The Beloved Apostle?

The Transformation of the Apostle John into the Fourth Evangelist

Kok

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532610226
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Second-century Christians had a significant role in shaping the import of the literary sources that they inherited from the first century through their editorial revisions and the church traditions that they appended to them. Michael J. Kok critically investigates the supposed clues that encouraged select Christian intellectuals to infer that John, one of Jesus' chosen twelve apostles, was the mysterious "disciple whom Jesus loved" and to ascribe the fourth canonical Gospel as well as four other New Testament books back to him. Kok outlines how the image of Saint John of Ephesus was constructed. Not all early Christians approved of the fourth canonical Gospel and some expressed strong reservations about its theology, preferring to link it with a heretical adversary rather than with an authoritative Christian founder figure. Discover how the moves made in the second century were crucial for determining whether this Gospel would be preserved at all for posterity, much less as part of the scriptural collection of the developing Orthodox Church.

1

The Beloved Son of Zebedee?

The enigmatic beloved disciple has piqued the curiosity of laypersons and academics alike. Some commentators restrict the exegetical analysis to the verses that explicitly designate a disciple in such a manner (John 13:23–25; 19:26–27; 20:2–10; 21:7, 20–24),1 while others broaden the scope of the investigation to encompass additional references to an anonymous character (1:35–40; 18:15–16; 19:35; 21:2).2 Redaction critics often consign the beloved disciple to a secondary or tertiary layer imposed upon older strata of tradition embedded in the Fourth Gospel.3 Literary critics have delved into the characterization of the beloved disciple as the archetypical devotee.4 In spite of this increasing methodological sophistication, the historic stance that the beloved disciple was the Apostle John has proven to be a remarkably enduring position.5 The pros and cons of this age-old authorial tradition thus deserve a fresh hearing.

The Case for the Traditional View

First, we must consider B. F. Westcott’s celebrated apologetic for the traditional authorship of the Fourth Gospel. Westcott progressively whittled down the candidates who could have been the evangelist—the evangelist must be a Jew, a native of Palestine, an eyewitness of Jesus, and a seminal leader among the twelve apostles—until he reached the verdict that the Apostle John alone satisfies all of these conditions.6 The first two criteria are relatively uncontroversial. Part of Westcott’s justification for the last two criteria is that the “narrative is marked by minute details of persons, and time, and number, and place and manner, which cannot but have come from a direct personal experience.”7 Granted, the topographical precision and descriptive flourishes could have also stemmed from prior written sources, from personal sojourns to locales where Jesus was believed to have visited, or from efforts to create verisimilitude for the story.8 It is not inconceivable that the evangelist corresponded with informants from the region who had interacted with Jesus in some capacity. Whether the evangelist was a direct eyewitness, and more so an apostle, depends on the wider exegetical considerations pertaining to the beloved disciple.

If the Apostle John was disguised behind this moniker, this might account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that he does not appear under his own name in the Fourth Gospel apart from a fleeting cameo in John 21:2. Moreover, when a “John” is named in the text, the referent is always the prophet who urged the people to undergo a baptism of repentance, but his name is never qualified with the sobriquet ho baptistēs (“the baptizer”). If the original consumers of the text were acquainted with the evangelist John on a personal basis, then they were not at risk of confusing the prophet John who prepared the groundwork for Jesus’ announcement of goods news before he was beheaded by the tetrarch Herod Antipas with the evangelist John.9 This second contention is a little weaker; the reason the prophet John is not qualified as the “baptizer” in the Fourth Gospel may be due to how the evangelist rendered the baptizing practices of Jesus’ disciples as supplanting the rite of Jesus’ predecessor (John 3:22–4:1).10

Zebedee’s children, James and John, may also be missing because the Fourth Gospel generally did not cover any of the incidents from the Synoptic Gospels where they were singled out. An exception is in the fishing excursion in the Johannine epilogue that is noticeably similar to Luke 5:1–11, and “those from Zebedee” (hoi tou Zebadaiou) are among the cast of characters (John 21:2). This opaque reference in John 21:2 may not disqualify the Apostle John from the running for the coveted role of the beloved disciple, for his name was conspicuously skipped over.11 J. Ramsay Michaels doe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Beloved Son of Zebedee?
• Chapter 2: The Beloved Evangelist?
• Chapter 3: Would the Real John Please Stand Up?
• Chapter 4: Why Does The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel Matter?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography