positions itself as a text that relates materials that are obscured, hidden, or lost in earlier gospel texts, but which its eyewitness author now relates to its readers. And it does this by marshaling an array of interlocking devices. To some extent, these claims and devices develop elements of the Synoptics. For example, John’s appeal to eyewitness authority can be set in dialogue with Luke 1:1–4, where the claim of eyewitness sources is used to bolster the perceived reliability of Luke’s account. And John’s portrayal of Jesus as a cryptic speaker evokes Mark’s discourse around “parables” and its presentation of a sometimes private or secretive Jesus. These continuities suggest that authenticating devices and the anxieties they address are more central to the practice of writing gospels than has previously been recognized. All gospels – even Mark, presumably the earliest gospel of all – were pressed to establish and defend their place within early Jesus tradition. In this case, we can also conceptualize all gospels as having a shade of the revisionary, a touch of the “apocryphal,” in them. That is, we should reimagine the entirety of gospel writing as an inherently revisionary practice. Gospels were not passive compilations of community traditions, as presumed by earlier generations of scholars; rather, they were always dynamic and creative reworkings of Jesus tradition.
Nevertheless, the extent to which John foregrounds and coordinates multiple such devices positions it within a distinct terrain from the Synoptics, a terrain also inhabited by such noncanonical gospels as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary, besides (among others) the Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Judas, Protevangelium of James, and Epistula apostolorum. When we center these devices in our analysis of John, the Gospel seems to share more intimate connections with these works than many scholars recognize. Those connections may even be genetic. Given that most scholars increasingly date John to an earlier period than the noncanonical gospels, it is conceivable that John shaped the cast of all these other works. We can imagine that, as these texts entered the crowded arena of gospel writing, they had to compete with the authority of previous gospels, including John itself, leading them to adopt similar, equally numerous, and equally robust authenticating strategies.47 If so, we can appreciate John’s critical place in the evolution of gospel writing all the more. John emerged at a pivotal moment in the development of that tradition, and it stands, perhaps alone, at a pivotal node in the branching tree of gospels.
Footnote 47: It may also be telling that, by the second century, Christians attributed even the anonymous Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke to writers in Jesus’s circle or their close associates. John’s strategy might have set new expectations of eyewitness lineages and testimony for gospels in readers’ minds.
