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Friday, March 06, 2020

The identity of the Beloved Disciple

Last year the White Horse Inn had a roundtable discussion regarding the authorship of the Fourth Gospel:



I'm going to quote some excerpts:

[Do  you  believe  that  it  was   written  by  John  the  Apostle?]

Craig Blomberg:  I  think  that  is  still  probably  the  most  likely  case. There  is  some   uncertainty  in  some  of  the  early  church  tradition,  not  about  the  name  of  the  author  but   about  whether  there  was  an  elder  John,  perhaps  a  disciple,  a  second  generation  follower  of   John  the  Apostle, but  that  evidence  isn't  all  that  strong,  and  I  see  no  reason  to  contradict   the  early  church  short  of  having  compelling  evidence  otherwise. 

[The  first  scholar  you  will  hear  from  is   D.  A.  Carson  and  I  asked  him  why  he  thought  it  was  that  the  Apostle  John  referred  to   himself  using  this  strange  language  of  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved]  



D. A. Carson:  Let  me  argue  a  bit  tangentially. There  are  some  people,  some   pastors,  some  Christian  leaders  who  think  soon,  when  you  get  to  know  them,  you  come   away  thinking  that  you're  particularly  loved  by  them. A  good  pastor  does  that  in  part  by   giving  all  of  his  attention  to  whatever  person  he  is  talking  to. So,  when  John,  whoever  is   writing,  when  John  speaks  of  the  one  whom  Jesus  loves,  I  don't  think  he's  saying  I'm  loved   more  than  you  are  or  something  like  that. I  don't  think  it's  competitive  document. In  John   11,  Mary  and  Martha  referred  to  Lazarus,  their  brother,  as  the  one  whom  he  loved  and  that   has  actually  made  some  people  wonder  if  Lazarus  wrote  the  book. But  I  think  that  doesn't   make  any  sense  either. There's  just  too  much  patristic  and  other  evidence  against  itno   hint  that  he  was  present  at  the  Last  Supper. I  think  that  it's  a  way  of  saying  Jesus  so  loved   people  that  they  felt  peculiarly  loved  by  him,  and  here  is  John,  who  is  once  the  son  of   thunder  who  sees  himself  now  as  "the  one  whom  Jesus  loves." You  have  to  remember  that   his  first  readers  would  know  who  he  was  talking  about. It's  not  the  literary  strategy  of   somebody  writing  a  book  that's  being  thrown  out  of  the  open  marketplace. I  mean,   everybody  who  read  him  in  the  first  instance  would  have  known  whom  he  was  talking   about. I  think  that  Bauckham  is  right  when  says  that  the  four  gospels  were  meant  to   circulate  widely  and  not  just  into  little  narrow  communities. I  think  that's  correct.  The   gospels  for  all  believers,  for  all  Christians. 

Andreas Kostenberger:  None  of  the  gospels  explicitly  identify  their  author.   In  that  sense,  gospels  are  different  from  epistles,  where   the  author  identifies  himself  right  at  the  outset. And  so,  this  is  not  innate  to  John's  gospel. I   think  the  reason  why  John  would  not  identify  himself  more  directly  in  part  has  to  do  with   duplication  of  names  in  the  gospel. He  likes  towhen  you  have  multiple  figures  in  the   narrative  with  the  same  name,  he  likes  to  reserve  that  name  for  one  of  those  characters,   and  then  refer  to  another  character  by  the  same  name  in  different  ways. You  see  that,  for   instance,  with  Mary,  Jesus'  mother.Of  course,  everybody  knew  her  name  was  Mary. Again,   it's  one  of  those  things  that  John  likely  assumed  as  just  people's  general  knowledge  of  the   Christian  story,  but  in  John  2,  for  example,  the  wedding  at  Cana,  Mary  is  never  referred  to   as  Mary. She  is  just  called  the  mother  of  Jesus. Why? I  think  it's  to  eliminate  any  possible   confusion  about  which  Mary  are  we  talking  about  here. So,  in  John,  Mary  is  Mary   Magdalene.  You  see  in  the  prologue  in  John  1:6, "And  there was a man, his name was John. He was sent from God." And  so,  right  at  the  beginning  then,   that  name  is  essentially  claimed. And  so,  then  I  think  John  is  identifying  himself  more   obliquely  as  "the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved",  but  to  me,  I  think  there's  probably  more   weighty  reasons  why  Bauckham  rejects  apostolic  authorship  that  probably  have  more  to  do   with,  maybe,  hesitation  to  go  with  the  more  traditional  view. I'm  not  saying  we  should   blindly  follow  tradition.  I  think,  in  this  case,  I  would  say  there  is  a  good  reason  why  the   tradition  holds  that  the  Apostle  John  wrote  the  gospel. I  know  that  John  21:2,  where  he   talks  about  the  sons  of  Zebedee  as  part  of  that  group  of  seven  who  go  fishing  seems  to   speak  against  that,  but  I  think  when  you  look  at  it  more  broadly  in  the  big  picture,  it's  a   fairly  minor  piece  of  evidence  that  can  easily  be  explained  by  this  common  feature  of   authors  occasionally  referring  to  themselves  in  the  third  person. 

If I  were  starting  out  with  skepticism   toward  apostolic  authorship,  I  would  probably  go  to  John  the  Elder,  too,  because  that's  just   about  the  only  possible  piece  of  evidence  for  a  John  other  than  John  the  Apostle,  but  I  think   when  you  look  at  the  referencing  question  to  John  the  Elder,  there's  many  caution  flags   going  up  that  we  should  not  be  too  quick  to  assume  that it's  even  such  a  person  as  John  the   Elder. Remember  that  John  refers  to  himself  as  the  elder  in  two  of  the  epistles,  and  so,  I think  it's  very  likely  that  that  particular  church  father  might  have  separated  those  two   figures,  when  in  fact,  John  the  Apostle  and  John  the  Elder  were  one  and  the  same  person.      

Lydia  McGrew:  I  would  agree  with  Richard  Baukham's  general  take  that  that   phrase  was  the  person's  roundabout  way  of  emphasizing  his  own  role  as  the  witness  and   recorder–that  he  is  this  person,  was  especially  close,  and  so,  he  has  this  role  as  witness. It's  just  kind  of  a  conspicuous,  stylized  reference  to  himself  and  to  his  own  self-­concept,  and   one  could  argue  that  he's  made  this  decision  to  not  name  himself,  and  therefore,  he  can't   name  his  brother  either  because  it  would  be  awkward,  because  they're  generally  named   together  and  so  forth. So,  I'm  not  necessarily  leaning  heavily  on  that. I'm  just  pointing  out   that  the  lack  of  the  name  could  be  used,  I  would  say,  more  plausibly  to  argue  that  he  is  the   son  of  Zebedee  than  to  argue  that  he  is  not  the  son  of Zebedee. 

Well,  I  think  we  find  that  pretty  frequently  with  ancient authors,   generally. Matthew  refers  to  himself  in  the  third  person  all  the  time  and  doesn 't  say,  by  the   way,  "I'm  Matthew." Luke,  in  Acts,  never  says,  by  the  way,  "I'm  Luke,  the  beloved   physician." Papias  is  the  only  source  for  there  being  two  Johns  in  Ephesus,   and  that's  also  a  disputed  interpretation  of  Papias,  too. It  could  be  a  different  person. If  it  is,  I  don't  think  we  have  any   reason  to  believe  he's  the  author  of  the  gospel. Like  you've  got  this  possible  reading  that   there's  two  different  Johns,  and  then  Bauckham  kind  of  takes  off  with  it  from  there  to   where,  okay,  maybe  this  other  John  is  the  author  of  the  gospel. That's  the  part  where  I   think  it's  incorrect. 

That  Polycrates  argument  is  extremely  weak.  Polycrates  says  that  the  John  who  leaned  on  Jesus'  breast  was  one  who  wore  the  priestly  mitre.  Now  he  does  not   contrast  that  with  the  son  of  Zebedee.    Bauckham  conjectures  how  Polycrates  got  confused   about  this,  because  he  thinks  he's  wrong  that  he  wore  the  priestly  mitre.    And  so,  he  says,   "How  did  he  get  confused?  Oh,  maybe  in  Acts  4,  he  accidentally  identified  him  with  the  John   who  was  with  the  priests  in  Acts  4,  Now  this  would  be  a  horrible  mistake.  And  then,   Bauckham  says,  "Well  he  wouldn't  have  made  this  mistake  if  he didn't  know  that  he  wasn't   the  son  of  Zebedee,  because  there  he  is  in  the  same  scene  with  the  son  of  Zebedee,  so   because  I  think that's  the  mistake  he  made,  I  think  he  knew  he wasn't  the  son  of  Zebedee."   So,  that's  the  argument,  and it's  a  terrible  argument.  So,  Polycrates  doesn't ,  in  fact,   distinguish  him  from  the  son  of  Zebedee.  That  is  a  highly  dubious  conjecture. 

D. A. Carson:  I'm  still  surprised  that  he's  [Bauckham] done  it. He  gives  all   the  reasons  why  John  has  to  be  an  eyewitness  and  so  on,  and  then  he  appeals  to  this   character  called  John  the  Elder. I  think  a  pretty  good  case  can  be  made. The  references  to   John  the  Elder  are  actually  a  reference  to  the  Apostle  John,  who  calls  himself  an  elder  as   Peter  calls  himself  an  elder  in  his  epistles. The  reasons  for  appealing  to  John  the  Elder  as  a   separate  individual,  in  my  view,  are  pretty  weak. But  Richard  Bauckham  has  made  a  good  a   case  as  you  can get,  and  if  somebody  wants  to  go  that  route,  that's  fine.
  
 One  small  point. It's  clear  that  the  beloved  disciple  whom  Richard  takes  to  be  in  reference  to  this  elder  was   present  at  the  Lord's  Supper. So,  he  must  say  that  present  at  the  Lord's  Supper  were  not   only  the  twelve,  but  also  this  extra  chap. The  synoptics  make  it  pretty  clear  that  the  people   who  present  at  the  Lord's  Supper  were  Jesus  and  the  twelve,  that  there  was  nobody  else. 

I  would  say,  at  the  level  of  mere  logic,  that's  correct. But  on  the   other  hand,  you  can  show  that  Matthew's  gospel,  as  compared  with  Mark,  regularly  has   multiple  sub-­people. He's  interested  in  the  fuller  picture  and  so  provides,  too,  where  Mark   has  one.  So,  there's  a  pattern  of  that  going  on,  but  all  the  sources  that  we  have  of  the  Last   Supper,  there  is  no  hint  of  anyone  present  beyond  the  Twelve. There's  no  passage  that   says "and,  of  course,  there  was  nobody  else  present." If  you  look  at  something  as  exclusive   as  that,  then  Richard  is  right. There  is  no  text  that  is  exclusionary. But  on  the  other  hand,  I   think  that  it's  extraordinary  that  you'd  have  to  argue  for  the  presence  of  somebody,  also,  by   the  name  of  John  who  is  not  mentioned  in  any  of  the  accountswhose  very  existence  as   somebody  independent  of  John  the  Apostle  is  at  least  disputable  on  some  tactical  grounds   connected  with  the  Papias  document.It  is  so  tenuous. I  really  don't  see  why  such  a  fine   scholar  as  Richard  goes  down  that  route. 

Shane Rosenthal:  Dr. Carson,  what's  your  view  of  the  unnamed  disciple  who   appears  in  John  18,  who  follows  Jesus  into  the  courtyard  of  the  high  priest  and  then,  who   later  speaks  to  the  servant  girl  and  grants  Peter  access?    Do  you  think  this  character  is  also   the  beloved  disciple  and  thus  the  author  of  this  gospel?     

D. A. Carson:  Probably,  but  not  certainly. I  think  it's  the  simplest  exclusion. I   think  that  the  ones  John  has adopted,  the  strategy  of  not  naming  himself  but  referring  to   him  obliquely  and  commonly  as  "the  one  whom  Jesus  loved," I  think  that  that  makes  sense. The  Galilee  fishing  business  provided  food  for  the  capital,  and  it   may  well  be  that  John  was  one  of  those  who  had  access  to  the  courts  of  Jerusalem,  precisely   because  he  acted  in  part  for  the  family  and  sales,  and  so  on. I  can't  prove  any  of  that  but  it's   a  more  reasonable  speculation  to  the  speculation  as  to  invent  another  unknown  party.    

Well,  it  is  not  established  that  the  figure  has  the  authority  to  let   Peter  in,  but  that  he  is  known,  and  therefore,  Peter  is  let  in.      

Shane Rosenthal:  But  the  text  says  he  went  to  speak  to  the  servant  girl  at  the   gate  and  she  let  Peter  in.  

D  A. Carson:  Of  course,  but  that  doesn 't  mean  he  went  to  the  servant  girl  and   said,  "Hey,  I'm  part  of  the  priestly  family  here. I  command  you  to  let  him  in.It  sounds   much  more  like, "Hey,  you  know  me. Can  my  friend  come  in  here  please?" 

Craig Blomberg:  It  certainly  could  be. You've  got  five  places  in  the  latter   chapters  of  John  where  you  have  this  strictly  anonymous  person  called  the  disciple  Jesus   loved  that  the  church  has  associated  with  the  Apostle  John  since  early  days. But  you  also   have  a  handful  of  other  places  where  you  just  have  an  anonymous  disciple,  or  you  might   expect  a  name  to  appear  but  you  don't,  and  if  John  the  Apostle  as  the  writer,  he's  being   consistent  and  not  referring  to  himself  by  name,  he  may  be  that  person  that  you  alluded  to   in  chapter  18. It's  interesting. We  tend  to  have  a,  sort  of,  romantic  notion  perhaps  of   Galilee,  and  it's  a  backwater  place  with  rude,  unlettered  fishermen  and  farmers,  and  the   ancient  reality  was  much  more  complex  than  that,  especially  in  Tiberias,  especially  in   Sepphoris. You  had  very  urbanized  cities. There  was  a  thriving  fish  industry  going  up  and   down  the  Jordan  River.  The  best  fish  were  consistently  said  to  come  from  Galilee. Jerusalem  is  landlocked. It's  almost  as  close  to  the  Dead  Sea  as  it  is  to  the  Jordan  River,  and   somebody  had  to  provide  the  elders,  and  Sadducees,  and  the  high  priests  and  governors   with  food  and  the  food,  for  the  most  part,  came  from  Galilee.  Citrus  fruit  came  from  the   planes  of  Sharon  along  the  Mediterranean  Sea. It's  complete  speculation  but  it's  not  recent   speculation. It  was  John's  family,  one  of  the  suppliers  of  fish  to  the  high  priest's  home. Is   that  how  he  knew  them? It's  not  beyond  the  bounds  of  possibility.      

Andreas Kostenberger:  All  that  is  claimed  there  is  that  the  high  priest   apparently  knew  who  John  was. And  so,  that  enabled  him  to  gain  Peter  access. This  is   part  of  the  consistent  portrayal  of  the  author,  which  I  believe  to  be  John  the  Apostle  having   superior  access,  superior  even  to  the  Apostle  Peter. And  so,  you  see  consistently  that's  in   the  Upper  Room. Peter  is  turning  to  the  beloved  disciple  to  find  out  the  identity  of  the   betrayer,  or  later  on,  the  empty  tomb. John  outruns  Peter  and  gets  to  the  tomb  firstor   even  more,  maybe  prominently  in  chapter  21,  it's  John  who  recognizes  Jesus  and  says,  "It's   the  Lord,"  and  then  Peter  jumps  into  the  lake. And  so,  I  think  there's  this  consistent  holy   one-­up-man-ship,  you  might  say,  where  John  tries  to  boost  his  credentials  as  a  witness,  if   you  will,  and  shows  that  in  some  ways  he  was  even  closer  to  the  source  than  Peter. And  so, if  you  place  that  reference  in  John  18  within  that  larger  picture,  that  again,  Peter  can't  get   even  into  the  high  priest  courtyard  without  John's  help.      

Shane  Rosenthal:  But  how  do  you  think  John,  the  son  of  Zebedee,  would  have   been  known  to  the  high  priest? 

Andreas  Kostenberger:  We  just  have  to  consider  the  possibility  that  John  had  a   personal  acquaintance. His  father  had  a  fishing  business  with  several  employees  and  so   forth,  which  we  need  to  realize  that  in  Galilee,  fishing  was  one  of  the  major  industries. So,   this  is  not  just  some  marginal  business  he  was  engaged  in.      

Lydia McGrew:  It  says  explicitly  that  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved  was   standing  at  the  foot  of  the  cross. So,  there's  no  reason  to  introduce  a  different  anonymous   person  who  is  sort  of  following  through  Jesus'  passion  in  chapter  18. So,  to  take  the  phrase   the  other  disciple  in  chapter  18  to  be  that  same  person  as  "the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved",   at  the  foot  of  the  cross  in  chapter  19  is  a  very  reasonable,  simplifying  assumptionthat  this   was  a  disciple  of  Jesus  who  was  remaining  close  to  him  through  his  passion.      

Shane Rosenthal:  Yeah,  and  then  there's  also  John  20,  where  it  says  "the  other   disciple,  the  one  whom  Jesus  loved."    

Lydia  McGrew:  Exactly. Sometimes  those  phrases  are,  actually,  even  brought together. 

 I  think  we  have  an  anachronistic  idea  of  this  courtyard  as  a  sort   of  exclusive  place. We,  modern  Americans,  are  not  used  to  big  households  with  courtyards   and  especially  as  an  influential  person,  and  with  lots  of  people  kneeling  around  who aren't  members  of  the  family. But  that's,  actually,  the  picture  we  see  in  all  four  of  the  gospels. It's   a  very  crowded  place. So,  I  don't  think  the  high  priest  is  there  giving  orders,  hardly  letting   anybody  in–"Be really  careful,  we're  trying  to  keep  this  quiet." That's  not  the  picture  I  get   from  any  of  the  four  gospels. 

Well,  I  don't  know  of  any  independent  evidence  that  only  a   resident  would  generally  have  the  social  ability  to  get  the  servant  girl  to  let  someone  in. I   think  that's  just  a  supposition. It's  really  who  you  know. So,  she  sees  him  and  out. She   thinks  well  of  him  and  He's  probably  pretty  young,  by  the  way. I  think  he  was  maybe  the   youngest  of  the  disciples  since  he  lived  to  quite  an  old  age. So,  you  could  think  of  him  as  the   kid  who  delivers  the  fish,  the  kidmaybe  I'm  being  a  little  exaggerated  but,  you  know,  he's   in  his  late  teens  or  something  like  that. She  lets  him  in  then  he  can  say,  "Oh,  this  guy  is  fine. He's  a  friend  of  mine. Let  him  in." Again,  it's  a  society  where  influence  is  what  matters.  

Of  course,  it's  a  conjecture! We  don't   know  how  he  was  known  to  the  high  priest,  but  at  least  I  don't  have  a  whole  chain  of   conjectures. This  is  just  one  conjecture  to  account  for  this  one  statement  that  he  was   known  to  the  high  priest. How  might  have  he  have  been  known? I  mean,  I  could  make   other  conjectures,  too. That's  just  one.     

Shane Rosenthal:  Okay. So  now,  once  he  grants  access  to  Peter  there  in  the   courtyard  of  the  high  priest,  where  do  you  think  the  beloved  disciple  goes  from  there?      

Lydia  McGrew:  Looks  like  he  follows  Jesus  to  the  cross. I  mean,  I  think  we're   agreed  on  that  because  that's  what  we  find  in  John  19. I  think  he  was  probably  one  of  the  witnesses  with  Pilate. He  may   have  been  one  of  the  witnesses  here. I  do  think  we  have  reason  to  think  that  there  were   multiple  witnesses,  one  of  them  might  have  been  someone  who  converted  from  the  priestly   class. We  know  in  Acts  that  they  were  members  of  the  priestly  class  who  converted. 

Okay. So,  we've  got  several  different  questions  here. So,  let's   start  with  he  was  in  the  inner  trial.  He  was  there.  He  was  a  witness  of  it. That  is  an   inference. We  don't  know  that. Maybe  yes,  maybe  no.  Maybe  he  stepped  in  the  back  of  the   room  for  a  minute  and  stepped  back  out. Number  2,  if  he  was  there,  then  he  had  to  be   someone  more  important. He  had  to  be  someone  closer  to  the  high  priest. And  at  this point, you're  multiplying  your  improbabilities.  So,  I'm  not  going  to  hold  myself  responsible   to  answer  a  question, "Hey,  why  was  he  definitely  allowed  into  this  trial  if  they didn't  know   him  really  well?" There's  all  kinds  of  suppositions  going  on  there,  but  then  the  absence  of   his  being  named  in  the  synoptic  narratives  as  being,  for  example,  near  the  cross,  receiving   custody  of  Marywell,  let's  note  the  synoptics  don't  even  say  that  anybody  got  custody  of   Mary. In  fact,  they  don't  even  mention  Mary  near  the  foot  of  the  cross. So,  why  didn't  they   mention  Mary? Now,  as  far  as  why they  didn't  mention  him  as  a  witness,  I  believe  that   Bauckham  and  those  who  argue  from  that  has  the  exact same  problem  themselvesif  he   was  this  person  who  was important  to  the  early  church,  if  he  was  "the  disciple Jesus  loved", he  was  in  that  sense  an  important  witness. I think  the  very  same  question  arises,  "Why   don't  they mention  this  disciple  at  the  foot  of  the  cross  in  the synoptics?" Well,  people  just   don't  mention  things  sometimes. 

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