The author may have drawn on a "signs source" (a collection of miracles) for chapters 1–12, a "passion source" for the story of Jesus's arrest and crucifixion, and a "sayings source" for the discourses, but these hypotheses are much debated, and recent scholarship has tended to turn against positing hypothetical sources for John. The author seems to have known some version of Mark and Luke, as John shares with them some vocabulary and clusters of incidents arranged in the same order, but key terms from those gospels are absent or nearly so, implying that if the author did know them they felt free to write independently. The Hebrew scriptures were an important source, with 14 direct quotations (versus 27 in Mark, 54 in Matthew, 24 in Luke), and their influence is vastly increased when allusions and echoes are included, but the majority of John's direct quotations do not agree exactly with any known version of the Jewish scriptures. Recent arguments by Richard Bauckham and others that John preserves eyewitness testimony have not won general acceptance.
The author may have drawn on a "signs source" (a collection of miracles) for chapters 1–12, a "passion source" for the story of Jesus's arrest a,nd crucifixion, and a "sayings sourc.e" for the discourses, but these hypotheses are much debated, and recent scholarsh.ip has tended to turn against positing hypothetical sources for John. The author seems to have known some version of Mark and Luke, as John shares with them some vocabulary and clusters of incidents arranged in the same order, but key terms from those gospels are absent or nearly so, implying that if the author did know them they felt free to write independently. The Hebrew scriptures were an important source, with 1.4 direct quotations (versus 27 in Mark, 54 in Matthew, 24 in Luke), and their influence is vastly increased when allusions and echoes are included, but the majority of John's direct quotations do not agree exactly with any known version of the Jewish scriptures. Recent arguments by Richard Bauckham and others that John preserves eyewitness testimony have not won general acceptance.