by Tom Bissell
Another thing the Christians of Ephesus built with their absconded haul of pagan marble was the entrance arch of Saint John’s Basilica, called, somewhat unwelcomingly, the Gate of Persecution. Suzy and I passed through it now. The gate’s name came from a frieze that was no longer extant but might have depicted the persecution of Paul, who according to the Acts of the Apostles enjoyed a decidedly unhappy experience in Ephesus. The courtyard just past the Gate of Persecution was angled in such a way as to direct visitors toward what had once been the basilica’s altar, beneath which was John’s tomb. This was a reminder that Saint John’s Basilica was, above all else, a pilgrimage church, its choke points intended to guide and accommodate large numbers of people. The courtyard also served as what a local guidebook described as the area “that would customarily serve as the last stand, if the fortress was overrun.”
That was no idle fear. At various points in its history, Saint John’s Basilica was more fortress than church. Ephesus, as a city, had two things going for it: its land was fertile, and its landscape was beautiful. The harbor brought in money and outside-world contact of all types and ambitions. The irregular, crumbling ring of fort walls that run along the base of Ayasoluk Hill—not uncovered and reconstructed until the 1970s—was built in the eighth or ninth century to keep out invading Arab raiding fleets during the incessant sea war between the Byzantine Empire and its Muslim enemies.
In the first century BCE, Augustus granted Ephesus the status of Roman Asia’s capital city, and soon its population swelled to twenty thousand citizens. Greco-Roman Ephesus was more Roman than Greco, largely because Augustus was forced to rebuild the city after a dreadful first-century BCE earthquake brought much of it to the ground. In the fourth century, no fewer than three earthquakes devastated Ephesus. The city’s once-large population, getting the message, began to dwindle, and its harbor, abandoned by the Aegean, silted up. By the fifth century, Christianity was ascendant in Ephesus, and the city was still regarded as important enough to host two major Christian councils, visitors to which complained about the heat, disease, and swampy malarial air. When Ephesus fell prey to a string of attacks perpetrated by marauders in the eighth century, most of its population was reduced to hiding behind the walls of Saint John’s Basilica. In the twelfth century, Turks won lasting control of the weakened city, which they renamed Ayasoluk. In the fourteenth century, Ayasoluk was visited by the English knight and traveler John Mandeville,*1 who called it “a fair city, near to the sea. And there Saint John died, and was buried behind the altar in a tomb. And there is a fine church; for Christian men used to possess the city. But now it is occupied by Turks.” So it was. So it is.
It took both Suzy and me a moment to realize that once we had passed through the courtyard, climbed more stairs, and followed a short path, we were, in effect, standing inside Saint John’s Basilica. A surprising number of the columns that lined the basilica’s now-phantom nave had been recovered and set upright on their pedestals, but this was, nevertheless, a ruined graveyard world. Other than the columns, almost no part of the basilica that had been restored reached higher than my shoulders.
We were two of many tourists. A thin, crew-cut American man who wore his large silver crucifix on the outside of his Massachusetts sailboat dealership T-shirt walked around aggressively chewing his gum. Several Asian women wore welding-mask-like Burberry sun visors that covered their whole faces, giving them the effect of extraterrestrials here to take a surface sample before heading back to the mother ship.
Near one of the basilica’s side entrances, Suzy noticed that a crowd had gathered, which she suggested we investigate. It turned out our fellow tourists had decided that some storks living in messy, grass-padded nests atop the walls that surrounded the basilica were more interesting than the basilica itself. Suddenly, as though to prove this, two of the great birds took off, their wings’ downdraft scattering the nests. After a few brisk, powerful flaps, the storks glided with immense, ultralight silence down Ayasoluk Hill. The storks came to rest atop the minaret of a nearby mosque, as though providing us all with a very nearly literal demonstration of the way in which Turkish winds blow.
IV.
In the popular Christian imagination, Peter is always gruff, tempestuous Peter; Thomas is always remote, questioning Thomas. Yet the tradition of how John has come to be seen and understood contains a number of severe conceptual breaks.
According to the gospels, John wants to immolate Samaritans and demands that Jesus put a stop to the work of an unauthorized exorcist. He is also the beardless boy apostle who lovingly reclines on his master’s breast during the Last Supper. To some, he is a devoted disciple standing steadfastly at the foot of his master’s cross, embodying everything Christianity can be, and to others he is a wizened seer sitting on the crags of Patmos, embodying everything Christianity can know. The flamethrower mystic of Revelation is also the arch theologian of the Fourth Gospel. Meanwhile, in extra-biblical legend, John is a crinkly-eyed, lovable centenarian—and lifelong virgin—telling his disciples to always love one another. While these are not necessarily mutually exclusive identities, they are highly textured when compared with the simpler, more consistent images the New Testament and its legendary outgrowths allow us to form of the other apostles. Despite his changefulness, John is, for many Christians, perhaps the Twelve’s most notionally familiar member. This is the enigma of John, one that his body’s disappearance from its tomb on the Ayasoluk Hill has only deepened.
“John” derives from the common theophoric Hebrew name Yohanan or Yehochanan, means “God has been gracious,” and appears in all four of the New Testament’s Twelve Apostle lists. In Mark, John is listed third, after his brother James; in Matthew and Luke, he is listed fourth, once again after James. In Acts, though, John is listed second, which may have something to do with that book’s depiction of John as Peter’s traveling partner and ally. (Two important second-century apocryphal works, The Epistle of the Apostles*2 and The Gospel According to the Ebionites, contain lists of the Twelve in which John, unusually, is listed first.) The Gospel According to John contains no explicit mention of John or his brother James; the book’s final and most likely added twenty-first chapter does, however, refer to “the sons of Zebedee.”
In the synoptic tradition, James and John are called to follow Jesus moments after he calls Peter and Andrew. As Mark has it (and Matthew closely follows him), Jesus goes “a little farther” along the seashore of the Sea of Galilee, where he sees the brothers “mending the nets” in a boat. Like Peter and Andrew, James and John are said to “immediately” follow Jesus. Unlike Peter and Andrew, they leave several people behind, including their father, Zebedee, and what Mark calls “hired men.” Luke, however, tells us that the Zebedee brothers were “partners” with Peter and Andrew.
Scholars have done much to reconstruct the complicated social world of the first-century Galilean fisherman. Galilee was subject to Herodian rule, and the Herods continued many of the regional administration practices put into effect by previous dynasties. One such practice, it is believed, was the selling of fishing rights to individual fishermen. These permits were likely not cheap, which placed those who possessed them at the top of an occupational pyramid. Beneath the permit holder would have been various other workers and servants who did everything from piloting the boats to maintaining their nets to rifling through the day’s catch and tossing back into the sea any and all catfish, which, due to their lack of scales, are not regarded as kosher. Mark’s account seems to indicate that James and John work for a presumably permit-holding father; Luke’s suggests that they are a part of some shared-permit collective. An early tradition, credited to Origen, identifies the Zebedee brothers as “sailors,” meaning they helmed their assigned boat rather than fished from it.
In Mark and Matthew, whenever John and James are mentioned, James usually comes first, which is probably reflective of the authors’ understanding of their ages. However, as the scholar R. Alan Culpepper notes, Luke,
on four occasions spread throughout his gospel and Acts, mentions John first—a sign, possibly, that “Luke knew that John was the more famous of the two brothers.” Thanks to Christian attempts to harmonize the gospels’ accounts of which women were present at the cross during Jesus’s execution, James and John’s mother, Salome, has been traditionally identified as the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, though one would be hard-pressed to find this information in the gospels themselves. According to the common Christian understanding that sprang from this harmonization, James and John were eventually imagined to be cousins not only of Jesus but of John the Baptist as well.
Only once in the gospels are John and Jesus shown to have a private interaction. The scene is included in both Mark and Luke, though Luke’s rendering of it is a third as long. In Mark’s account, John approaches Jesus and says, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” Jesus’s response is notable both for its liberalism and for its hard-nosed realpolitik: “Do not stop him….Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Culpepper believes that the nature of Jesus’s response somewhat confounds the belief, held by some scholars, that the scene was created by the early church in order to provide guidance as to how to deal with fringe figures who used Jesus as the stated source of their power. If the young church had created the scene as a response to later pastoral developments, what purpose would Jesus’s accepting conclusion have served?
Thanks to Mark, and Mark alone, we learn that the Zebedee brothers were called by Jesus “Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder.” Etymological explanations for this strange phrase range from “sons of earthquake” to “loud-voiced” to “shout-workers,” but Culpepper regards Mark’s “Sons of Thunder” as a more or less accurate translation of an Aramaic phrase Mark incorrectly transliterated.*3 This can be seen in later Syriac Christian traditions, which are generally believed to have preserved more authentic Aramaisms than the Greek of the gospels. In Syriac Christian texts, we find John and James referred to as benay regesh, or “sons of noise.”
The traditional explanation for why Jesus called the brothers the Sons of Thunder has to do with their intemperate nature. Yet most of the evidence used to support this tradition comes from Luke, who does not record the nickname. One such scene occurs shortly before “the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up.” Jesus, determined to meet his fate in Jerusalem, sends messengers ahead of him. These messengers pass through a Samaritan village and are in some way rebuffed. James and John somehow witness this Samaritan cold shoulder and approach Jesus. Quite shockingly, they ask him, “Lord, do you want us to command fire down from heaven and consume them?” Why the brothers believe they can wield such heavenly napalm is unclear. Jesus rebukes them all the same.
This is one of two rebukes the Zebedee brothers receive in the synoptic tradition, the other resulting from their awkward request to sit at Jesus’s side in Heaven, which is contained in Matthew as well as Mark, though Matthew, perhaps to shield James and John from criticism, has their mother do the asking for them. Jesus’s rebuke of the brothers in this case is notable for several reasons. First, Jesus asks them if they will be “able to drink the cup that I drink.” The brothers respond, “We are able.” Jesus then tells them, “The cup that I drink you will drink.” Jesus appears to be predicting that the Zebedee brothers will die as martyrs. Indeed, there is an early tradition, eventually eclipsed by later legends, that John, like his brother James, was martyred. The second-century bishop Papias, for instance, apparently believed that John the apostle was martyred, and the tradition survives in various forms of Eastern Christianity as well. Culpepper believes the tradition might have grown out of the apostle John’s fate being conflated with that of John the Baptist.
John’s most interesting relationship, at least as it developed through Christian tradition, is not with Jesus but rather with his fellow apostle Peter. Many of the scenes in which John and Peter are traditionally believed to interact stem from the Fourth Gospel’s inclusion of “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” otherwise known as the Beloved Disciple.
In Luke and Acts, John and Peter are shown several times to work together. The first and only example in Luke takes place during the Festival of Unleavened Bread, shortly before Passover, when Jesus tells John and Peter to go to Jerusalem and find “a man carrying a jar of water,” who will take them to what Jesus calls an “already furnished” room for the Last Supper.*4 In Acts, Peter and John are shown to be on their way to the Temple to pray, and, at the Temple’s “Beautiful Gate,” they encounter a lame man who begs for alms. The lame man expects a handout; what he receives is Peter’s command to “stand up and walk.” The man springs to his feet and clings to Peter and John. In short order, “much annoyed” Sadducees arrest Peter and John. The next day, they informally arraign them. The once-lame man turns up at this arraignment, during which the Sadducees are said to notice the “boldness” of the otherwise “uneducated and ordinary” Peter and John. The Sadducees demand that the pair stop preaching about Jesus; to this, Peter and John say thanks but no thanks. The Sadducees want to punish them, but “the people,” who are apparently on the apostles’ side, make that politically impossible.
Peter and John turn up together again during the story of Philip’s adventures in Samaria. When the apostles learn of Philip’s successful evangelizing there, they ask Peter and John to join him. In Luke’s gospel, John voices a wish to destroy Samaritans. In Acts, also written by Luke (though we do not know how much time passed between the two works’ composition), John lays his hands in blessing on the Samaritans. It is difficult to know exactly what dynamic (if any) is at work here in John’s journey from anti-Samaritan rage to pro-Samaritan tending.
Tradition tells us the apostle John is the same person as the Fourth Gospel’s “disciple whom Jesus loved,” also known as the Beloved Disciple—the purest, most perfect follower of Jesus—who stands at the center of the New Testament’s most intriguing identity crisis: Thomas, Andrew, Philip, Mary Magdalene, Matthias, Lazarus (the only other man in John’s gospel that Jesus is specifically said to love), Judas the brother of Jesus, John Mark, and Paul were all put forth as the Beloved Disciple’s alternative identity at some point during Christian history, but John the apostle eventually won out. One explanation for this confusion lies in how obdurately the Fourth Gospel obscures the Beloved Disciple’s identity. The text is read as though it were written by the Beloved Disciple, but only in one late verse does it claim to be a first-person work wearing a third-person mask.
The Beloved Disciple first appears by name at a surprisingly late point in the gospel. It is the Last Supper, and Jesus has just announced, for the second time, that he is aware that he will be betrayed. John: “One of the disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him.*5 Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.” The other passages that mention the Beloved Disciple occur when Jesus is on the cross (“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her”), when Mary Magdalene discovers Jesus’s empty tomb (“So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved”), and twice during Jesus’s resurrection appearance in Galilee (“The disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ ”; “Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them”).
One instantly notices a thematic pertinence: four of the five mentions of the Beloved Disciple angle him, in some way, against Peter. The first example has an air of pettiness about it: Peter, despite his intimate place at the table with Jesus, is not even able to speak to his teacher without the intercession of the Beloved Disciple. The tomb sequence, on the other hand, seems overtly polemical. After hearing from Mary Magdalene about the empty tomb, Peter and the Beloved Disciple rush off to see it for themselves. “The two were running together,” John tells us, “but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.” Once inside the to
mb, the Beloved Disciple—and John makes sure to emphasize this—“saw and believed.” Nothing is said of Peter’s belief.
This leaves us with the risen Jesus’s appearances in Galilee during John’s twenty-first chapter, which scholars view as a later addition for several reasons. Its position on Peter and his authority appears more equitable than the preceding chapters; its language is different; its subtextual quandaries have less to do with Jesus than the situation likely faced by the community responsible for producing the gospel; and it has a clear linguistic relationship to Luke’s account of the calling of Peter, which John 21 might have retrofitted.
John 21 is an extended scene—quite extended, by the truncated narrative standards of the gospels—followed by a highly unusual coda. It takes place in Galilee, specifically the Sea of Tiberias (as the Sea of Galilee was also known), and involves “Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others.” Once again, John coyly resorts to strategic anonymity. We know that one of these disciples is the Beloved Disciple, and given the way in which he is referenced in the rest of the gospel, he would seem to be one of the “two others.” While the disciples are fishing, Jesus appears on the shore and tells them to cast their nets in a new place, where there are more fish. They do as Jesus suggests, “and now they were not able to haul [the nets] in because there were so many fish.” Immediately after the fish are pulled into the boat, the Beloved Disciple says, to Peter, “It is the Lord!” John: “When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he…jumped into the sea.” Once again, Peter does not initially believe it is the Lord; he has to hear it from the Beloved Disciple.