Somewhere in or near Palestine, a group of Jews accepted Jesus as the Davidic Messiah who fulfilled the prophecies and was confirmed by miracles. There was a man among this group who had been Jesus' disciple during Jesus' earthly ministry. This man was later to become known as the "Beloved Disciple." Eventually, another group, comprised of Jews of an anti-temple bias, was added to the first group. This newer group understood Jesus against a Mosaic background, rather than against a Davidic One. Jesus was thought to be the one who had seen God and who brought God's word into the world.
The Jewish understanding of divine Wisdom, which we find, for example, in Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach, was an important aspect of this second group's understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God's word. This is where we get the high, pre-existent Christology that we first find in the prologue to Jn's gospel. However, the Christology of the Johannine community was so high that it led to debates with other Jews who thought that the Johannine Christians were elevating Jesus to the status of God and departing from Jewish monotheism. The leaders of the synagogue expelled the Johannine Christians from the synagogues (9.22; 16.2).
The Johannine Community
Raymond Brown has developed a hypothetical reconstruction of the Johannine community. The following is a summary of the first stage of Brown's reconstruction with a few additional comments, For the full account, see his NT introduction, p. 373 ff.
Source:
Brown, Raymond.
An Introduction to the New Testament.
New York: Doubleday, 1997.
This is one reason that we see so much hostility to "the Jews" in Jn. Jn's rejection of the Jews actually evidences an intra-Jewish dispute. Put differently, even though the Johannine Christians were probably Jews themselves, they used the term "Jews" to designate those who rejected their message about Jesus, rather than the Jewish people as a whole. We might think of this as a "family dispute."
Some believers did not want to make a public break with the synagogue, and they were not thought well of in the Johannine community. Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus by night (3.1 ff.), seems to be representative of this type of believer. The Beloved Disciple, however, did break with the synagogue, and he helped others to make the transition, as well.
