Beloved disciple
by Mike Oettle
JOHN – ah, yes,
the Beloved Disciple, you might say. Few people on the calendar of the Church
are as familiar and as well loved as John the Apostle, whose day is sometimes
kept on 6 May in memory of a reputed miracle, although it officially falls on
27 December. We do know a good deal about him: his father was Zebedee, his
mother Salome. (If you’ve seen the musical The Witness, you’ll
remember Salome [“Mrs Zebedee”] pleading with the Lord for good positions for
her sons and enthusing about “my boys”.)
Zebedee was a Galilean fisherman, and John[1] and his brother James[2] were working on their nets when Jesus called them to be “fishers of men” – the brothers who were known as Boanerges, or the Sons of Thunder. Perhaps this was because of their fiery temper: they were the ones who urged Christ to call down fire from Heaven on the Samaritans who had rejected Him. John was present, with James and Simon Peter, when Jesus went up “into the mountain”, in the words of the King James Bible, and was transfigured.[3]
But for all we do know about John there’s a great deal we don’t know. Was he in fact the “disciple whom Jesus loved” [4] who reclined next to the Lord at the Last Supper, and who Jesus spoke to from the cross, saying to Mary: “Woman, this is your son,” and to the disciple: “This is your mother.”[5] If he was, he must have been the one who ran ahead of Peter to the tomb on the Sunday morning after the crucifixion and, seeing it empty, believed. When the disciples returned to Galilee and spent all night fishing in vain, it was the same disciple who recognised his Master on the shore and told Simon Peter, who went splashing through the water to Him. John 21:2 clearly identifies the sons of Zebedee as being there, although they are not named invidually.
We know all these things because they are mentioned as acts of this “beloved disciple” in John’s Gospel, and it is traditional to identify them with the author, self-effacingly avoiding naming himself in the narrative.
But even the authorship of the Johannine Gospel, of the letters of John and of the
Revelation to John is in dispute. When textual criticism was first developed
during the 19th century, great attention was paid to the vocabulary of the
text. Marked differences were found in the Greek usage of the Gospel,
Epistles and Revelation of John, and it was concluded that they could not
possibly have the same author. More recent scholarship has not been so
dogmatic, and many scholars now believe that while John was perhaps not
responsible for the final editing (redaction, it is called) of these documents,
he at least is the source of the traditions contained in them, and wrote them
in large part.
If he is indeed the author of Revelation (the most disputed of the three), it is
probable that he left an assemblage of rough notes and verbal recollections of
his vision which his disciples finally pieced together. As for the Gospel,
early tradition (the verbal teaching of the Church) makes John its author.
Tradition is not always a reliable authority, but the earlier it is found
written down, the more likely it is to be correct.
John is mentioned in Acts (for instance the healing of the beggar at the Gate
Beautiful, when Peter said: “Silver and gold have I none . . .”). However, precise details of his later career are
given in neither Roman documents nor the Scriptures.
Early
tradition places him at Ephesus, however: Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus
towards the end of the 2nd century, identified him as the beloved disciple and
says that he “was a priest, wearing the sacerdotal plate, both martyr and
teacher”. Irenæus, Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyon) around AD 180, says John wrote
his Gospel and letters at Ephesus and Revelation at Patmos, and later died at
Ephesus. Two sites at Ephesus were claimed as John’s grave. The North African
Tertullian, also in the 2nd century, reports that John was plunged into
boiling oil and survived miraculously. This may have given rise to a later
belief that John did not die, but was taken up to heaven like Enoch and Elijah.
John’s symbol as a Gospel author is the eagle. His name,
variously interpreted as meaning “God’s grace” or “gift of God’s grace”, has
become one of the most popular names in the Western world. I will trace its
many forms when we look at John the Baptist.
