St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

This is from the archives of my old LiveJournal, drawn (and slightly adapted) from two postings in December 2008 that mostly dealt with other matters:

The Prologue to the Gospel according to St. John is appointed for the third set of Eucharistic lessons for Christmas, and for the First Sunday after Christmas Day. It is how Christmas appears after long reflection – not the surprise of hearing the song of Angels, or running to the manger, or the darker tales soon to be heard from St. Matthew, but an attempt, long after the fact, to put into words what it all means.

I can imagine St. John, now far advanced in years, struggling to catch in words what the Spirit has shown him as the proper way to begin his account, so unlike the other Gospels that he surely knew: words about the Word, the Logos, the “brightness of (God's) glory, and the express image of his person” as the writer of Hebrews says (1:3), and the manifestation of God's love, as in the Matins lesson for Christmas Day from First John (4:7-16). “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. . . . full of grace and truth.”

It is too good to be true. But it is, nonetheless, true. It, or rather He, is Himself the Truth, come among us.

Since today is his feast day, here is my uneducated layman's theory about the origins of the Gospel according to St. John. I presume that the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine epistles (and, less certainly, the Apocalypse) are by John, son of Zebedee, the “beloved disciple,” and that the Gospel faithfully recounts the historical deeds, “signs,” and teachings of Jesus, as do the synoptic Gospels. Differences in detail between John and the Synoptics do not strike me as problematic; I think the differences are the point of the whole enterprise. I do not see any reason to suppose a different author of the Fourth Gospel, other than the perversity of the modern liberal Biblical scholars (nineteenth century and onwards) who must find a way to deconstruct everything.

St. John was, by tradition, young during the ministry of Jesus. Again by tradition, he lived to a very old age, perhaps in Ephesus. By his last years, the synoptic Gospels were in circulation. I can imagine him reading them, and thinking “Yes. This is all well and good. But what about. . . .” What about the miracle at Cana? The discussion with Nicodemus? That day by the well in Samaria? The raising of Lazarus? Or the Last Supper – they recorded the bare facts, but what about all the things that Jesus said that night? How could they leave that out? And Mary Magdalene at the tomb on Easter morning? And that morning when he was on the shore, and said to Peter “Feed my sheep?”

I can imagine all of this nagging at John, year after year, in the way that the Spirit often does with us when we resist doing something that we should. “Maybe I ought to write some of this down,” he thinks. And so, finally, he does. He sees little need to cover the ground that the Synoptics covered, and when he does, he goes out of his way to give it the way he remembers it, especially when it differs from the way they wrote it; he assumes that readers of his account will have theirs at hand, and will gain a fuller understanding of what happened, and what it meant, from the differences in the accounts. He is presenting only enough to help people believe (20:30-31). He is not attempting to tell the complete story; it cannot be done. For, as he says, “there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” (21:25)

An aside: I take the absence of a Johannine account of the Nativity as a support for Luke's account. According to tradition, John shared his household with the one person who knew more about these events than any other, one who had "kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart"(Luke 2:19). If John had reason to think that Luke (or for that matter Matthew) were wrong, he would have probably given his own version, or rather, a version that was more concerned with detail than John 1:1-18. As it stands, his silence on this implies agreement. [If St. John the Divine is the same as the Apostle and Evangelist, one might take Revelation 12 as an account of the Nativity and the Flight into Egypt, as well as a comment on the woman whom he had taken into his household as his mother: "a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." Verse 4 can easily be compared with Matthew 2:13-18]

As to how all of this results in divinely inspired Holy Scripture, and (apart from its other virtues) a masterpiece of the world's literature from the hand of an uneducated fisher-of-men, I do not know, understand, or dare to conjecture, beyond noting Acts 4:13:

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.


I cannot imagine life without the Gospel according to St. John. I can easier imagine life without sun or moon.