by Tom Bissell
The chapter’s next mention of the Beloved Disciple similarly seeks to qualify, but what is at stake looms far beyond the narrative’s stated purview. Jesus asks Peter three times if he will feed his sheep, and three times Peter agrees he will. Jesus then predicts Peter’s martyrdom, which the author of John apparently regards as an accomplished fact, after which Peter turns to the Beloved Disciple and says, “Lord, what about him?” What follows is one of the most haunting passages of the New Testament:
Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”
This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.
This is the only time in the gospel tradition that the author turns to his audience and claims to be witness to the events recorded.
It would seem that this passage was intended to address a question being asked within the Johannine community; its mention of “the rumor” makes much less sense otherwise. If the community claimed as its lodestar someone with a special relationship to Jesus, and at least part of the community believed that this person would live until Jesus’s return, what would have happened when that lodestar died? Obviously, the community would have been forced to explain to itself what that meant. And here we have the community’s conspicuously underwhelming explanation: it was a big misunderstanding.
The Beloved Disciple, whatever his identity, and whatever his fate, was not intended to be the apostle John. Those who believe otherwise are implored to consult the work of three scholars who have done extensive work on Johannine Christianity: Raymond E. Brown, R. Alan Culpepper, and Richard Bauckham, all of whom were or are believing Christians and one of whom, Bauckham, is an extremely conservative (and intelligent) advocate of what has been called “elegant fundamentalism.” All reject a Beloved Disciple intended by the gospel’s author to be understood as the apostle John.
The real question about the Beloved Disciple is not whether he was John but whether the writer of the gospel expected his audience to know his identity. The way in which the gospel refers to the Beloved Disciple (“the disciple whom Jesus loved”) is a noticeably formulaic, even ritualistic, phrase and could easily have been inserted into existing traditions. More than that, the Beloved Disciple material exists in what several scholars categorize as “tension” between John’s gospel and the synoptic gospels, which contain not a single trace of John’s Beloved Disciple material.
To my mind, the most convincing possibility is that the Beloved Disciple is intended to stand in metaphorically for the Johannine community itself. The metaphors throughout the Fourth Gospel are heavily worked, starting with its opening lines: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Surely, a community inclined to view Jesus as an abstraction of this magnitude would have no trouble projecting itself, communally, into the gospel story. John 21, then, may represent a later stage in the community’s journey, in which the original, spiritual thrust of the Beloved Disciple metaphor was replaced by literal interpretation. As the community’s lot worsened, its scribes might have taken the original metaphor of a communal relationship to Jesus and reified it through explicit dramatization.
V.
The prominent members of the Twelve were all subject to a process in which possibly historical memories were legendarily expanded, some of which legends achieved quasi-scriptural authority. John presents a unique apostolic problem, in that the majority of memories and legends associated with him are dependent upon his being the Beloved Disciple. What this means is that a legend not originally about John claimed him early.
The first identifiable writer known to link John to the Fourth Gospel was Theophilus of Antioch, who died sometime in the 180s. He counted John (whom he did not explicitly name as an apostle) among “the spirit-bearing men” and considered his work (which he did not call a gospel, though he clearly meant the gospel) “holy.” The next prominent early Christian to connect John to the gospel was Clement of Alexandria, who seems to have been aware of an earlier tradition. After telling us how and why Mark was written, Clement—or rather Eusebius’s later gloss on Clement, because the commentary in which Clement made these claims is lost—noted, “Last of all, aware that the physical facts had been recorded in the gospels by his pupils and irresistibly moved by the Spirit, John wrote a spiritual gospel.” These modest, paraphrastic lines would frame the perception of John for generations.
The church fathers made the argument for John’s authorship in good faith. Within the synoptic tradition and Acts, the factual basis of which the church fathers had no reason to doubt, Peter and John were linked. They read the Fourth Gospel with care, noted an unnamed disciple’s serial involvement with Peter, and sensibly deduced that this disciple must be John. Additionally, they believed that the Beloved Disciple was necessarily a member of the Twelve, if only due to the Last Supper, the synoptic portrayal of which seems to exclusively involve the Twelve. Finally, the Zebedee brothers have such prominent roles in the synoptic gospels; it made no sense that the Fourth Gospel would ignore them. Thus, by the fourth century, the apostle John was widely accepted as the gospel’s author, and the gospel was widely acknowledged to possess a different character from that of the synoptic gospels, which was, in turn, partially attributed to John’s advanced age when he wrote it.
The scalpel of modern scholarship has by now sliced all this to ribbons. One scholar has written that the severity of John’s differences is such that “we can only treat it as a secondary source.” An exaggeration, surely, but not by much. One thing the reader of John immediately notices is how densely, even rhythmically, literary it is. As storytellers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke largely avoid scenic writing. Their preferred mode is that of the vignette. This is especially noticeable when the synoptic gospels shift from their knockabout accounts of Jesus’s ministry and move into his Passion, which is a long, continuous, and dreadfully intense scene in all four gospels. This has to do with how the oral traditions about Jesus developed. While the events of his ministry were likely passed on in a scattered, nonlinear manner, the Passion tradition was always a complete, prepackaged storytelling unit.
As often as possible, John writes in scene: the miracle at the wedding in Cana, the nighttime visit to Jesus by the Pharisee Nicodemus, Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman by the well, Jesus’s confrontation by the followers of the Baptist, the raising of Lazarus, Thomas’s doubt—all stories that are unique to John. In those stories that John shares with the synoptic gospels, one often finds a decisive added detail: that the fish Jesus multiplies are smoked, for instance, or that the perfume the woman pours over Jesus’s feet could be smelled throughout the house, or that the woman who did the pouring was named Mary, or that it was Peter who struck the slave during Jesus’s arrest, or that the slave was named Malchus, or that Jesus dipped bread into a dish to identify his betrayer during the Last Supper.
Another example: Mark describes how Jesus, early in his ministry, healed a lame man in Capernaum. John gives us a similar story but places the healing in Jerusalem. Not only in Jerusalem, but “by the Sheep Gate.” Not only by the Sheep Gate, but near “a pool.” Not just any pool, but a pool called “Beth-zatha.” Additionally, this pool has five porticoes,*6 and sprawled on these porticoes are the sick. Not just the sick, but the “blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Mark’s Jesus heals the lame man of Capernaum, who says nothing to Jesus, but John’s lame Jerusalemite speaks, to distinctly heartbreaking effect: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Mark sketches a vague miracle story. John creates a small, detailed world.
Many scholars have explored the ways in which the Johannine tradition departs narrati
vely from the synoptic tradition by noting how often its departures lack any dialectical force behind them. As Raymond E. Brown writes, “Unless theological symbolism moves him otherwise, John respects plausibility, and that evangelist was much closer to what would seem plausible in the 1st cent than we are.” In some cases, its departures feel like remembered details. This is a large part of what makes John so fascinating. The gospel with the clearest markers for having an authentic eyewitness at its core also has the most elevated view of Jesus’s divinity.
Many scholars believe the Gospel According to John contains details and memories that are historical but a theology that is not. Conservative Christian scholars have pointed out the convenient agnosticism of this position. But if Mark’s gospel were our only witness to Jesus’s ministry, for instance, Jesus’s supposed divinity would be an open question. Say that John’s theology truly was received from the source rather than developed over time. This would mean Mark made the inexplicable decision to assay a less emphatic case for Jesus’s divinity. It is far more likely that John’s gospel contains historical information later reinforced by theological elaboration.
Brown argues that the synoptic version of the Jesus story, with its climactic arrival in Jerusalem, was more dramatically satisfying and probably quite a bit “easier to preach” than John’s story, in which Jesus goes back and forth from Galilee to Jerusalem throughout. John’s gospel does not appear to have been shaped by the demands of “narratological preachability.” It is a story text, a proclaiming text, and offers evidence of a community in obvious pain. The author of John darkly and frequently lingers on the issue of Jewishness, for instance, mentioning “Jews” ten times more than any other gospel. This is, without any doubt, the Fourth Gospel’s most regrettable and historically disastrous legacy, though it is important to remember that the Johannine community was probably composed mostly of Jews, at least initially; its gospel’s attacks must be understood as emanating from within Judaism, not without. In contrast to the synoptic gospels, John’s Jesus has several secret Jewish admirers—Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea—who occupy important positions within the Temple hierarchy. John goes so far as to note that “many” among the Temple “authorities” believed in Jesus. The most anti-Jewish gospel is also the gospel that is most fixated on Jewish approval of Jesus.
Jesus himself tells his disciples during the Last Supper, “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.” Yet there is absolutely no historical evidence that anyone who followed Jesus was expelled from his or her synagogue or killed by the Jewish authorities during or in the immediate years after Jesus’s ministry. (The Jewish authorities of Jesus’s time were by and large not in the business of killing people over things they said.) The numerous passages of John in which synagogue expulsion is mentioned appear to refer to the Test Benediction, a daily synagogue prayer believed by some (but not all) scholars to have been formulated in the 80s by Gamaliel II, one of Judaism’s most important leaders in the difficult period following the destruction of the Temple in 70. The apparent purpose of the Test Benediction was to exclude Jewish Christians and other perceived heretics from the synagogues. By taking events familiar to the Johannine community and placing them within the ministry of Jesus, John’s author is presenting history as prophecy.
Aside from Paul, “John” is the New Testament’s most prolific writer, with five books attributed to him: the gospel, three letters, and Revelation. Yet these attributions are far from certain. The Johannine epistles claim to have been written by a man who refers to himself as the “elder,” and the author of Revelation says he is Jesus’s “servant John.” Tradition has generally regarded both figures as the apostle. If, however, the Beloved Disciple was not the apostle John, the connection between him and the “elder” of the Johannine epistles all but short-circuits. As for Revelation, several early Christians refused to identify its author as the apostle John—even though Revelation is the only piece of Johannine literature whose author identifies himself as John! Which John wrote the works attributed to him was a question several church fathers worked diligently to answer. Their efforts encased a single, merely perplexing question within a gnarl of combative confusions.
In the early second century, Papias wrote of two Johns, one of whom was obviously the apostle and one of whom he called an “elder” or “presbyter” named John. Papias appears to admit that he did not know the apostle but did know (or had heard) Elder John. This Elder John, according to Papias, had, apparently (possibly?), known (or had heard?) the apostle John. Suffice it to say that the passage in which Papias makes these claims is extremely confusing, and due to what one scholar describes as the passage’s “flexible Greek,” it may just as easily be that Papias was claiming a direct relationship not to either John but rather to people who knew them. That would put Papias at three stages of remove from the apostle and two stages of remove from the Elder.
Irenaeus, the second-century bishop and inexhaustible heresiologist, is the first Christian known to argue that the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine epistles were written by the apostle John, that the gospel was written while John “was residing in Ephesus,” and that John lived up to the time of the Roman emperor Trajan, whose rule began in 98. The epistolary fragment in which Irenaeus divulged how he learned of this information presents a number of problems. According to Irenaeus, his source was Polycarp of Smyrna, who was martyred around 157. While “still a boy,” Irenaeus wrote, and living in “Lower Asia,” he met the celebrated Polycarp, who frequently talked about his “intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord.” Elsewhere Irenaeus wrote that Polycarp “was appointed by apostles to serve in Asia as Bishop of Smyrna.” Yet no writer who lived before Irenaeus mentioned Polycarp’s connection to John.
Irenaeus was familiar with the work of Papias, who he said “had listened to John and was later a companion of Polycarp.” But which John did Irenaeus mean? Because Irenaeus never mentioned any Elder John, he must have meant the apostle. Papias, though, never clearly claimed to have known the apostle, as Eusebius was quick to point out a century after Irenaeus, writing that Papias himself “makes it clear that he [Papias] was never a hearer or an eyewitness to the holy apostles.” Eusebius attributes Irenaeus’s confusion to the fact that two Johns lived and were buried in Ephesus: the apostle John, who wrote the gospel; and another John, who wrote Revelation (a work Eusebius did not wholly approve of). It was the latter John, Eusebius argued, whom Papias was acquainted with. Yet the legend that grew up around John is largely based on Irenaeus’s belief that Papias knew the apostle rather than the Elder.
Irenaeus had considerable motivation to interpret Papias’s relationship to the apostle John in the way that he did, for he was determined to make a case for the apostolic origins of the Fourth Gospel. It would have done Irenaeus’s argument no good to acknowledge the existence in Ephesus of Papias’s other, non-apostolic John. In short order, he became the Fourth Gospel’s most significant early supporter and worked hard to ensure its acceptance among proto-orthodox Christians.
The Fourth Gospel needed Irenaeus’s campaign because many of the first Christian thinkers who found themselves attracted to it—and the figure of John himself—were heterodox. One such figure was Montanus, who took up the Fourth Gospel’s imperatives, as he understood them, at the very moment that Irenaeus was trying to argue on the gospel’s behalf. The Christianity Montanus forged was apocalyptic and anticlerical. Moreover, it allowed women to participate in its rites and serve as its prophets. Montanist Christianity was also extremely popular, spreading throughout Roman Asia in the second half of the second century and eventually plucking from the ranks of proto-orthodox Christianity its first great Latin-speaking intellectual, Tertullian. The Fourth Gospel became so tainted by its association with various forms of heterodoxy that several early Christian writers and church fathers seemed reluctant even to mention it.
/> If the Gospel According to John is the voice of a Christian community in pain, the three Johannine epistles are the voice of a Christian community pelvis-deep in schismatic misery. Reading the epistles straight through may be the most unpleasant literary experience offered by the New Testament. For instance, 1 John 3:6 reads, “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” This is the ne plus ultra of Johannine thought and reveals its granite, uncompromising view of what it means to believe in Jesus. It also has no parallel in the New Testament, which frequently seeks to console those who sin.
Addressed to the “little children” of the author’s community (which might have included other, nearby churches), 1 John*7 seems to be a desperate attempt to shore up, and protect, the faithful. The voice throughout the epistle is distinctly that of a desperate community leader attempting to inhabit an authority that all within his troubled community had, at one point, accepted. After a brief note of congratulations, 2 John quickly gets around to warning all to keep away from anyone who “goes beyond” the teachings of Christ. That the writer of 2 John is addressing a broken and increasingly imperiled Christian community becomes more apparent in 3 John, which condemns the false teachings of a man named Diotrephes, apparently a community leader who broke away from the group and took others with him. Why the author or authors of the epistles never mention or appeal to the authority of the Fourth Gospel is a question without a good answer. If the epistles predate the gospel, which is possible but unlikely, it might be that the Johannine Christians’ lack of a widely accepted documentary proclamation helped tear their community apart.
Revelation is the New Testament’s most mongrel work. Thomas Jefferson memorably dismissed it as “the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.” It contains a gospel in miniature, several specimens of epistolary counsel, fantasias, sprinklerheads of mysticism, and a prophetic, often violent unveiling of events soon to come (parts of which might derive from contemporaneous reactions to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE). Texts do not get bristlier than Revelation, yet it is astoundingly sketchy on explaining what specific transgressions have so angered its author. The offenses it does mention include fornication, eating meat sacrificed to idols, and tolerating false teaching, but that is about it. The rest of the New Testament frequently emphasizes that to be a Christian is to accept outside rule, but Revelation broils in confrontation and sedition, taunting both Rome and its emperor.