Introduction to the Epistles of John (1): The Life and Old Age of St. John

1. LIFE OF ST. JOHN IN OUTLINE.

The facts relating to this eminent apostle which are recorded in the New Testament are soon told. He was the son, apparently the youngest son, of Zebedee and Salome, the sister of the Virgin Mary, "the mother of the Lord." Hence he was a first cousin to Jesus, the Messiah. 

There is reason for the widely spread belief that he was the junior of the other apostles, and by reason of his near kinship, his youth and his natural enthusiasm, his intensity of thought, of speech, of insight, and of life, he became the special favorite of our Lord Jesus. 

Like the other apostles, except Judas, the traitor, John was a Galilean. The fact has a moral value, inasmuch as it separated him from the political intrigues and demoralizing speculations rife in Jerusalem. He retained the simple faith and stern heroism of earlier times. 

With his brother James he shared the ardor of the Galllean temperament fitly described by the epithet Boanerges, sons of thunder; which their Master early applied to them. From this we understand that they were very effective speakers, swift, startling and vehement in the utterance of the truth like fire shut up in their bones. John regards everything on its divine side. He sees all events, the past and the future, contributing to the manifestation of the sons of God, the sole hope of the world. Of this he had himself been assured by ocular evidence and inward revelation of the Son of God, like that which thrust Paul into the Christian ministry. He could say: "We have seen and do testify." He produced conviction not by labored argument, but by confident affirmation.

2. THE OLD AGE OF JOHN THE APOSTLE.

After the ascension of Christ, the history of the apostles whom He had trained is left in the utmost obscurity. Except James, who was early killed with the persecutors' sword in Jerusalem, we know not when, or where, or how any of the Eleven died. The Acts of the Apostles briefly speaks of them collectively in its first few chapters, then it drops all except Peter and John. Soon it drops the beloved apostle and describes Peter's career only. Then it takes up the biography of Paul and continues it through the remaining fifteen chapters to his imprisonment, where the narrative abruptly and tantalizingly ends. Ask any ecclesiastical historian to designate the point where the records of the early church leave him to grope in Egyptian darkness, and he will unhesitatingly put his finger on the period following the end of the Acts of the Apostles, of which Neander says that "we have no information, nor can the total want of sources for this part of church history be at all surprising." Says Dean Farrar, "The facts of the corporate history of the early Christians, and even the closing details in the biographies of their greatest teachers, are plunged in entire uncertainty." 

Of this period Renan says: "Black darkness falls upon the scene; and a grim and brooding silence, like the silence of an impending storm, holds in hushed expectation of 'the day of the Lord' the awe-struck breathless church. No more books are written; no more messengers are sent; the very voice of tradition is still." We doubt the truth of the last clause. The voice of tradition was not still. It tried to fill the vacuum with its swarms of puerile conjectures and manifest falsehoods. It represents John at Rome reduced to the humble occupation of a fireman tending the furnace fire of a woman's bath-house, and on one occasion immersed in a caldron of boiling oil and handling deadly serpents without bodily harm; and Peter the apostle to the Jews for twenty-five years poaching in Paul's Gentile preserve in Rome, when there is not an atom of Scriptural proof, nor a particle of credible, contemporaneous testimony to this statement to be found in history, sacred or profane, during the first Christian century. (See Bibliotheca Sacra, Vols. XV and XVI, "Was Peter in Rome and Bishop of the Church?" for a negative answer which cannot be controverted.) 

We should be glad to believe the touching and beautiful tradition of John's reclaiming for Christ a convert who had so far apostatized as to become the leader of a band of robbers, but the story lacks a historic basis, as does the story of his hasty exit from a bath, lest the structure should fail upon his head by reason of the presence of the heresiarch, Cerinthus. It was widely believed after his burial that he was not dead, but sleeping in his grave till Christ should come. Tradition alleged that "the dust was stirred by the breath of the saint." This vain tradition was not needed as a fulfillment of Christ's words, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" He did tarry among the living till Christ came. It is impossible for us to realize fully what was involved in the destruction of the Holy City for those who had been trained in Judaism. It was nothing else than the close of a divine drama, an end of the world. The old sanctuary, "the joy of the whole earth," was abandoned. Henceforth the Christian church was the sole appointed seat of the presence of God. When Jerusalem fell — an event most favorable to Christianity — Christ came, and with His coming came also the work of St. John. During the period described by John in the Apocalypse, the period of conflict and fear and shaking of nations — "things which must shortly come to pass" — before the last catastrophe, St. John had waited patiently, having doubtless fulfilled his filial office to the mother of the Lord in his own home in Galilee and the end of her earthly sojourn.