42. Apostolic Labors of John

I. The Son of Thunder and the Apostle of Love.

I quote some excellent remarks on the character of John from my friend, Dr. Godet (Com. I. 35, English translation by Crombie and Cusin):

“How are we to explain two features of character apparently so opposite? There exist profound receptive natures which are accustomed to shut up their impressions within themselves, and this all the more that these impressions are keen and thrilling. But if it happens that these persons once cease to be masters of themselves, their long-restrained emotions then burst forth in sudden explosions, which fill the persons around them with amazement. Does not the character of John belong to this order? And when Jesus gave to him and his brother the surname of Boanerges, sons of thunder (Mark 3:17), could he have described them better? I cannot think that, by that surname, Jesus intended, as all the old writers have believed, to signalize the eloquence which distinguished them. Neither can I allow that he desired by that surname to perpetuate the recollection of their anger in one of the cases indicated. We are led by what precedes to a more natural explanation, and one more worthy of Jesus himself. As electricity is stored up by degrees in the cloud until it bursts forth suddenly in the lightning and thunderbolt, so in those two loving and passionate natures impressions silently accumulated till the moment when the heart overflowed, and they took an unexpected and violent flight. We love to represent St. John to ourselves as of a gentle rather than of an energetic nature, tender even to weakness. Do not his writings insist before and above all else upon love? Were not the last sermons of the old man ’Love one another?’ That is true; but we forget other features of a different kind, during the first and last periods of his life, which reveal something decisive, sharp, absolute, even violent in his disposition. If we take all the facts stated into consideration, we shall recognize in him one of those sensitive, ardent souls, worshippers of an ideal, who attach themselves at first sight, and without reservation, to that being who seems to them to realize that of which they have dreamt, and whose devotion easily becomes exclusive and intolerant. They feel themselves repelled by everything which is not in sympathy with their enthusiasm. They no longer understand a division of heart which they themselves know not how to practice. All for all! such is their motto. Where that all is not, there is in their eyes nothing. Such affections do not subsist without including an alloy of impure egoism. A divine work is needed, in order that the true devotion, which constitutes the basis of such, may shine forth at the last in all its sublimity. Such was, if we are not deceived, the inmost history of John.” Comp. the third French ed. of Godet’s Com., I. p. 50.

Dr. Westcott (in his Com., p. xxxiii.): “John knew that to be with Christ was life, to reject Christ was death; and he did not shrink from expressing the thought in the spirit of the old dispensation. He learned from the Lord, as time went on, a more faithful patience, but he did not unlearn the burning devotion which consumed him. To the last, words of awful warning, like the thunderings about the throne, reveal the presence of that secret fire. Every page of the Apocalypse is inspired with the cry of the souls beneath the altar, ’How long’ (Rev. 6:10); and nowhere is error as to the person of Christ denounced more sternly than in his Epistles (2 John 10; 1 John 4:1ff.).” Similar passages in Stanley. II. The Mission of John.

Dean Stanley (Sermons and Essays on the Apost. Age, p. 249 sq., 3d ed.): “Above all John spoke of the union of the soul with God, but it was by no mere process of oriental contemplation, or mystic absorption; it was by that word which now for the first time took its proper place in the order of the world—by Love. It has been reserved for St. Paul to proclaim that the deepest principle in the heart of man was Faith; it was reserved for St. John to proclaim that the essential attribute of God is Love. It had been taught by the Old Testament that ’the beginning of wisdom was the fear of God;’ it remained to be taught by the last apostle of the New Testament that ’the end of wisdom was the love of God.’ It had been taught of old time by Jew and by heathen, by Greek philosophy and Eastern religion, that the Divinity was well pleased with the sacrifices, the speculations, the tortures of man; it was to St. John that it was left to teach in all its fulness that the one sign of God’s children is ’the love of the brethren.’ And as it is Love that pervades our whole conception of his teaching, so also it pervades our whole conception of his character. We see him—it surely is no unwarranted fancy—we see him declining with the declining century; every sense and faculty waxing feebler, but that one divinest faculty of all burning more and more brightly; we see it breathing through every look and gesture; the one animating principle of the atmosphere in which he lives and moves; earth and heaven, the past, the present, and the future alike echoing to him that dying strain of his latest words, ’We love Him because He loved us.’ And when at last he disappears from our view in the last pages of the sacred

volume, ecclesiastical tradition still lingers in the close: and in that touching story, not the less impressive because so familiar to us, we see the aged apostle borne in the arms of his disciples into the Ephesian assembly, and there repeating over and over again the same saying, ’Little children, love one another;’ till, when asked why he said this and nothing else, he replied in those well known words, fit indeed to be the farewell speech of the Beloved Disciple, ’Because this is our Lord’s command and if you fulfil this, nothing else is needed.’ “

§ 42. Apostolic Labors of John. John in the Acts.

In the first stadium of Apostolic Christianity John figures as one of the three pillars of the church of the circumcision, together with Peter and James the brother of the Lord; while Paul and Barnabas represented the Gentile church.569 This seems to imply that at that time he had not yet risen to the full apprehension of the universalism and freedom of the gospel. But he was the most liberal of the three, standing between James and Peter on the one hand, and Paul on the other, and looking already towards a reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. The Judaizers never appealed to him as they did to James, or to Peter.570 There is no trace of a Johannean party, as there is of a Cephas party and a party of James. He stood above strife and division.

In the earlier chapters of the Acts he appears, next to Peter, as the chief apostle of the new religion; he heals with him the cripple at the gate of the temple; he was brought with him before the Sanhedrin to bear witness to Christ; he is sent with him by the apostles from Jerusalem to Samaria to confirm the Christian converts by imparting to them the Holy Spirit; he returned with him to Jerusalem.571 But Peter is always named first and takes the lead in word and act; John follows in mysterious silence and makes the impression of a reserved force which will manifest itself at some future time. He must have been present at the conference of the apostles in Jerusalem, a.d. 50, but he made no speech and took no active part in the great discussion about circumcision and the terms of church membership.572 All this is in entire

569 Gal. 2:9, Ιάκωβος, καὶ Κηφας καὶ Ιωάννης, οἰ δοκουντες στυλοι ειναι ... αὐτοὶ εἰς τὴν περιτομήν. They are named in the order of their conservatism. 570 Gal. 2:12, τινὲς ἀπὸ Ιακώβου. 1 Cor. 1:12, ἐγώ εἰμι Κηφα. 571 Acts 3:1 sqq.; 4:1, 13, 19, 20; 5:19, 20, 41, 42; 8:14-17, keeping with the character of modest and silent prominence given to him in the Gospels.

After the year 50 he seems to have left Jerusalem. The Acts no more mention him nor Peter. When Paul made his fifth and last visit to the holy City (a.d. 58) he met James, but none of the apostles.573

John at Ephesus

The later and most important labors of John are contained in his writings, which we shall fully consider in another chapter. They exhibit to us a history that is almost exclusively inward and spiritual, but of immeasurable reach and import. They make no allusion to the time and place of residence and composition. But the Apocalypse implies that he stood at the head of the churches of Asia Minor.574 This is confirmed by the unanimous testimony of antiquity which is above all reasonable doubt, and assigns Ephesus to him as the residence of his latter years.575 He died there in extreme old age during the reign of Trajan, which began in 98. His grave also was shown there in the second century.

Jerusalem on that occasion, Acts 15:6, 22, 23, and is expressly mentioned as one of the three pillar-apostles by Paul in the second chapter of the Galatians, which refers to the same conference. 573 Acts 21:18. John may have been, however, still in Palestine, perhaps in Galilee, among the scenes of his youth. According to tradition he remained in Jerusalem till the death of the Holy Virgin, about a.d. 48 574 Rev. 1:4, 9, 11, 20; 2 and 3. It is very evident that only an apostle could occupy such a position, and not an obscure presbyter of that name, whose very existence is doubtful. 575 Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp (a personal pupil of John), Adv. Haer. III. 1, 1; 3, 4; II. 22, 5, etc., and in his letter to Florinus (in Eusebius, H. E. V. 20); Clemens Alex., Quis dives salvetur, c.42; Apollonius and Polycrates, at the close of the second century, in Euseb. H. E. III. 31; V. 18, 24; Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, etc. Leucius, also, the reputed author of the Acts of John about 130, in the fragments recently published by Zahn, bears witness to the residence of John in Ephesus and Patmos, and transfers his martyrdom from Rome to Ephesus. Lützelberger, Keim (Leben Jesu v. Nazara, I. 161 sq.), Holtzmann, Scholten, the author of Supernatural Religion, (II. 410), and other opponents of the Gospel of John, have dared to remove him out of Asia Minor with negative arguments from the silence of the Acts, the Ephesians, Colossians, Papias, Ignatius, and Polycarp, arguments which either prove nothing at all, or only that John was not in Ephesus before 63. But the old tradition has been conclusively defended not only by Ewald, Grimm, Steitz, Riggenbach, Luthardt, Godet, Weiss, but even by Krenkel, Hilgenfeld (Einleitung, pp. 395 sqq.), and Weizsäcker (498 sqq.), of the Tübingen school.

We do not know when he removed to Asia Minor, but he cannot have done so before the year 63. For in his valedictory address to the Ephesian elders, and in his Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians and the second to Timothy, Paul makes no allusion to John, and speaks with the authority of a superintendent of the churches of Asia Minor. It was probably the martyrdom of Peter and Paul that induced John to take charge of the orphan churches, exposed to serious dangers and trials.576

Ephesus, the capital of proconsular Asia, was a centre of Grecian culture, commerce, and religion; famous of old for the songs of Homer, Anacreon, and Mimnermus, the philosophy of Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander, the worship and wonderful temple of Diana. There Paul had labored three years (54–57) and established an influential church, a beacon-light in the surrounding darkness of heathenism. From there he could best commune with the numerous churches he had planted in the provinces. There he experienced peculiar joys and trials, and foresaw great dangers of heresies that should spring up from within.577 All the forces of orthodox and heretical Christianity were collected there. Jerusalem was approaching its downfall; Rome was not yet a second Jerusalem. Ephesus, by the labors of Paul and of John, became the chief theatre of church history in the second half of the first and during the greater part of the second century. Polycarp, the patriarchal martyr, and Irenaeus, the leading theologian in the conflict with Gnosticism, best represent the spirit of John and bear testimony to his influence. He alone could complete the work of Paul and Peter, and give the church that compact unity which she needed for her self-preservation against persecution from without and heresy and corruption from within.

If it were not for the writings of John the last thirty years of the first century would be almost an entire blank. They resemble that mysterious period of forty 576 “The maintenance of evangelical truth,” says Godet (I. 42), “demanded at that moment powerful aid. It is not surprising then that John, one of the last survivors amongst the apostles, should feel himself called upon to supply in those countries the place of the apostle of the Gentiles, and to water, as Apollos had formerly done in Greece, that which Paul had planted.” Pressensé (Apost. Era, p. 424): “No city could have been better chosen as a centre from which to watch over the churches, and follow closely the progress of heresy. At Ephesus John was in the centre of Paul’s mission field, and not far from Greece.” 577 See his farewell address at Miletus, Acts 20:29, 30, and the Epistles to Timothy. days between the resurrection and the ascension, when the Lord hovered, as it were, between heaven and earth, barely touching the earth beneath, and appearing to the disciples like a spirit from the other world. But the theology of the second and third centuries evidently presupposes the writings of John, and starts from his Christology rather than from Paul’s anthropology and soteriology, which were almost buried out of sight until Augustin, in Africa, revived them.

John at Patmos.

John was banished to the solitary, rocky, and barren island of Patmos (now Patmo or Palmosa), in the Aegean sea, southwest of Ephesus. This rests on the testimony of the Apocalypse, 1:9, as usually understood: “I, John, your brother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience in Jesus, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for (on account of) the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”578 There he received, while “in the spirit, on the Lord’s day,” those wonderful revelations concerning the struggles and victories of Christianity.

The fact of his banishment to Patmos is confirmed by the unanimous testimony of antiquity.579 It is perpetuated in the traditions of the island, which has no other significance. “John—that is the thought of Patmos; the island belongs to him; it is his sanctuary. Its stones preach of him, and in every heart, he lives.”580

The time of the exile is uncertain, and depends upon the disputed question of the date of the Apocalypse. External evidence points to the reign of Domitian, a.d. 95; internal evidence to the reign of Nero, or soon after his death, a.d. 68.

The prevailing—we may say the only distinct tradition, beginning with so respectable a witness as Irenaeus 578 Bleek understands διά of the object: John was carried (in a vision) to Patmos for the purpose of receiving there the revelation of Christ He derives the whole tradition of John’s banishment to Patmos from a misunderstanding of this passage. So also Lücke, De Wette, Reuss, and Düsterdieck. But the traditional exegesis is confirmed by the mention of the θλίψις, βασιλεία and ὑπομονή in the same verse, by the natural meaning of μαρτυρία, and by the parallel passages Rev. 6:9 and 20:4, where διά likewise indicates the occasion or reason of suffering. 579 Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, etc. 580 Tischendorf, Reise in’s Morgenland, II.257 sq. A grotto on a hill in the southern part of the island is still pointed out as the place of the apocalyptic vision, and on the summit of the mountain is the monastery of St. John, with a library of about 250 manuscripts.