St. John the Apostle

Son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve, and in the Church's tradition the beloved disciple and the Evangelist

John, son of Zebedee, was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus called him with his brother James. With Peter and James he was among the three Jesus kept closest. The Church has long identified him with the disciple whom Jesus loved, who leaned on his breast at the Last Supper and stood at the Cross with Mary; ancient tradition gives him the Fourth Gospel and a long old age at Ephesus, where Christians have venerated his tomb since antiquity.

The first three Gospels tell the call plainly. Jesus saw James and John in their boat mending nets, and they left their father Zebedee with the hired men and followed him (Mark 1:19-20). He named the brothers Boanerges, "sons of thunder," and the Gospels do not hide why: they wanted fire from heaven on a Samaritan village, and they asked for the seats at his right and left in his glory. With Peter they alone went in to the daughter of Jairus, up the mountain of the Transfiguration, and further into Gethsemane on the last night.

The Fourth Gospel never names John, son of Zebedee. It speaks instead of "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who reclined beside him at the Supper, stood at the Cross with his mother and took her into his own home, ran with Peter to the empty tomb, and knew the Lord on the shore of Tiberias. Its last chapter says this disciple is the one "who has written these things." From the second century the Church identified him with John: Irenaeus, who had known Polycarp, wrote that John, "the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast," published the Gospel while living at Ephesus. Many scholars today question the identification, or see the Gospel as shaped by those who handed on his witness. The Church receives it as apostolic testimony, as she always has.

After the Resurrection, Acts shows John at Peter's side: going up to the Temple to pray, standing before the council, sent with Peter to the new believers in Samaria. "We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard," the two of them answered (Acts 4:20). Paul, visiting Jerusalem, names James, Cephas and John as the "pillars" of the Church there (Galatians 2:9). Three letters in the New Testament bear the Johannine voice: "God is love."

The author of Revelation calls himself John, on Patmos "on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 1:9). Early writers took him to be the apostle, though already in the third century some doubted it. Eusebius, following Irenaeus, says he was banished to the island under Domitian, returned to Ephesus when Domitian died, and lived there into the reign of Trajan. Tertullian adds that at Rome he was plunged into boiling oil and came out unharmed. Tradition remembers him as the one apostle who did not die a martyr's death.

Ephesus kept his memory. About the year 190 its bishop, Polycrates, wrote that John, who reclined on the Lord's breast, "sleeps at Ephesus." A memorial grew over a tomb on Ayasuluk Hill above the city, and in the sixth century Justinian raised a great domed basilica over it. Its ruins stand today above Selçuk; no relic is shown there, and archaeology cannot name the man buried beneath. A much later tradition places Mary with John near Ephesus in her last years. The Gospel says only that from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

John is the Church's witness to the love of God made flesh: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." His symbol is the eagle, for the height from which his Gospel begins. The Church keeps his feast on December 27, in the octave of Christmas, beside the first martyr and the Holy Innocents. Pilgrims meet him in the Holy Land where the Gospels place him, and at Ephesus, where the Church remembered his old age and his grave.