John

(first century)

   Saint and Apostle.

   John was the son of Zebedee and the brother of james. Before he was called to discipleship, he was a fisherman. Jesus nicknamed the two brothers Boanerges (‘sons of thunder’) and, with peter, they seem to have formed an inner group of disciples. As one of the three, John was present at the raising of Jairus’s daughter from the dead, at the transfiguration and at the agony in the garden. In addition, with Peter, he prepared the final Passover meal for Jesus and the Twelve. He is not mentioned by name in the Fourth Gospel, but he has traditionally been identified with the ‘disciple Jesus loved’. If this is correct, John lay next to Jesus at the Last Supper, was entrusted with Jesus’s mother Mary at the crucifixion and was one of the earliest witnesses to the empty tomb. In Acts, he is mentioned on three separate occasions, always in conjunction with Peter. According to Irenaeus, John lived at Ephesus and died naturally. eusebius of caesarea stated that he was exiled on Patmos during the reign of Domitian. Traditionally he is believed to have been the author of the Fourth Gospel, the Johannine epistles and the Book of Revelation. There is also a theory that he was martyred with his brother James. Both the question of the identity of the beloved disciple and that of the authorship of the Johannine corpus have been subjects of much scholarly controversy.

   C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1957);

   M.W.G. Stible, John’s Gospel (1994);

   J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (1991).