Final answer:
The traditional belief is that the Gospel of John was written by John, an apostle and eyewitness, but modern scholars debate this due to the Gospel's dating roughly sixty years after Jesus' death, making direct eyewitness authorship uncertain.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question whether the Gospel of John is written by an eye-witness of the events discussed refers to the traditional authorship attributed to the fourth Gospel in the New Testament. While it has been traditionally believed that John, an apostle and one of Jesus' closest followers, authored this Gospel, modern scholars are more cautious. The Gospel of John is one of the four Gospels in the Christian New Testament, and it is indeed linked to an evangelist named John. However, given the dating of the text to around 90 CE, some sixty years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, it is debated whether John the Apostle could have lived long enough to be the author or whether the text was based on the testimony of an eyewitness or a community of believers. No definitive evidence can irrefutably prove that the text was penned by a firsthand witness to Jesus's life. Nonetheless, it remains a foundational text for understanding the life and teachings of Jesus, as well as early Christian thought.