Zane Hodges says the Gospel According to Saint John was written as an evangelistic book to help people start to believe in Jesus, and yet mentions faith but not repentance, and thus repentance is not required for eternal life. John MacArthur counters that John the Evangelist was writing after the Synoptic Gospels were written, so John assumed that readers had already learned about repentance from them, and so he decided to focus his gospel on the importance of faith.
While we are conjuring hidden backgrounds and motives to the gospel writers, a much more fun story is told by Dom Gregory Dix in his book The Shape of the Liturgy. Suddenly we see the practice of the eucharist in house-churches popping up behind the text everywhere in the New Testament, and it's lovely:
One remarkable feature of the N.T. allusions to the eucharist is the rich variety of meanings they already find within the single rite of the broken Bread and the blessed Cup. It is the solemn proclamation of the Lord’s death (1 Cor. 11:26); but it is also the familiar intercourse of Jesus abiding in the soul, as a friend who enters in and sups with a friend (Rev. 3:20). It fulfils all the past, as the ‘true’ (Jn. 6:52) and the ‘secret’ (Rev. 2:17) manna, the meaning of all sacrifice (Heb. 13:10), the truth of all Passovers (1 Cor. 5:7; Lk. 22:18). But it also looks forward to the future beyond the end of time, as a mysterious anticipation of the final judgement of God (1 Cor. 11:30-32), a foretaste of the eternal Messianic banquet of heaven (Lk. 22:30), a ‘tasting of the powers of the world to come.’ (Heb. 6:5) It foreshadowed the exultant welcome of His own at that Second Coming (1 Cor. 11:26), for which those who had first lost their hearts to Him in Galilee looked so wistfully all their years after, that the echoes of their longing murmured on in the eucharistic prayers of the church for centuries. By the time the New Testament came to be written the eucharist already illuminated everything concerning Jesus for His disciples—His Person, His Messianic office (Jn. 6:33, 35, 48), His miracles (the accounts of the feeding of the multitude are obviously 'coloured' by the eucharist), His death and the redemption that He brought (Jn. 6:51). It was the vehicle of the gift of His Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13b), the means of eternal life (Jn. 6:53-54), the cause of the unity of His church (1 Cor. 10:17). This is not an exhaustive analysis of New Testament teaching about the eucharist. Nor do I suggest that all these passages are intended to be directly about the eucharist (they are not) but that in all of them the experience of the eucharist is at least colouring and affecting the author’s presentation in some cases even of other matters, which is what is significant for our purpose. They shew that the church had found in the eucharist an entire epitome of ‘the Gospel’ before our four gospels had been written.
Later in his book, Dix goes on to suggest that the image in Revelation of God on his throne surrounded by the elders reflects how a bishop and presbyters would sit in the living room of a Roman villa where the house church would typically meet, taking the seats like the father and his family members. Again, I don't know how true it is, but it's fun to think about.
It's definitely more imaginative than the Hodges-MacArthur debate.
