In all the mountain ranges of commentary on [the Gospel of] John — the all but endless attempts to explain John’s alleged dislocations, his stops and jolting starts, his glaring clarities and sudden fogs — I have met with no sustained attempt to see the heart of John’s final draft as, specifically, an old man’s book. Yet an arresting case can be made for its being the product of a single large but aging mind, a mind at hurried final work on the scenes and words of its distant youth — now precise and lucid, now vague and elliptical in its movement, all its memories screened through the thought of intervening years.
Reynolds Price, from Three Gospels