The identity of the recipients of the Fourth Gospel in the light of the purpose of the Gospel

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the identity of the recipients at the time of the completion of the Gospel. An effort is made to determine to whom John wrote this Gospel and how he adapted his theological message to reach this aim. It will be argued that John did not only focus on a specific group of people, but had a wide variety of people (i.e., Jews, Hellenists, Samaritans) in mind, which leads to the conclusion that the Fourth Gospel was written with both evangelistic and didactic aims.