Gospel is anonymous, none of the proposed candidates are plausible (there is no reason to assume he was actually named 'John'), and that because no new evidence is likely to emerge, the real author will remain unknown and unnamed. At most, the author is merely referred to as 'John' (and the Fourth Gospel as 'Gospel of John') for the sake of convention, a placeholder name for an otherwise unknown person. Lazarus of Bethany Dating The Gospel of John is considered to be the last of the four canonical Gospels to be written. Most modern scholars date it to between 90 and 100AD, although a minority suggest an even later date. The Fourth Gospel may also have been written later as it was penned for a smaller group within the Johannine community, and was not circulated widely until a later date. However, claims of authorship that date much later than 100AD have been called into question due to the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a fragment of the gospel found in Egypt that was probably written around 125AD. 19th century views According to Adolf Julicher, K.G. Bretschneider's 1820s work on the topic of Johannine authorship pioneered the modern critical scholarship on this topic. Bretschneider called into question the apostolic authorship of the Gospel, and even stated that, on the basis of the author's unsteady grip of topography, the author could not have come from Palestine. He argued that the meaning and nature of Jesus presented in the Gospel of John was very different from that in the Synoptic Gospels, and thus its author could not have been an eyewitness to the events. Bretschneider cited an apologetic character in John, indicating a later date of composition. Scholars such as Wellhausen, Wendt, and Spitta have argued that the fourth gospel is a Grundschrift or a, "..work which had suffered interpolation before arriving at its canonical form; it was a unity as it stood." Walter Bauer opened the modern discussion on John with his book Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum. Bauer's thesis is that "the heretics probably outnumbered the orthodox" in the early Christian world and that heresy and orthodoxy were not as narrowly defined as we now define them. He was "convinced that none of the Apostolic Fathers had relied on the authority of the Fourth Gospel. It was the gnostics, the Marcionites, and the Montanists who first used it and introduced it