Consider the following sayings of Jesus found in John's Gospel alone:

John 14:9: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."

John 6:35: "And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life."

John 8:12: "I am the light of the world."

John 8:58: "Before Abraham was, I am."

John 10:7: "I am the door of the sheep."

John 11 :25: "I am the resurrection, and the life."

John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

John 15: 1 "I am the true vine."

Christian scholars tell us that if Jesus had made all these fantastic claims about himself, the first three gospels would surely have recorded them. Mark was written around 70 CE, followed by Matthew and Luke somewhere between 80-90 CE John, written around 100 CE, was the last of the four canonized gospels. The Christian scholar James Dunn writes in his book The Evidence for Jesus: "If they were part of the original words of Jesus himself, how could it be that only John picked them up and none of the others? Call it scholarly skepticism ifyou like, but I find it almost incredible that such sayings should have been neglected had they been known as a feature of Jesus'teaching. If the 'I am' had been part of the original tradition, it is very hard indeed to explain why none ofthe other three evangelists made use of them." (p. 3 6)

 Similarly, the New American Bible tells us in its introduction, under the heading How to Read Your Bible:

"It is difficult to know whether the words or sayings attributed to Jesus are written exactly as he spoke them....The Church was so firmly convinced that ... Jesus ... taught through her, that she expressed her teaching in the form of Jesus' sayings." (St. Joseph Medium Size Edition, p.23)

What we have in John, then is what people were saying about Jesus at the time John was written (about 70 years after Jesus was raised up). The writer of John simply expressed those ideas as if Jesus had said them. Rev.James Dunn says further in his book that, almost certainly,the writer of the fourth gospel "was not concerned with the sort of questions which trouble some Christians today Did Jesus actually say this? Did he use these precise words? and so on." (Fhe Evidence/or Jesus, p. 43)

Scholars have concluded that this gospel was originally written in a simple fonn. But this gospel was later on, as the New Jerusalem Bible says, "amplified and developed" in several stages during the second half of the first century." (p. 1742)

It says further: "It is today freely accepted that the fourth Gospel underwent a complex development before it reached its final form." (p. 1742)

On a previous page, the same Bible says: "It would seem that we have only the end-stage of a slow process that has brought together not only component parts of different ages, but also corrections, additions and sometimes even more than one revision of the same discourse." (p. 1739)

The New American Bible says that most scholars "have come to the conclusion that the inconsistencies were probably produced by subsequent editing in which homogeneous materials were added to a shorter original."(New American Bible, RevisedNew Testament. p. 143)