Out of all the NT books, the Gospel of John has the most witnesses among the papyrus MSS – twenty-two to date (P2, 5, 6, 22, 28,36, 39, 44, 45, 52, 55, 60, 63, 66, 75, 76, 80, 84, 90, 93, and 95). Two of these MSS, P66 and P75, contain a good portion of this gospel by themselves; and when all the MSS are compiled together, they cover nearly the entire book, with a great deal of overlap. The missing portions are as follows: 14. 31; 15.1; 16. 5, 8–10; 21.10–11, 14, 16, 21–22. Many more verses, especially in chapters 14–21, have lacunae.

The statement of the Jewish authorities to Pontius Pilate in John 18. 31b, ‘It is not lawful for us to kill anyone’, is commonly regarded as a key to the historical reconstruction of the trial and execution of Jesus. If it means — as it is usually understood to mean — that Roman law did not permit the Jewish Sanhedrin to carry out the death penalty in capital cases, then it explains what is otherwise unexplained in the synoptic Gospels: i.e. why, if Jesus was convicted by the Sanhedrin, was he delivered to the Romans for another trial, and for death by crucifixion? Why was he not simply stoned to death at the command of the Sanhedrin, as the Jewish law required (cf. Lev 24. 16)? The narrator's parenthetical comment in John 18. 32 seems to bear out this interpretation: the fact that the Jews were not allowed by the Roman government to execute Jesus meant that he would die by being ‘lifted up’ on a cross - a distinctively Roman method of execution (cf. John 3. 14; 12. 32–33).