John the Evangelist

John the Evangelist is the name given in Christian tradition to the author of the Gospel of John. From the later second century he has been identified with John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee and brother of James, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, and with the unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved who appears in the Fourth Gospel. The same traditional figure has also been credited with the three Johannine epistles and the Book of Revelation. Ancient writers already noted possible distinctions: Papias of Hierapolis spoke of both an apostle John and a John the Elder, and the author of Revelation names himself John on Patmos. Modern scholarship commonly treats the apostle, the evangelist, the elder, and the seer as separable questions. In the liturgy, iconography, and hagiography of the churches, however, these identities have long been united in a single saint.

The Synoptic Gospels describe John as a Galilean fisherman called, together with his brother James, from the boat of their father Zebedee on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus surnamed the brothers Boanerges, sons of thunder. With Peter and James he belonged to an inner circle of disciples, present at the raising of the daughter of Jairus, at the Transfiguration, and at the agony in Gethsemane. The Fourth Gospel never names its author, yet the disciple whom Jesus loved reclines beside him at the Last Supper, stands at the foot of the Cross where Jesus commends his mother to the disciple's care, reaches the empty tomb with Peter, and is the first to recognize the risen Lord by the Sea of Tiberias. After Pentecost the Acts of the Apostles portrays John as a leading companion of Peter in Jerusalem, in the Temple, and before the Sanhedrin. Paul, writing to the Galatians, names James, Cephas, and John as the acknowledged pillars of the Jerusalem church.

Second-century Christian authors locate John's later life in Ephesus in the Roman province of Asia. Irenaeus of Lyons, who claimed to have heard Polycarp of Smyrna, a hearer of John, states that John remained in Asia until the times of the emperor Trajan and that he wrote the Gospel at Ephesus. Tradition further holds that under Domitian John was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he received the visions recorded in the Apocalypse, and that he returned to Ephesus after Domitian's death. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus near the end of the second century, wrote that John, who had reclined on the Lord's breast, was a priest who wore the sacerdotal plate and was buried at Ephesus. A tomb on Ayasuluk Hill was already a place of pilgrimage in late antiquity; a memorial church of the fourth century was succeeded in the sixth by the great basilica erected by the emperor Justinian, whose ruins still mark the traditional burial site. No reliable source records an exact year of birth or death; Irenaeus's notice that John lived into Trajan's reign (from 98) is the principal chronological anchor.

John's liturgical cult is among the most ancient in Christianity. The Roman calendar keeps his principal feast on 27 December as Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist; a secondary Western commemoration on 6 May, Saint John before the Latin Gate, recalls the legend, drawn from the apocryphal Acts of John, that he was plunged unharmed into a cauldron of boiling oil at Rome. Eastern calendars honor his falling asleep on 26 September and keep another feast on 8 May. He is invoked as patron of authors, theologians, booksellers, publishers, editors, scribes, and painters, and as protector against burns and poison, the last associations arising from the oil legend and from the related story that he drank poisoned wine without harm. In art he appears as a youthful, often beardless figure accompanied by an eagle, the symbol assigned to his Gospel in the tetramorph of the four evangelists, or holding a chalice from which a serpent emerges. Patristic writers from Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine onward celebrated him as a lifelong virgin; no early source records a wife or children. He was neither Bishop of Rome nor patriarch of any of the later patriarchal sees, though later ecclesiastical lists sometimes style him bishop of Ephesus.