Mystery: Was John a Samaritan

See also: Mystery:Unsolved_Gospel_Mysteries

John the Apostle was most likely a Samaritan, in light of at least the following 21 reasons. Alternatively, John could have been different from the other disciples in some other ethnic or fundamental way.

• John's mother made a request of Jesus that would have been blasphemous among Jewish people then, and thus she was probably not Jewish. See Matthew 20:20-21 ;
• John's father's name, translated as "Zebedee", appears nowhere in the Old Testament and is most common today in Nigeria, Africa, which is half Muslim and half Christian;
• John's unique description of Jesus as possibly coming from the Samaritans;
• John's sympathy towards Samaritans, including describing how Jesus first disclosed his divinity to a Samaritan woman at a well (which everyone else omitted);
• the Apostles sent the young John (along with Peter) to evangelize Samaria after the Resurrection, see Acts 8:14 ;
• John's repeated references -- 10 times more than any other Gospel -- to "the Jews," meaning the Jewish people in and around Jerusalem, was how Samaritans would have referred to their rivals;
• only the Gospel of John contains a derogatory reference, as Samaritans would have felt, about the Jewish region of Nazareth: “Nathanael said to him, 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Philip said to him, 'Come and see.'” John 1:46
• the Gospel of John emphasized the concept of the sacrificial lamb -- the "Paschal Lamb" -- which is a central part of Passover for Samaritans but not for Masoretic Jews.
• the Gospel of John contains only 27 quotations and allusions to books of the Old Testament, far less than "Matthew (124), Mark (70), and Luke (109)," and the Samaritans recognized only the Pentateuch in the Old Testament;
• Samaritans rejected "the prophets," and only four times does the Gospel of John refer to "the prophets" -- far less than the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke do -- and 2 of John's references are quoting "the Jews," a third is quoting someone other than Jesus, and the fourth is one of the Editorial Comments in the Gospel of John which is grammatically suspect: "It is written in [should be "by" or worded better] the Prophets ...."
• among the few references by the Gospel of John to the Old Testament, many are Editorial Comments in the Gospel of John which may have been added later;
• the universality of the Gospel of John, as in John 3:16 ;
• his harsh language against Jewish leaders, whom Samaritans already disliked;
• the thriving "Johannine community" in the late 1st and 2nd century A.D. had ideological similarities to Samaritan views, and probably included many Samaritans;
• the mysterious disappearance of most Samaritans, who perhaps converted to Christianity on the strength of John's teachings to them;
• John had a rivalry with Peter, suggesting they may have had different ethnicities;
• John was ostracized by other Apostles: despite being the one Jesus loved, John is barely mentioned in the lengthy Gospel of Matthew, is not mentioned at all by Peter or Paul in their extensive letters, and John had to live out his life isolated on the island of Patmos;
• the lack of parables in the Gospel of John, which was a teaching style used 11 times in Old Testament books not recognized by Samaritans and also in the Greco-Roman world of which Samaritans were not a part;
• the Gospel of John has more references to "life" than all the other Gospels combined, and the Samaritan version of the Book of Exodus is more pro-life than the Jewish Masoretic translation;
• John prominently includes multiple quotations of Thomas the Apostle, such as the famous "doubting Thomas" passage at John 20:24-29 , while Matthew omits all this from his Gospel, and subsequently Thomas (a name never mentioned in the Old Testament evangelized India, all of which implies an ethnic difference between John and the Jewish Matthew; and
• the name "John" is Aramaic rather than Hebrew: no one in the entire Old Testament has the name "John". Likewise for the name of his brother, "James".