Commemorated on September 26
Introduction: Do not believe everything you read.
If you look up the life of Saint John the Theologian, in many places you won’t find much, or else you’ll read skeptical theories about him, contrary to the Church’s tradition about him.
For example, modern (and even a few ancient) skeptics decided that John must have been two or even three different persons, because: 1 How could a simple fisherman have written such profound theology in his Gospel account and Epistles? 2 How could that Jewish fisherman know and write in such elegant Greek? 3 How then could the same man write the Book of the Revelation with its entirely different tone and in crude Greek? This certainly must have been a different “John”, they say.
However, according to Church tradition, these were all the same man. We’ll deal with the skepticisms as we go along. But first:
A Question: Which would you trust more? 1 The traditions of the Church of Jesus Christ which have come down to us from those who were present at the time? or 2 Theories chiefly from non-Orthodox scholars who live 2000 years later, in an entirely different culture, with an entirely different mindset, who ignore the Church’s traditions? and really don’t seem to have much imagination!
Can some of the minor traditional stories get exaggerated a bit? I suspect so, though we have no way of distinguishing which, so I just ride along with them. However, I believe we can defend the basic traditions without difficulty.
You’ll note from his official title what the Church believes about Saint John. So here I’m going to present the Church’s traditional understanding of him, which includes both what is written in the Holy Scriptures, and also what earliest Church tradition tells us. When we come to the parts that are difficult to understand, often the tradition explains them. Otherwise I’ll present some suggestions to try to make them all seem possible, contrary to the skeptics who automatically try to explain them away.
Please forgive me. I have had a very busy week, so I’m going to take the following from the site of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. (Thank you, Greek brothers and sisters.) I’ll include some personal comments in italics.
The Life of Saint the Apostle, Evangelist and Theologian
Saint John came from Bethsaida, a poor village in Galilee. He was the son of Zebedee the fisherman and of Salome, the daughter of Joseph, the Betrothed of the Virgin Mary. Joseph had four sons by his first marriage: James, Joses, Jude, and Simon (or Simeon), and three daughters: Esther, Martha, and Salome. Thus, Jesus Christ our Savior was the uncle of Saint John the Theologian, since He was the half-brother of John’s mother Salome.
John and his brother James were helping their father Zebedee with the fishing when the Savior called them to follow Him and become fishers of men. They immediately left everything to follow His heavenly teaching. Such was John’s love of virginity and ascesis that, above all the disciples, he was worthy of the name of “virgin,” and such his ardent love for Christ and irreproachable life that, among them all, he became the “beloved disciple.”
John had surely known his “Uncle Jesus” before. They were family. In fact John was likely the “other disciple” (this was the usual humble way of identifying the author) with Peter in John 1:35-40, when the Baptist told them Jesus was the Lamb of God.
So His call to the fishermen James and John was not unexpected. Other reasons John was so beloved of Jesus: he was such a young guy, probably only 19 or 20 when he left home to become a disciple, and the Lord saw such potential in him.
He was one of the three closest to the Savior, who ascended Mount Tabor with Him. John looked upon the Divinity shining in the body of Christ and heard the voice out of the cloud that said: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased; listen to Him” (Matthew 17:5). It was John, carried away by his love, who wanted to sit at the right hand of the Lord in His Kingdom (Matthew 20:21).
It was also because he was still learning that the Kingdom of God is not about power. Remember the episode (Luke 9) when James and John wanted to call down fire from Heaven to destroy villages that had rejected Christ. Jesus nicknamed them “boanerges”, “sons of thunder”!
At the Last Supper, the Lord placed him at His side, where he leaned on the breast of his beloved Master (John 13:23). When the Jews laid hold of Jesus, Saint John followed Him into the palace of the high priest (John 18:15). He alone remained with the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross when the Savior was crucified. Seeing John standing by, Christ said to His mother: “Woman, behold your son!” and to John: “Behold your mother!” From that hour, John took the Virgin Mary into his own home (John 19:27).
This also was because they were family. Mary was his great aunt.
At the time the Resurrection was announced, John outran Peter and came first to the Tomb. It was he who first stooped down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground (John 20:5-6). He saw Christ after His Resurrection and was commissioned with the other disciples to preach the Gospel throughout the world when the Lord breathed on them as an earnest of the gift of the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). He was present also at the Lord’s Ascension into heaven and received the Holy Spirit under the appearance of tongues of fire with the other disciples on the day of Pentecost (Acts 1-2). He remained the last of them all in Jerusalem, in the company of the Virgin Mary, whom he served until the time of her Dormition.
When the time came to part from one another to preach in all the regions of the world, the Apostles drew lots to tell where each should go. It fell to John to preach the Gospel in Asia Minor which was full of idolatry and entirely given over to paganism. Saint John was much cast down on learning where he was to go for he had not yet learned to put all his trust in the invincible power of God. To purge him of this human weakness, God put him to the trial of wind and waves for forty days before he reached his destination. During this tempest, John’s disciple, the deacon Prochorus (July 28), was cast by the waves upon the shore at Seleucia where the people of the city accused him of witchcraft, suspecting him of having spirited away money from the shipwrecked vessel. He managed to escape, and after forty days found his master whom the sea had brought to shore at Marmareota, another city of Asia Minor.
They made their way to Ephesus, a place where the people had great devotion to the goddess Diana and would celebrate festivals in her honor. At one of these, John climbed the hill where stood the great statue of the goddess in order to address the crowd. The pagans were enraged to see him there and tried to stone him, but by the grace of God all the stones missed their mark and struck the statue, which was reduced to rubble. But the pagans, blind to the signs of divine Providence and deaf to the words of Saint John, made a second attempt to stone him. This time the stones turned back on the idolaters themselves, and the earth, quaking at the Apostle’s prayer, suddenly swallowed up more than two hundred of them. The people who survived came to their senses at last. They begged John to intercede with God to deal mercifully with them and restore to life those who had perished. So, at the prayer of Saint John, all those people came forth from the bowels of the earth, venerated the Apostle and were baptized.
The Virgin Mary joined him in Ephesus for a while. I wrote last August that in the Nineteenth Century a German mystic somehow perceived the location of and exact details about her house. Archaeologists dug and found it exactly as she had described. It has since become a place of pilgrimage. She later returned to Jerusalem.
The Emperor Domitian (AD 81-96) heard of John’s renown and arranged to meet him. He was so enraged by the Apostle’s confidence that Christ is mightier than any worldly power that he banished him to the island of Patmos in the hope of reducing his influence. On the voyage there with Prochorus, John showed the kindness of God towards man by curing the dysentery of the soldiers escorting them. As soon as they arrived, he freed Apollonides, the son of Myron a local dignitary, of an impure spirit. This miracle, accompanied by the word of John, brought Myron’s entire household to faith in Christ and baptism; and a little later, the Governor of the island was also baptized.
While he was on Patmos, John received a letter from the Bishop of Athens, Dionysius the Areopagite (October 3) who was then ninety-nine years old. He praised John as the daystar of the Gospel and prophesied that he would soon be freed. Indeed when Trajan succeeded Nerva (AD 98), he recalled Saint John to Ephesus, to the great sorrow of the people of Patmos whom he had converted. John did not want to leave them unconsoled. Strengthened by a sign from heaven, he fasted with them for three days; then, accompanied by Prochorus, he went up into a mountain where he directed all the powers of his soul towards the Lord. Suddenly the sky was rent by fearful flashes of lightening and claps of thunder. Prochorus was overwhelmed and fell to the ground while John remained impassible in contemplation. He heard a voice like thunder proclaiming from the height of heaven: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Prochorus transcribed this message of salvation, revealed to John as was once the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, but this time not for the Jews alone, but for all even to the ends of the earth.
Some say it was in Ephesus that John dictated his Gospel account. Scribes who knew good Greek were readily available there. He is titled “the Evangelist”. [euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), means “good news” or “gospel”] Because of its profundity he is titled “The Theologian”. How could this former fisherman write such profound theology? Because you don’t need to have an doctoral degree to be intelligent.
A personal example: The other Sunday at coffee hour I was sitting with a young inquirer and another young man, newly chrismated, who graduated from high school only last year. The inquirer asked some questions. Who gave the more incisive and pastoral answers? Me with my three years of graduate study? No, it was the young high school graduate. Scholars can forget that “ordinary” people can be intelligent.
We do not know the extent of John’s education. We do know he had special connections in the Jerusalem temple and knew the high priest. See John 18:15-16. Most important, John was Christ’s confidante. From Him this brilliant disciple surely learned even more than is recorded.
It was also on Patmos that John wrote the New Testament book known as the Apocalypse or Revelation. John saw Christ, having the appearance of a young man whose “face was like the sun shining in full strength.” Reassuring John, who “fell at his feet as though dead,” the Lord said: “Fear not; I am the First and the Last; I am He that Lives and was dead; and behold, I am alive forevermore and have the keys of Death and of Hell. Write the things that you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter” (Revelation 1:17ff). Then in successive revelations John was shown what will happen at the end of time: the gathering strength of iniquity, the coming of the Antichrist, his warfare against the faithful and his final struggle against Christ who, in the end, will cast him forever into Hell with the Devil and his angels. It was also given him to see in his vision the violent upheavals that will take place in the world, the fiery end of all things, and the final triumph of the Son of man, the general Resurrection and the Last Judgment.
How to explain the “tone” of the Revelation? I believe the first and last chapters were from a vision. The remainder were written in “code”, referring to events of the time about which we now know little or nothing, to give persecuted Christians hope. The crude Greek? Patmos was a small island with few scribes. Even if the scribe was the Deacon Prochorus, both he and John were old – winter? damp cave? arthritis? (I’ve seen the place. It’s a hole in a cliff.) That’s a possible explanation.
After his time on the island of Patmos, the Apostle John returned to Ephesus where he spent the remainder of his days in peace, bringing many to the faith. He was fifty-six when he left Jerusalem to preach the Gospel, which he did for nine years until his exile. He spent fifteen years on Patmos and lived another twenty-six years after his return to Ephesus.
He died on September 26 about the year 100. He was about ninety years old.
Here is a story passed down to us from Saint Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna and Martyr, who had know the Apostles: John, the “apostle of love” retained his tough side. He and some friends were about to enter the Roman bath house (the only way for people to keep clean in those days) when John spotted the heretic Cerinthus in the baths. The apostle immediately got up and left, telling his friends: “Let’s get out of here before the walls fall in on us!”
Another story, not written down till Saint Jerome in the Fourth Century, sounds authentic: Late in his life Saint John would be carried into church, saying again and again, “Little children, love each other.” When asked about it, John responded, “If you do this, it is enough.”
A strange story is this: Before his death, John directed his disciples to bury him in a cross-shaped tomb. When they later opened it to remove his bones, they found only white dust. The fact is there have never been relics of Saint John the Theologian. *
- Some years ago an Anglican friend gave me a relic of Saint John the Apostle, who left no relics. Brothers and sisters, on eBay you can obtain supposed relics of almost anybody – for a price.
Holy Apostle, Evangelist and Theologian John, pray for us.
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Next Week: Many Things
Week after Next: Holy Prophet Abraham