Before the turn of the millennium, critical historical Jesus scholarship was certainly a chaotic world. There were liberal and conservative disagreements over whether Jesus was something like a Cynic philosopher, an eschatological prophet, a teacher of wisdom, a ‘liberal’ rabbi and so on. There were also accompanying disputes over sources: can we use something called ‘Q’? Can we even define ‘Q’? Should we use the Gospel of Thomas and certain other non-canonical Gospels? But in the midst of the chaos one thing seemed certain: John's Gospel was not to be used as a source for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus and it certainly was not the earliest Gospel. There were differing dissenting voices, such as J. A. T. Robinson and D. A. Carson, but these could be dismissed (rightly or wrongly) as being either too maverick or too evangelical for mainstream tastes. John, with its high Christology, lengthy discourses and disputes with the generalized ‘the Jews’, was deemed too different from the Synoptic tradition and anachronistic in ways that the Synoptic tradition was not.

Two 1996 publications illustrate this well. Maurice Casey's book, Is John's Gospel True?, may have provoked some hostility through its polemical tone but part of its design was simply to make clear what Johannine scholarship had long assumed, namely, that John's Gospel was of little use for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus.