Interesting:
Liberals who downplay Jesus’ divinity typically say that John has little reliable data about the actual history of Jesus’ lifetime. Though no fundamentalist, Brown rejected that view: "John is based on a solid tradition of the words and works of Jesus, a tradition that at times is very primitive. Indeed, I believe that often John gives us correct historical information about Jesus that no other Gospel has preserved."
A manuscript fragment from Chapter 18, discovered in 1935, is commonly dated at A.D. 135-150 or, more conservatively, at A.D. 125. (Such approximate dates could vary by plus or minus 25 years.) Since this copy was located in faraway Egypt, the original composition elsewhere would have occurred years before
Brown figured A.D. 100-110 was the latest plausible date for the final version of John. He put the nearly final composition at around A.D. 90 and a preliminary version at around A.D. 70, both using some writings from A.D. 40-60.
(The Chapter 18 manuscript find and scholars’ consensus that John was written in the first century are ignored in the current best seller "Beyond Belief" because author Elaine Pagels prefers to think John came later than the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text early Christianity deemed spurious.)
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