Justified True Belief

(●) The fisherman who once asked permission to burn a village, and who spent his old age writing that God is love. + Mark, telling how Jesus recruited his first followers, gives one homely detail and moves on. Two brothers were in a boat with their father, mending the nets. It is the least dramatic thing a fisherman does. The nets tear on rocks and on the fish themselves, and somebody has to sit with them in the morning, working the tangles out by hand, if there is going to be a catch tomorrow. That is what John of Galilee was doing the day his life changed. He is on a Christian apologetics shelf for a reason that goes beyond the obvious one. Five books of the New Testament come down to us under his name, and one of them, the Fourth Gospel, is the most theologically ambitious document in the collection: it opens outside of time, with a Word who was with God and was God, and then spends twenty-one chapters insisting that this Word could be heard, watched, leaned against, and touched. That combination is the whole Christian claim in one book. And the book keeps interrupting itself to say that the man behind it was standing there. "He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe" (John 19:35). There is also a chain of custody here that exists for almost no other ancient figure. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180 AD, says he sat as a boy at the feet of Polycarp of Smyrna, and that Polycarp used to describe his own conversations with John and with others who had seen the Lord. Three living memories, end to end, and you are back at the boat. One honest caution goes with all of it, and it will come up again: the Fourth Gospel never names its author. It calls him "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and the identification of that disciple with John the son of Zebedee is a tradition reaching back to Irenaeus, not a statement the book itself makes. Serious Christian scholars still argue about it, and the argument is worth having rather than hiding.

(●) Before c. 28 AD: He worked his father’s fishing business on the Sea of Galilee, and it was big enough to have employees. + Nobody wrote down the year he was born. What the Gospels give instead is a family and a trade, mentioned in passing because the writers assumed everyone knew. His father was Zebedee, his brother was James, and the two of them worked the lake together: "And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him" (Mark 1:19–20). Hired men. That is a small phrase carrying a fair amount of weight. This was not a man fishing to feed his own household; it was a business with wages to pay, and Luke adds that Zebedee’s sons were in partnership with Simon, the man Jesus would rename Peter (Luke 5:10). Boats, nets, hired hands, a catch to salt and sell. When the two of them walked away from it, they were walking away from something. His mother is probably named in the Gospels, though it takes a comparison to see it. Mark lists the women watching the crucifixion from a distance and names Salome among them; Matthew, listing the same group, names instead "the mother of the sons of Zebedee" (Mark 15:40; Matthew 27:56). The most natural reading is that these are the same woman. A further step is sometimes taken from there. The Fourth Gospel’s list of the women at the cross includes an unnamed sister of Jesus’ mother (John 19:25), and if that sister is Salome, John was a cousin of Jesus. That step is an inference from how a list is read, not a fact anyone states, and honest commentators leave it as a possibility rather than a conclusion.

(●) c. 28 AD: Jesus called the brothers off the water and gave the pair a nickname, Sons of Thunder. + When Mark reaches the list of the twelve men Jesus chose, he stops to explain two of the names. Simon became Peter, the Rock. And then: "James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder)" (Mark 3:17). Mark never says what the brothers did to earn it, which is the sort of gap that makes a detail feel less like invention and more like a family joke everyone in the room already understood. The other Gospels supply candidates, and none of them is flattering. A Samaritan village refused Jesus hospitality, and the brothers had a suggestion ready: "And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). On another occasion John reported, apparently expecting approval, that he had tried to shut down a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name, on the grounds that the man was not one of their group (Mark 9:38). And on the road to Jerusalem the two of them asked for the best seats in the coming kingdom: "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory" (Mark 10:35–37). Ambition, tribalism, and a willingness to call down fire, all in the space of a few chapters. Yet he is also one of three men repeatedly taken where the other nine are not. Peter, James and John are the ones brought into the room where a synagogue official’s daughter is raised, up the mountain where Jesus’ appearance changed in front of them, and into the olive grove on the night of the arrest (Mark 5:37; Mark 9:2; Mark 14:33). Whatever the thunder was, it did not disqualify him.

(●) c. 30 AD: He was standing at the cross, and Jesus handed him his mother. + The Fourth Gospel has a habit that no other Gospel has. There is a disciple in it who is never given a name, who appears at the supper, at the cross, at the tomb, and by the lake at the end, and who is called only "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20). The church has identified him with John son of Zebedee since Irenaeus, and one reason is a quiet oddity: John son of Zebedee, one of the three most prominent disciples in the other three Gospels, is never once named in this one. At the crucifixion that disciple is standing near enough to be spoken to. "When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, Woman, behold, your son! Then he said to the disciple, Behold, your mother! And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home" (John 19:26–27). A dying man in agony, arranging for his mother’s support. It is one of the most ordinary things in the Gospels and one of the hardest to read. Two mornings later he is running. Mary Magdalene brings word that the tomb is open, and the two of them go, the beloved disciple outrunning Peter and stopping at the entrance, Peter going straight in past him (John 20:4–6). Then, in a sentence with no explanation attached: "Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed" (John 20:8). Grave clothes lying undisturbed, no body, and a man who suddenly understood something. The same book will later pause in the middle of the crucifixion account to swear that the person telling you this watched it happen (John 19:35).

(●) 30s AD: In Jerusalem he was Peter’s constant companion, and the Samaritans he had wanted burned got the gospel instead. + In Acts the two of them travel as a pair, and something odd stands out once you notice it: John never speaks on his own. He is going up to the temple with Peter at the hour of prayer when the lame man at the gate asks them for money (Acts 3:1). He is standing beside Peter in front of the council, where the verdict on the two of them is blunt and, in its way, a compliment: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13). Uneducated and common meant without formal rabbinic schooling, not illiterate. He was a tradesman being surprising in a room full of professionals. The one line Luke ever gives him he shares with Peter a few verses on, when the pair tell the council they cannot stop speaking about what they have seen and heard (Acts 4:19–20). Then comes the detail worth holding next to the fire from heaven. Philip had preached in Samaria and people had believed, and the Jerusalem apostles sent two men north to them: "Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John" (Acts 8:14). Samaritans and Jews had been quarreling over the right mountain to worship on for centuries, and this particular apostle had once wanted a Samaritan village incinerated for a discourtesy. Luke reports the errand without comment. He did not need to make the point.

(●) 44 AD: Herod executed his brother, and John went on living, one of the three men Paul would soon call pillars. + Luke reports the death of James in one flat sentence, without a funeral, without a speech: "He killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:2). Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great, wanted to please the Jerusalem crowd, and killing an apostle did it. James became the first of the twelve to die for the name. The brothers who had asked to sit on the right and the left were told they would drink the cup Jesus drank, and one of them drank it within about fourteen years (Mark 10:38–39). The other did not, and the contrast is part of why the church remembered him the way it did: the two Sons of Thunder ended as the first apostle to be martyred and, by the oldest traditions, the last of the twelve to die. There is a late and much weaker report going the other way, and it is better named than quietly left out. A fragment of a fifth-century chronicle by Philip of Side claims that Papias, writing in the early second century, said John was killed by Jews along with his brother. Almost no one builds on it: the fragment is late, it survives at several removes, and the two earliest writers who actually read Papias, Irenaeus and Eusebius, both say plainly that John lived into old age. Around 49 AD Paul went up to Jerusalem to settle whether Gentile converts had to become Jews first, and found John still there, at the center of things: "and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised" (Galatians 2:9). It is the last time the New Testament’s letters place him anywhere in particular. Paul is writing about the man who had once tried to stop an outsider from working in Jesus’ name, and reporting that he shook hands on a mission to outsiders.

(●) c. 95 AD: On a small island called Patmos, by the oldest accounts under a sentence of banishment, he wrote a circular letter to seven churches and filled it with visions. + Between the handshake in Jerusalem and the island, the record goes quiet for the better part of half a century. Nobody wrote the middle of his life down, and the honest thing to say is that we do not know how he spent it. What the second-century church says, with very little variation, is that he ended his life in the Roman province of Asia, on the western coast of modern Turkey, and the first document that puts him anywhere in particular after Galatians puts him on a small rock offshore. Patmos is a rocky Aegean island of about thirteen square miles, roughly forty miles off that coast. Rome used places like it for relegation, the milder form of banishment, which left a man his citizenship and usually his property but parked him somewhere he could not cause trouble. The author of the Revelation says why he was there: "I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 1:9). Strictly, that says he was there and why, not that a magistrate sent him; banishment is the reading the early church gave it, and Eusebius passes on the account that John was condemned to the island for his testimony to the divine word (Church History 3.18). Irenaeus, who is the earliest witness to the date, places the vision at the very end of the reign of the emperor Domitian, which puts it around 95 or 96 AD (Against Heresies 5.30.3). A minority of scholars argue for the 60s instead, under Nero, reading the book’s references to the temple as evidence it was written before Jerusalem fell in 70 AD. The traditional later date is still the majority position, and the argument is about the reading of the visions, not about whether they were written. What he wrote is a letter, not a puzzle book. It opens with messages to seven named congregations in Asia, with their compromises and their fears addressed one by one, and only then opens out into the throne room. The turn at the center of it is the sentence that governs everything after: he is told to look at the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and what he sees when he looks is a slaughtered lamb, standing (Revelation 5:5–6).

(●) c. 100 AD: He died old at Ephesus, and the men who buried him were remembered by men who wrote it down. + Ephesus was the largest city in the Roman province of Asia, a port with a harbor road, a theater seating perhaps twenty-five thousand, and the temple of Artemis that tourists came to see. Irenaeus says John lived there and published his Gospel there, and that "he remained among them up to the times of Trajan" (Against Heresies 3.1.1; 2.22.5). Trajan became emperor in 98, so the traditional date of death, around 100 AD, comes from that sentence and is an estimate rather than a record. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, writing to Rome about 190 AD, names among the great lights buried in Asia "John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and, being a priest, wore the sacerdotal plate," and says he fell asleep at Ephesus (in Eusebius, Church History 5.24). The sacerdotal plate was the gold frontlet worn on the forehead of Israel’s high priest, and what Polycrates meant by hanging it on a Galilean fisherman is still argued about. Three stories about the old man circulated in the centuries after his death, and the fathers pass them on as stories rather than as documents. Irenaeus repeats what men who had heard Polycarp told him: John went to bathe at Ephesus, perceived the heretic Cerinthus inside, and rushed out without bathing, calling out "Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within" (Against Heresies 3.3.4). Cerinthus taught in Asia that the Christ came down on the man Jesus at his baptism and left him again before the end, so that whoever died on the cross was only a man. A fisherman who had stood near enough to be spoken to from it would have had a view about that. Clement of Alexandria tells of a young convert John had entrusted to a local bishop, who fell in with thieves and became the captain of a robber band; the aged apostle rode out after him and called to him as he ran, "Why, my son, do you flee from me, your father, unarmed, old?" (Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? 42). Jerome reports that in his last years John had to be carried into the assembly and could manage only one sentence, repeated: little children, love one another. Asked why he never said anything else, he answered that it is the Lord’s command, and if that alone is kept, it is enough (Commentary on Galatians, on 6:10). The Gospel itself preserves something that fits an old man’s death oddly well. A rumor had gone around that this disciple would not die at all, and the book takes the trouble to correct it: Jesus had said only, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?" (John 21:22–23). Somebody thought that misunderstanding needed clearing up, which is the kind of thing you do when the man everyone expected to outlive the world has just been buried.

What He Taught

(T1) The Word who made everything became a human being with a body. + Every other Gospel begins somewhere you could stand: a genealogy, a manger, a preacher at a river. The Fourth Gospel begins before there was anywhere to stand. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). The Greek behind "Word" is logos, and it was a word with a long history in that room. To a Greek trained in philosophy it meant the rational principle that holds the cosmos together and makes it intelligible, the reason there is order rather than noise; Heraclitus had used it that way some six centuries earlier. To a Jew it carried the memory of Genesis, where God speaks and things exist, and of the word of the Lord that comes to the prophets. John takes the term both audiences already had, and then does something neither of them was expecting. He says the Word is a person, distinguishable from God ("with God") and yet fully God ("was God"), and that everything else that exists came into being through him. Then he moves. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The verb for dwelt is built on the word for a tent, and behind it stands the tabernacle in the wilderness, the tent where the glory of God settled among a camping people. The claim is not that a god put on a human disguise, and not that a good man was promoted. It is that the one through whom everything was made took on a body that got tired, wept at a grave, and bled. That sentence is where the church’s four centuries of careful argument about Christ began, and every round of it was an attempt to hold on to both halves at once: the one through whom everything was made, and the body that got tired.

(Q) "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." + Source: John 1:14 (English Standard Version). The hinge of the prologue, and the point where the eternal Word enters a datable century. Notice the pronoun: we have seen. The claim about eternity is made by someone claiming to have been in the room (T2).

(T2) What he wrote about, he says he heard and watched and touched. + Imagine a man giving evidence about a fire. He does not begin with the chemistry of combustion. He begins with where he was standing, what he heard, and what the heat felt like on his face, because that is the part only he can supply. The opening of the first letter of John reads exactly like that, and it stacks the senses one on top of another: heard, seen, looked at, touched with our hands. There is a reason for the piling on. Teachers had begun circulating in Asia who held that the divine Christ could not really have taken a body, since matter is beneath God; the Son only appeared to be human, the way an actor appears to be a king. Later writers gave the view a name, docetism, from the Greek dokein, "to seem." John gives it no philosophical rebuttal at all. He gives a test that a fisherman could apply and a philosopher could not wriggle out of: "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God" (1 John 4:2–3). The Gospel does the same thing in its own way, twice interrupting the narrative to certify it. At the cross: he who saw it has borne witness, and he knows that he is telling the truth (John 19:35). And at the end, in a voice that seems to belong to the community that published the book rather than to the writer: we know that his testimony is true (John 21:24). Whatever else the Fourth Gospel is, it is not offered as a meditation. It is offered as sworn evidence, and it invites the reader to treat it as such.

(Q) "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." + Source: 1 John 1:1 (English Standard Version). The letter opens without a greeting, without a name, and without a sentence that finishes on time; the grammar strains because the writer is trying to get four kinds of contact into one clause. Two verses later he says why he is telling anyone: so that you too may have fellowship with us (1 John 1:3).

(T3) Eternal life is not a reward that starts later; it is knowing God, and it starts now. + Ask most people what eternal life means and they will describe a duration: a very long time, beginning after the funeral. John keeps using the phrase in the present tense, and about people who are demonstrably still alive. Whoever believes has eternal life, he writes, and he writes it so that his readers may know they have it now (1 John 5:13). The definition he gives is not a length at all. It is a relationship: "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3). The verb for knowing is the ordinary one used for knowing a person rather than a fact, the difference between knowing about a man from his file and knowing him because you have eaten at his table for thirty years. Eternal life on this account is that kind of acquaintance with God, and its length is a consequence of what it is rather than the thing itself. Theologians sometimes call this strand realized eschatology, which sounds forbidding and means something simple: the last things have started arriving early. John has not dropped the future, and it is worth saying so, because the charge is sometimes made. He still expects a resurrection on the last day and a judgment (John 5:28–29), and the Revelation is nothing if not a book about how history ends. What he insists on is that the future has a beachhead in the present. The life of the age to come is not only ahead of the believer; some of it is already underway.

(Q) "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." + Source: John 17:3 (English Standard Version). From the prayer Jesus prays on the last night, with the arrest an hour or two away. The setting matters to the claim: a man about to be killed defining eternal life, and defining it as knowing somebody.

(T4) God is love, and the word is defined by an execution rather than by a feeling. + "God is love" is probably the most quoted sentence John ever wrote and the most frequently emptied out. Lifted from its paragraph it becomes a mood, a general benevolence, a God who is agreeable about everything. That is not what the paragraph says. John writes the sentence and then, in the next breath, tells you where to look to find out what the word means, and where he points is not a sunset. "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). Propitiation is the technical term in the room, and it is worth learning rather than skipping. It means a sacrifice that deals with wrath: not a bribe offered to a hostile deity to change his mind, which is the pagan version, but something God himself provides to deal with his own settled opposition to evil. The picture behind it is the mercy seat, the lid of the ark of the covenant, where blood was sprinkled once a year on the Day of Atonement. Christians have argued about how much of that machinery the word carries, and some translations render it "atoning sacrifice" instead. What no reading avoids is the direction of travel. Love, on John’s account, is not primarily something we do or feel toward God. It is something God did, at cost, first. Which is why the letter turns immediately practical and stays there. If God loved like that, we ought to love one another; anyone who claims to love God while hating a brother is lying; love that stays a sentiment and never becomes an action is not the article (1 John 4:11, 20; 1 John 3:18). The Son of Thunder who wanted a village burned is the man writing this, and the reader who knows that reads it differently.

(Q) "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." + Source: 1 John 4:10 (English Standard Version). The preceding verse supplies the evidence for the claim: "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9).

(T5) History is held by a slaughtered Lamb, and it ends with God moving in with people. + The Revelation is read badly more often than any other book in the Bible, usually as a coded timetable for working out when the world ends. Take it instead as what it announces itself to be, a letter carrying visions to seven anxious congregations living under an empire that could kill them, and its argument turns out not to be hard to state. The whole thing turns on one image. John weeps in the vision because no one is found worthy to open the sealed scroll of history. An elder tells him to stop crying and look at the Lion of the tribe of Judah, who has conquered. He looks, and what stands there is a Lamb, "as though it had been slain" (Revelation 5:5–6). The lion is announced and the lamb appears, and the two images are not swapped; they are identified. Whatever conquest means in this book, it means what happened at the cross, which is why the martyrs later in the book "have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony" (Revelation 12:11) rather than by winning a fight. Then the ending, which decides what kind of hope Christianity is. It is not the soul escaping the world for a better place. It is God coming down to a renewed one: a city descending, God pitching his tent among people, and every tear wiped away by hand. The word behind "dwelling place" is the Greek for a tent, and the verb for dwelling is the one the prologue used, so the tabernacle image returns at the close of the story, and this time the tent is permanent (T1).

(Q) "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." + Source: Revelation 21:3–4 (English Standard Version). A loud voice from the throne, announcing the end of the story to a congregation that had reason to think the empire would write it. The promise is not evacuation but residence.

(Q) "This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true." + Source: John 21:24 (English Standard Version). The last word about him in his own Gospel is spoken by somebody else, in the plural: we know. A community that had him among them is vouching for the man and putting its name to his book, which is where the church’s long argument about him begins.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church built its doctrine of Christ out of his first fourteen verses. + Clement of Alexandria, around 200 AD, gave the Fourth Gospel the description that stuck. The other three had set out the outward facts, he said, and so John, "being urged by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel" (preserved in Eusebius, Church History 6.14.7). It was never meant as a demotion of the other three. It meant that this one goes after the significance of the events, and it does so with vocabulary the church has never put down. When the great fourth-century controversy came, it was fought almost entirely on Johannine ground. Johannine is the scholars’ adjective for anything belonging to John and his circle, the way Pauline works for Paul, and the ground in this case was the prologue. Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, one of the ordained elders who ran its congregations, taught that the Son was the highest of creatures, made before time but made; there was, in his famous slogan, a when that he was not. His opponents pointed to the prologue: the Word already was in the beginning, everything that came into being came through him, and he was God (John 1:1–3). Athanasius, who spent five separate exiles defending the point, argued from John 10:30 that the Son shares the Father’s being, and answered the Arian appeal to John 14:28, "the Father is greater than I," by taking it as a statement about the Son’s incarnate condition rather than his nature. The word the Council of Nicaea settled on in 325, homoousios ("of the same substance"), is not in the Bible, and Nicaea’s defenders freely said so; their case was that it was the only way left to say in Greek what the prologue says in Greek. The line back from those councils to the fisherman is unusually short. Irenaeus, whose Against Heresies is the first sustained defense of the four-Gospel collection, describes hearing Polycarp of Smyrna as a boy and remembering how the old man recounted "his intercourse with John," along with what he had heard from others who had seen the Lord (in Eusebius, Church History 5.20).

(†) His letters gave the church a plain test against teachers who said Christ only seemed human. + By the early second century there were teachers in Asia offering a Christ without a real body, and the pastoral problem was not abstract. If the Son had only seemed to suffer, then the martyrs going to the arena were dying for a story. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to execution around 110 AD, hammers the point: Jesus was truly born, truly ate and drank, truly was crucified, and if he only seemed to suffer, then Ignatius is only seeming to be in chains. Behind that argument sits John’s test, which needs no philosophy to apply: does this teacher confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:2; 2 John 7)? There is an irony worth admitting, and Christians who use John as a weapon against Gnostic teaching should know it. The Gnostics were teachers of the second century and after who held that the material world is not the good work of God but the botched project of a lesser being, and that a person is rescued out of it by gnosis, an inside knowledge of where the soul came from and how it gets home. If matter is the problem, a Savior with a body is an embarrassment, which is why that outlook and docetism kept such easy company. And yet the Gnostics loved this Gospel. Heracleon, who belonged to the school of Valentinus, the most successful of those teachers, wrote what is as far as anyone knows the earliest commentary on any Gospel, and it was a commentary on John; we have it in fragments almost entirely because Origen, the great Alexandrian scholar of the following century, quoted it in order to argue with it. A book that talks about light and darkness, above and below, knowing and not knowing, was congenial to people who read those pairs their own way. What they could not accommodate was the tenth word of verse fourteen. Flesh is the word that will not go quietly into a system where matter is the problem, and it is why the same Gospel that attracted them also convicted them. That is roughly Irenaeus’s achievement, and it is why he tells the story about the bath-house at Ephesus. Whether or not John ever bolted from a building because Cerinthus was in it, the church that told that story was making a claim about what the apostle would have thought of a Christ without a body.

(†) Whether the fisherman wrote the books has been disputed since the second century. + The traditional case is strong and old. Irenaeus, writing around 180 and claiming a link through Polycarp, says John the disciple of the Lord published the Gospel at Ephesus (Against Heresies 3.1.1). The Muratorian Fragment, a list of accepted books from roughly the same period, tells its own story of how the Gospel came to be written and treats the Gospel, the letters and the Apocalypse, which is the older name for the Revelation, together. Polycrates of Ephesus knows a grave in his own city. Hardly anyone in the ancient church proposed a rival name for the Gospel’s author, and the one group that did made the suggestion look worse rather than better: a small party in Asia, nicknamed the Alogi by the later heresy-cataloguer Epiphanius because they threw out the Word, credited both the Gospel and the Revelation to the heretic Cerinthus, and no one else took the charge up. The complications are equally old, and there are two of them. The first is a sentence in Papias, a bishop writing in the first half of the second century, who says he used to ask travelers what Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas or James or John "or any other of the disciples of the Lord" had said, "and what things Aristion and the presbyter John" say (in Eusebius, Church History 3.39.4). The name John appears twice in one sentence, once among the disciples Papias was asking after and once beside a man named Aristion, in the present tense, as somebody still alive and still talking. Presbyter is simply the Greek for elder, so that second figure is the man later writers call John the Elder, and Eusebius drew the obvious inference: there were two Johns in Asia, and two tombs at Ephesus were shown, "each of which, even to the present day, is called John’s." The second complication concerns the Revelation. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria in the third century, compared the Greek of the Gospel with the Greek of the Apocalypse and concluded they could not be by one hand: the Gospel is written without error and with elegance, while the Apocalypse has barbarous idioms and, in places, outright solecisms, sentences that simply break the rules of Greek grammar. Anyone who has puzzled through a badly translated instruction manual knows the difference he is pointing at, and he was reading both books in the language he himself wrote and preached in. Dionysius was not attacking the book; he accepted it as inspired. He was doing textual criticism, the patient comparison of one writer’s habits with another’s to see whether the same hand is behind both, fifteen centuries before the discipline had a name. The modern argument runs along the same two grooves. Richard Bauckham, whose Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is among the strongest recent defenses of the Gospels as eyewitness testimony, nonetheless argues that the beloved disciple is Papias’s John the Elder, a genuine disciple of Jesus in Jerusalem but not one of the twelve. Lydia McGrew, in an appendix to The Eye of the Beholder, answers him point by point and defends the son of Zebedee. Neither position is a concession to skepticism, and it is worth being clear why: both hold that the Gospel comes from a man who was there. The dispute is over which man, and a reader who is told there is no dispute has been badly served.

(†) The Gospels themselves record his failings: fire for a village, silence for a stranger, a throne for himself. + Sit through a eulogy and you will learn what a man was good at. Nobody stands up at a funeral to describe the afternoon he lost his temper with a neighbor, and the stories a family keeps about a grandfather lose a little more of their rough edge with every telling. That is what makes the record of John’s faults unusual. It was written down by people on his side, the Gospel writers, not by anyone who wished him ill, and it is short. Three scenes, all within a few chapters of each other, carry the whole of it. He wanted fire called down on a Samaritan village that would not take Jesus in, and Luke gives the response in a single short sentence: "he turned and rebuked them" (Luke 9:55). He tried to silence a stranger who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name, on the grounds that the man was not one of their group, and was told, "Do not stop him" (Mark 9:39). He and his brother asked for the two best seats in the coming kingdom, and heard, "You do not know what you are asking" (Mark 10:38). Put the three side by side and what you have is a temper, a tribal streak, and ambition, which are the faults of an ordinary man rather than of a villain. Each was corrected in front of the others by the one he followed, and each was left in the record by writers who could easily have dropped it, and did not. One more thing belongs beside those three scenes, and it is to his credit. The man who asked for fire is the man who wrote, in old age, "If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar" (1 John 4:20). Somewhere between the Samaritan village and that sentence the man had changed, and the change is the reason to keep the three scenes in the record at all. The tradition that grew around him did not begin with a saint. It began with a man who had to be told no, and who listened (T4).