Surprise! John is not the Beloved Disciple

Last updated on: December 16, 2025 at 11:08 am by Ben Witherington

Surprise! John is not the Beloved Disciple 2025-12-16T11:08:04-05:00 Ben Witherington

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WHO IS THE BELOVED DISCIPLE, AND WHY IS THE GOSPEL ATTRIBUTED TO A MAN NAMED JOHN?

While the issue of authorship has been debated throughout church history, and bearing in mind that the header of this Gospel was only added after the fact when the Gospels were combined into one codex, and there was need for the distinctions— ‘according to John’, ‘according to Mark’ etc. In other words, the caption on the fourth Gospel is not part of the inspired and inspiring text which begins with vs. 1. But let us start with the attribution of the Gospel to someone named John. Unfortunately, there are several famous Johns in the NT, not even mentioning John the Baptizer. There is John son of Zebedee, there is John of Patmos, there is an elder (not an apostle or one of the Twelve) mentioned as the writer of 2-3 John. Partly because the Fourth Gospel fell into the hands of the Gnostics, and Irenaeus wanted to rescue the book for orthodox Christianity while writing four tomes dismantling Gnostic thought, he seems to have attributed the Gospel to John son of Zebedee, clearly one of the Twelve, indeed in the inner circle of the three leaders of the Twelve. But there are immediate problems with this ascription: 1) Papias, dwelling in Smyrna with Polycarp, and apparently Irenaeus as well who was taught by Polycarp, says that there were two Johns of important, one was John the elder, who he Papias met, the other was an earlier John about whom Papias could only ask what that man had testified in the past. Polycarp also met this John the elder apparently and later taught Irenaeus about him. He seems to be the one who put together and edited the Fourth Gospel, because in John 21 there is a clear distinction between the Beloved Disciple who wrote down his own eye witness testimony and the community he was a part of ‘for we know that his testimony is true’. The implication in John 21 is not only a distinction between the final editor of the Beloved Disciple’s testimony (hereafter call the BD), but also that the BD is now dead when the Appendix in John 21 is written, hence the denial that Jesus ever said the BD would definitely live unto his Second Coming. More evidence is now available about the fate of the Zebedee brothers, about whom Jesus himself said they would be baptized with the same baptism he was to endure on the cross (namely become martyrs) and we have the witness in Acts 12.1-2 that James Zebedee was killed by Herod Agrippa I.

But furthermore, we now apparently have an Oxyrhynchus papyrus mentioning Papias that testifies to John Zebedee’s death in the apostolic era, but the Fourth Gospel appears to have been written in the 90s, after the Synoptics and during a time when Domitian was the Emperor demanding worship as ‘deus et dominus noster’— ‘our lord and our god’. The confession by Thomas using these terms of Jesus would seem to be a rebuttal of the increasingly strident claims of the emperor cult about the deity of emperors. The Oxyrhynchus papyrus in question is dealt with in detail by M. Oberweis, (“Die Papias-Zeugnis vom Tode des Johannes Zebedai” in Novum Testamentum 38.3 (Jan. 1996), pp. 277-97). But even on the basic principle that the internal evidence of the Gospel itself must trump later attribution of who wrote this Gospel, we can see it surely is not John Zebedee. Why not? Because while this Gospel claims to be by an eyewitness (see John 19-21), THERE ARE NO SPECIAL ZEBEDEE EYEWITNESS STORIES IN THIS GOSPEL—nothing about their being called by Jesus from their nets, nothing about them being present when Jairus’ daughter was raised from the dead, nothing about them seeing the Transfiguration of Jesus, and nothing about them claiming the box seats in the kingdom, and the Zebedees are not even mentioned directly until John 21!!

And besides all this, what sort of person who had been with Jesus for three years and hear him say things like ‘unless you turn and become as a child you shall not enter the Dominion of God’ would go around calling himself Jesus’ favorite— the Beloved Disciple. If an early Christian did that, he would be told to take a humility pill. No, the phrase Beloved Disciple is what his community called him. But again— who is this mystery man, the Beloved Disciple?

Surprisingly, the answer is clear as a bell for one reading closely John 11-21. There are no references to a Beloved Disciple before John 11 where we hear these words from Martha in Bethany: Send a message to Jesus, about the man already identified in John 11.1 as her brother Lazarus (the Latinized form of the name Eliezer), Martha says “Lord, the one whom you love is gravely ill” wanting Jesus to come at once and remedy this problem. Only here in John 11.3 is a particular person in this Gospel called ‘the one whom Jesus loves’. Clearly, this whole family has a pre-existing relationship with Jesus of some duration, perhaps being built on the numerous trips Jesus has taken to the Jerusalem, according to the Fourth Gospel.

Now the story of the raising of Lazarus is the capstone sign or miracle story in the first half of this Gospel which prefigures the raising of Jesus himself in the second half of this Gospel. It is a crucial climactic story, which sends the Jewish authorities into a frenzy in regard to what to do about the rising popularity and following of Jesus. And this lengthy story in John 11 is not found in the Synoptics Gospels anywhere. But then this Gospel is not written from a Galilean disciple perspective at all, unlike the Synoptics. The only Galilean miracle it mentions which is also in the Synoptics is the feeding of the 5,000/walking on water tandem. That’s all. Leaving aside the wedding feast at Cana story in John 2 for a moment (which turns out Mary could have told the BD about later) notice that all the great stories in John are in or around Jerusalem, or in Samaria (John 4), not in Galilee (until John 21). The healing of the paralytic, the healing of the blind man, the raising of Lazarus, the visit with Nicodemus, the visit with the Samaritan woman and much more are stories unique to the Fourth Gospel and they all occur in or near Judaea, as to the confrontations in Jerusalem in and around the Temple, including Jesus nearly getting stoned for some of his claims, and having an anomalous near encounter with ‘the Greeks’ presumably Diaspora Jews who spoke Greek. In short, this Gospel has a Judaean provenance and has a Judaean author to account for that.

If we now track the references to the Beloved Disciple, here are a few of the crucial ones: 1) after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he and some disciples have a meal in the house of Mary. Martha and Lazarus where Jesus was anointed by Mary, and an argument transpired with Judas Iscariot about money. (John 12). We are told in Mk. 14 that this transpired in ‘the house of Simon the Leper’. If so, it might explain why Lazarus died prematurely, why Jesus takes his disciples to the house in Lk. 10.38-42, but apparently only he goes in the have a meal with them, and the disciples apparently stay outside, and it would especially explain why Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, all adults, are not married! The history of contagion in the house would have made marriage to a member of that family unlikely. After the meal in John 12, we have another meal in John 13, where Jesus reclines on a couch with the Beloved Disciple, and also washes the disciple’s feet. This latter story is nowhere to be found in the Synoptics, and this even is said to happen early in the week of Passover, not say on Thursday night, and not within the city walls as was the custom if possible, and which the Synoptics all say was requested and found by the disciples for Jesus in an upper room in the old city. In other words, John 13 is NOT the Johannine version of the Last Supper. No, it’s another meal in Lazarus’ house, with the chief guest on the couch with the newly revived host— the Beloved Disciple. Notice there is no reference at all in this story to what we later call the words of Institution— this is my body broken for you, this is my blood shed for you etc. And surely, if Judas was going to turn Jesus over to the authorities, he would have to make an arrangement with them earlier the week, to go and meet Jesus later in the spot where he and his disciples were camping for the festival, like many many others attending the festival— on the Mt. of Olives.

It is the Beloved Disciple and Peter who go to the house Annas (not Caiaphas) which is where Jesus was taken first, the BD is let in, because he is well known in that house—the Jewish authorities were present at the week long mourning when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. They knew his family anyway. Peter, a Galilean was not let into the house, being unknown. Even more tellingly, the Synoptics are clear that none, and I do mean none, of the Twelve were present at the cross when Jesus died— but the BD was, with the three Marys. And Jesus bequeathed his mother whom he loved to the disciple whom he had a special love for while on the cross. Lazarus, thereafter took Mary into his own home in Bethany, and we find Mary still in Jerusalem in Acts 1.14, praying with the other disciples for the Spirit. John 19.26-27 is clear enough the BD is present and Jesus says to Mary—here is your (new) son, and then to the BD—behold your mother. This is in no way surprising since Jesus had been close to that family for a long time, perhaps the whole of his three year ministry. And what this reminds us of is that Jesus had Judaean disciples as well as Galilean ones. Josephus of Arimathea and Nicodemus seem to have been other devotees of Jesus and they took charge of his burial—an event normally Jesus’ brothers would be expected to do, but according to John 7.5 they didn’t believe he was the messiah. They apparently thought he wanted fame and a following and should go do miracles at one of the festivals in Jerusalem—which ironically he did. It took a risen Jesus appearing to his brother James to change that whole attitude (see 1 Cor. 15.7 and the list of appearances).

Fast forward to Easter morning. The women go to the tomb to re-anoint the corpus and change the linen wrappings, only to be confronted with an empty tomb, and an angelic message that they shouldn’t be mourning—Jesus was risen, alive, and well. And then, as both John 20 and Mt. 28 make clear, Jesus appeared to Mary of Migdal and the women with her. Excitement and joy ensued and they went and told the male disciples but they wouldn’t take the women’s word for it. Instead, Peter and ‘the other disciple’ (so called I suspect, here and in the Annas story because he was the leader of the Judaean disciples before his death) run to the tomb and see that it is empty. This leaves Peter scratching his head but notice what is said about the Beloved Disciple— ‘he believed (on the basis of the empty tomb and the wrappings rolled up) for they did not know from Scripture yet that Jesus would rise from the dead’. In other words, this scenario which had recently happened to Lazarus himself, had happened again to Jesus himself, and Lazarus believed it on the empirical evidence and on the basis of his own recent experience.

Lest we leave this trail of evidence too soon, one may ask— why the rumor that the BD would not die again before the return of Christ (as reported in John 21). Surely this is because the community didn’t think a man who Jesus had dramatically raised would die twice before the return of Christ. But they were wrong, and it was after the fact, that John gathered the written down eyewitness testimony of Lazarus, put it together in a Gospel, added some other material and a preface and an Appendix (and various parenthetical remarks along the way for the audience), and so we have a Gospel put together by a man named John. Probably John the elder, as Papias mentions, who may also be John of Patmos, but this is uncertain. More certain is that John the Elder went on the road and visited Smyrna and surely Ephesus where there were many Christians and lived at some point in the community in Ephesus, and was buried there, where the ruins of the church of St. John can be seen today. One last thing, Lazarus is the Anglicized form of the name Eliezer, so the BD was named after a Maccabean war hero, just like Simon Peter was.

Finally, lest one think that I am a lone voice crying in the wilderness that the BD is Lazarus, you can also now find this view in a full length treatment by the Jesuit scholar James Martin, in a bestselling book entitled Come Forth, (Harper One, 2025), and see also my book What Have They Done with Jesus? (Harper, 2024), and A. T Lincoln, The Gospel according to St. John, (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2005).

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