Who Was the Beloved Disciple? John, Patmos and the Two Johns

Cold open

Picture this. A rocky little island in the Aegean Sea. A man there sees visions so strange they'll become the strangest book in the Bible. And he tells us his name, plainly. "I, John."

Now... for most of Christian history, most people were sure who that was. John the apostle. The fisherman. The beloved disciple. The man who wrote a Gospel, three letters and the Book of Revelation, and then lived to a ripe old age.

Here's the twist. The Gospel never tells us its author's name. The "beloved disciple" is never named at all. And the John on that island never once calls himself an apostle.

So how many Johns are we dealing with? One? Two? Possibly three?

Today, we're going to find out what we actually know. Scripture, I'll tell you. Early tradition, I'll tell you. And legend... oh, there's legend.

Let's begin.

The Sons of Thunder

Scripture

We meet John on the Sea of Galilee, in a boat, mending nets with his brother James and their father, Zebedee. Jesus calls them, and they go, leaving Zebedee in the boat "with the hired men."

Scholarship

Hired men. That suggests a family business with staff. Not necessarily rich... but probably not the poorest family on the lake.

Scripture

And then Jesus gives the brothers a nickname. Boanerges. Mark translates it for us: "Sons of Thunder." He doesn't tell us why.

But a few stories have made readers wonder. When a Samaritan village won't receive Jesus, James and John ask, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Jesus turns and rebukes them.

Another time, John reports that they saw someone casting out demons in Jesus's name, and tried to stop him, "because he was not following us." Jesus tells him: don't stop him.

And then the big one. James and John come to Jesus with a request. "Appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." In Matthew, it's their mother who asks. The other ten are angry.

Jesus asks them: "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink...?" "We are able," they say. And he answers: "The cup that I drink you will drink."

Hold on to that line.

The inner circle

Scripture

Whatever the nickname meant, John was close to the centre. In Mark's Gospel, three disciples go where the others don't: Peter, James and John. Into the house where Jesus raises a little girl. Up the mountain of the Transfiguration. And deeper into the garden of Gethsemane, on the last night.

And in the early chapters of Acts, John is at Peter's side. They go up to the Temple together to pray. They're arrested together. And the council is amazed at their boldness, realising they're "uneducated and ordinary men."

Scholarship

That phrase may mean "without formal training," rather than unable to read. Scholars debate it. But either way, Acts presents John as an ordinary man, not a trained scholar. And the Gospels tell us he was a fisherman.

Scripture

When Paul writes to the Galatians, he names three men in Jerusalem as "acknowledged pillars": James, Cephas, which is Peter, and John.

Meanwhile, King Herod, the one historians know as Herod Agrippa the First, has John's brother James "killed with the sword."

Many readers hear the cup Jesus spoke of in that. But what about the other brother?

The disciple with no name

Scripture

Now, the Gospel of John. Here's the strange thing. John son of Zebedee never appears in it by name. Not once.

Every "John" in this Gospel is either John the Baptist or Simon Peter's father. The sons of Zebedee turn up exactly once, in the very last chapter, in a fishing boat.

Instead, there's a figure called "the disciple whom Jesus loved."

He reclines next to Jesus at the Last Supper. He stands near the cross, and Jesus says to his mother, "Woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "Here is your mother." And from that hour, the disciple takes her into his own home.

He races Peter to the empty tomb. When Jesus stands on the shore, he's the one who says to Peter, "It is the Lord!"

And at the very end, the Gospel says this: "This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true."

We know. Who's "we"? Many scholars hear a group stepping in, vouching for him. Others think it's the author's own way of speaking.

But the Gospel never tells us his name.

So... is it John?

Tradition

The earliest clear answer comes from Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, around the year 180. He writes that "John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast," published a Gospel while living at Ephesus, in Asia. Notice: "the disciple of the Lord," not "son of Zebedee." Elsewhere, though, he counts this John among the apostles.

And Irenaeus had a link to the past. He says he listened to Polycarp, the old bishop of Smyrna, who talked about "his intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord." A chain, then: Irenaeus, to Polycarp, to John. Though Irenaeus says he was a boy at the time.

Scholarship

Scholars who defend the traditional view point to clues in the Gospels themselves. The beloved disciple is often paired with Peter, just as John is in Luke and Acts. John was one of the inner three. And if the beloved disciple is John, supporters argue, that could explain why John's name never appears in this Gospel.

Others aren't convinced.

Lazarus, for one. He's the only man this Gospel names as someone Jesus loved: "Lord, he whom you love is ill." And nobody is called "the disciple whom Jesus loved" until after Lazarus is raised. Ben Witherington, among others, argues for him.

James Charlesworth argued for Thomas. Others see the beloved disciple as an ideal figure, a model disciple, rather than one historical person. And Martin Hengel and Richard Bauckham pointed to someone else: a different John, though they don't agree on the details.

Which brings us to an old bishop, and a carefully worded sentence.

Tradition

Papias was bishop of Hierapolis, in Asia Minor, in the early second century. Eusebius quotes his lost books. Papias says that whenever someone came who had followed the elders, he asked about "the words of the elders": "what Andrew or what Peter said... or by John, or by Matthew"... and then, separately, what "Aristion and the presbyter John" say. "Presbyter" is simply the Greek word for elder.

Two Johns? One named alongside Andrew, Peter and Matthew. And one named again, with Aristion, and called "the elder." The catch: Papias calls the first group "elders" too.

Eusebius noticed the name twice himself. He passed on a report, which Dionysius of Alexandria had made before him, of two tombs at Ephesus, both called John's.

Scholarship

Some scholars read this as two different men: John the apostle, and John the Elder, who might be the figure behind the Gospel. They note that the second and third letters of John come from someone who calls himself simply "the elder." Others reply that Papias is naming the same John twice: once for what he said in the past, and once for what he was still saying. And Papias calls both groups "disciples of the Lord."

And here's a tangle. Irenaeus calls Papias "a hearer of John." In the lines Eusebius quotes, Papias doesn't say he heard the elder John himself; he says he asked those who came by. But Eusebius, who had Papias's books in front of him, says Papias heard Aristion and the elder John, adding, "At least he mentions them frequently by name." So did Irenaeus blend two Johns into one? Or did Eusebius split one John into two? Scholars still debate it.

The honest verdict? The tradition that the beloved disciple was John son of Zebedee is early, and many scholars still defend it. But the Gospel itself never says so, and scholars remain divided.

The island

Scripture

Now, Revelation. This time, the author does give his name. "John to the seven churches that are in Asia." "I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things."

He calls himself "your brother," who shares their persecution, and says he was on the island called Patmos "because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus."

Notice what he doesn't say. He never says he was exiled. Most readers take him to mean exile. Early writers certainly did. But it's not quite what he says. And he never calls himself an apostle.

Tradition

Early church writers had their own answers. In the mid-100s, Justin Martyr wrote of "a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ," who received a revelation. Irenaeus dates the vision "towards the end of Domitian's reign," which ended in the year 96.

But not everyone agreed. In the 200s, Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, read Revelation side by side with the Gospel... and argued they were very different, in style and in language. And Revelation's Greek, Dionysius said, uses "barbarous idioms" and even "solecisms."

His conclusion? He didn't deny that the author was called John. But, he wrote, "I cannot readily admit that he was the apostle, the son of Zebedee."

Even Eusebius left it open. He lists Revelation among the accepted books, "if it really seem proper"... and then again among the rejected ones, "if it seem proper." Both lists!

Scholarship

Today, most critical scholars think Revelation and the Gospel come from different authors, though the question of which John wrote Revelation is still open.

How did John die?

Scripture

The Gospel of John ends with a rumour. Jesus says of the beloved disciple, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?" And the rumour spread that this disciple would not die. The Gospel corrects it: Jesus didn't say he wouldn't die.

Speculation

A rumour like that would make sense if the beloved disciple lived a very long time, or had recently died. But that's an inference.

Tradition

The main tradition is a long life. Irenaeus says John stayed with the church at Ephesus "until the times of Trajan," the emperor who came to power in the year 98.

Irenaeus also passes on a story, from people who heard Polycarp, of John rushing out of a bath-house in Ephesus without bathing, because "Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth," was inside! A lovely story. Impossible to check.

Around 190, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, wrote that John, "who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord," was a witness and a teacher, wore the "sacerdotal plate" of a priest, and "fell asleep at Ephesus." That priestly plate is a genuine puzzle. In the same letter, he calls Philip "one of the twelve apostles." John, he calls a witness and a teacher. Scholars argue over whether that matters.

Around the year 200, Tertullian adds something dramatic. In Rome, he says, John "was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile." No earlier writer mentions it.

And then there's the odd one out. A later summary of a fifth-century historian, Philip of Side, says that Papias, in his second book, wrote that "John the theologian and James his brother were killed by the Jews."

Scholarship

Some scholars take that seriously, because it would fit Jesus's words: "The cup that I drink you will drink." But the evidence is thin. It's secondhand, from a late summary. Eusebius, who quotes Papias's books directly, never mentions it. And in his own century, Philip of Side was criticised for muddling his chronology.

So: a long life at Ephesus is the main early tradition. Martyrdom is a minority report, poorly attested. The boiling oil stands alone. And how John actually died... we simply don't know.

What's left at Ephesus

Scholarship

On Ayasuluk Hill, in the town of Selçuk, near the ruins of Ephesus, stand the remains of a vast church: the Basilica of St John, built by the emperor Justinian in the five hundreds, replacing an earlier, smaller church on the same spot. Under where the altar stood is a tomb, which tradition holds to be John's.

The basilica tells us that by the five hundreds, John's tomb here mattered enough for an emperor to build a great church over it. What it can't tell us is who was in the tomb.

Later Tradition

Nearby, up in the hills, pilgrims visit the House of the Virgin Mary. The Bible says the beloved disciple took Mary into his home. It never says where. And an ancient tradition places her last days in Jerusalem.

This particular house was identified in 1881 and 1891 by searchers using a book of visions attributed to Anne Catherine Emmerich, a bedridden German nun who never travelled there. The book was written up by the poet Clemens Brentano. It's a place of real devotion, and popes have visited. The Catholic Church has never ruled on whether it's authentic. But as history, it rests on visions, not evidence.

Close

So. Let's go back to that island.

Who was John? The New Testament gives us a fisherman nicknamed a Son of Thunder, one of the inner three, a pillar of the Jerusalem church. Early tradition gives us an old man at Ephesus, a Gospel, a book of visions and a tomb.

Whether those are all the same man... is one of the great open questions of the New Testament. And people of real faith and real scholarship have landed in different places.

The Gospel never names him. It just calls him "the disciple whom Jesus loved." And two thousand years later, we're still asking who he was.

Next time: a bishop at Ephesus mentions an apostle named Philip, and his daughters. But the Book of Acts has a Philip with daughters too... and he isn't one of the Twelve. Two Philips? Or one man, remembered twice?