Red-Letter Day
Apostle & Evangelist
December 27 · d. 100
also known as John the Apostle, St. John, John the Divine, The Beloved Disciple
John, called the Beloved Disciple, leaned on the Lord's breast at the Last Supper and stood beneath the cross to receive his mother into his keeping. The church remembers him as the witness behind the Fourth Gospel, the Johannine letters, and the Apocalypse. His feast falls December 27, in the octave of the Lord's nativity.
He came late, after the other Gospels were already in circulation, and he came differently. Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke had told the story of Jesus from the days of his ministry, John began before the foundation of the world. John opens his Gospel with the eternal Word made man: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
The man behind that sentence is the apostle the Fourth Gospel itself calls only the disciple whom Jesus loved. He is the one who reclined next to the Lord at the supper, who alone among the Twelve stood at the foot of the cross, who ran with Peter to the empty tomb on the third day and outran him, who recognized the risen Lord on the lake of Tiberias before Peter did. To this disciple, from the cross, the Lord gave his own mother into keeping, and from that hour, the Gospel says, the disciple took her unto his own home.
The church remembered him afterward at Ephesus. There, in the great city of Asia Minor where Paul had once preached for two years in the school of Tyrannus, John lived into great old age, the last of the apostles, governing the churches of the province and forming the disciples who would carry the apostolic memory into the second century: Polycarp of Smyrna, who as a boy sat at John's feet and as an old bishop went to the fire for the faith.
He suffered for the gospel without dying for it. The tradition remembered that in the persecution of Domitian, near the end of the first century, John was condemned and exiled to the rocky island of Patmos in the Aegean, and there, on a Lord's Day, he was in the Spirit and saw the heavens opened. After Domitian's death he returned to Ephesus, where, the church remembers, he continued to teach the new commandment he had received from the Lord: that the disciples love one another. The fathers preserved a story that in his last years, when he was too old to walk to the assembly and had to be carried in, he would say nothing else but this, over and over: little children, love one another. When they asked him why always the same word, he said: because it is the Lord's commandment, and if this alone is done, it is enough.
How we know. The Anglican calendar holds John the apostle as the witness behind the Fourth Gospel, the three Epistles of John, and the Revelation. Patristic attribution is unanimous from the late second century onward. As Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies 3.1.1, in Roberts's translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers: "Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia." Irenaeus had his information from Polycarp of Smyrna, who as a boy had known John; that puts this notice two generations from the apostle. The other principal patristic witnesses, all preserved or quoted in Eusebius of Caesarea's early-fourth-century Ecclesiastical History, are Papias of Hierapolis (c. 130, EH 3.39), Clement of Alexandria (EH 3.23), and Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus (c. 190, EH 5.24), who wrote to Rome in the Quartodeciman controversy and located John's tomb in his own city.
Of John's life after the resurrection the New Testament itself says little. The Acts of the Apostles shows him with Peter at the Beautiful Gate of the temple and before the Sanhedrin in the early Jerusalem chapters; Paul names him at Galatians 2:9 as one of the three pillars of the Jerusalem church. The rest is the memory of the church of Asia, transmitted through Polycarp, Polycrates, Papias, and Clement of Alexandria, and gathered up by Eusebius. In McGiffert's translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Eusebius records of the years after Domitian's death: "At that time the apostle and evangelist John, the one whom Jesus loved, was still living in Asia, and governing the churches of that region, having returned after the death of Domitian from his exile on the island." The reign of Domitian ended in 96; the tradition therefore places John's death at Ephesus in great old age near the end of the first century or just into the second.
The believing tradition holds the apostle John as the witness behind the Fourth Gospel. Modern critical scholarship treats the question of whose hand wrote the printed Greek text separately from the question of whose apostolic memory stands behind the work. Papias's own words, preserved by Eusebius at EH 3.39, name John twice, once among the apostles whose teaching he inquired after, and then a second time as 'the presbyter John' still living in his own day; this double notice is the patristic seed of both the medieval 'two Johns at Ephesus' tradition and of much modern Johannine scholarship. Richard Bauckham reads the canonical Gospel as the apostolic testimony of the Beloved Disciple himself; Martin Hengel reads it as the work of a dominant 'elder John' standing within a Johannine school anchored in the apostle's witness. The question of the hand on the page is held with appropriate care.
The Anglican calendar (BCP 2019) keeps December 27 as a red-letter feast in the octave of the Lord's nativity; the liturgical color is white, as for an apostle who was not martyred. By ancient Western reckoning John stands with Stephen on the 26th and the Holy Innocents on the 28th as the comites Christi, the companions of Christ at his coming: martyr in will though not in deed.
His evangelist symbol is the eagle, the bird that alone can look full into the sun, for the Gospel that begins not on earth but in the eternal Word. He is patron of theologians, writers, editors, and publishers, and of friendship. The Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos remains a place of pilgrimage; the ruins of Justinian's basilica over the traditional tomb at Ephesus stand on Ayasuluk Hill in Selçuk.
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The Gospel According to John(Koine Greek, late first century)
Patristic attribution unanimous from Irenaeus (c. 180) onward, anchored in the memory of the Asian churches that John taught into great old age. Modern critical scholarship treats the question of the hand on the page as separate from the question of the apostolic witness behind it; the believing tradition holds John the Beloved Disciple as the witness, and the Anglican calendar keeps that tradition.
Other translations: ESV (Crossway)
Public domain: KJV at Wikisource
The First, Second, and Third Epistles of John(Koine Greek, late first century)
1 John was universally received from the earliest period; 2 and 3 John were among the antilegomena Eusebius lists at EH 3.25 but were received into the canon. All three are grouped with the Fourth Gospel as products of a Johannine circle whose memory the church has anchored to the apostle.
Public domain: 1 John (KJV) at Wikisource, 2 John (KJV) at Wikisource, 3 John (KJV) at Wikisource
The Revelation of John (Apocalypse)(Koine Greek, c. 95 CE)
Justin Martyr (Dialogue 81) and Irenaeus (AH 5.30.3) explicitly attribute the Apocalypse to the apostle John, and Western tradition consistently named him. Dionysius of Alexandria's stylistic case (preserved at Eusebius EH 7.25) for a different John of Patmos made Eastern reception cautious for a time. The Anglican calendar holds the traditional attribution while the modern critical question remains open.
Public domain: Revelation (KJV) at Wikisource
Against Heresies 3.1.1 (Irenaeus on the Fourth Gospel)(Greek (preserved in Latin), c. 180)
The earliest unambiguous patristic notice that John, the disciple who leaned on the Lord's breast, published a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus. Irenaeus had his information from Polycarp of Smyrna, who as a boy had known John; this puts the notice two generations from the apostle and gives it unusual weight.
Public domain: AH 3.1.1 at New Advent
Ecclesiastical History 3.18, 3.23, 3.39, 5.24 (Eusebius on John at Ephesus)(Greek, c. 325)
Eusebius is the great gathering basin for the second- and third-century memory of John at Ephesus: the Domitianic exile to Patmos and return (3.18, 3.23), Papias's double notice of 'John' and 'the elder John' (3.39), and Polycrates of Ephesus locating the apostle's tomb in his own city (5.24). The four chapters together are the indispensable patristic primer for John's life after the resurrection.
Public domain: EH 3.18 at CCEL, EH 3.23 at CCEL, EH 3.39 at CCEL, EH 5.24 (Polycrates) at New Advent
John for Everyone (2 volumes)(English, 2004)
Recommended: N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-10 and Part 2: Chapters 11-21 (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004)
The lay-accessible entry point. Wright walks the reader through the Fourth Gospel chapter by chapter in short, prayable sections, taking John's high theology seriously while keeping it in a register a thoughtful parishioner can pray with. Part 2 (chs 11-21) continues the same treatment through the Passion, resurrection, and the lakeside breakfast (ASIN 0664227902). The book to put first in a reader's hand who wants to read John with company.
The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John(English, 2007)
Recommended: Baker Academic (2007)
The deeper scholarly-believing pick for the reader who has finished Wright and wants the contemporary academic case for reading the Fourth Gospel as the eyewitness testimony its own narrator claims it to be. Bauckham is patient, technical, and reverent, written by one of the most respected New Testament historians of his generation.
Further reading. Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple (Baker Academic, 2007), is the most sustained recent academic case for reading the Fourth Gospel as the eyewitness testimony its own narrator claims it to be; written by one of the most respected New Testament historians of his generation, and the best contemporary entry for a reader who wants to take the apostolic Johannine witness seriously. Martin Hengel, The Johannine Question (SCM Press / Trinity Press International, 1989), is the decisive late-twentieth-century study of the Johannine corpus as the work of a single dominant teacher at Ephesus standing within an apostolic school; small, careful, reverent in tone, and the academic watershed for the question. Read either or both alongside the Fourth Gospel itself.
Online resources. The primary patristic notices for John's life after the resurrection are gathered in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, books 3 and 5, in McGiffert's translation at CCEL; Irenaeus's witness is in Against Heresies 3.1.1, in Roberts's translation at New Advent.
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Shed upon your Church, O Lord, the brightness of your light; that we, being illumined by the teaching of your apostle and evangelist John, may so walk in the light of your truth, that at length we may attain to the fullness of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.