What was context of the times of the Gospel of John?

Answer 1

Like the other gospels, John's Gospel was written about the times when Jesus is believed to have lived.

John's Gospel was originally written anonymously early in the second century and only attributed to the disciple whose name it now bears later in the second century. It appears to have been written in a closed, Gnostic Christian community, but has been modified subsequently, to remove some of the more overt Gnostic content and make it more acceptable to a broader Christian audience. Scholars reading the First Epistle of John, written in the same community, say that it points to a split in that community soon after the Gospel was written. Part of the community joined another branch of Christianity, more aligned to the synoptic gospels, taking a copy of John with them and amending it to better suit their new faith. The other part of the community probably joined other Gnostic communities which were eventually defeated by the emerging dominance of the Christianity of the synoptic gospels. The Gnostic version of John's Gospel no longer exists.