John in the Bible: Life, Death & Interesting Facts

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The Apostle John is traditionally known as one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples and a member of his inner circle. Yet, despite his high status among the apostles and his close relationship with Jesus, much about John remains shrouded in mystery — including whether he actually authored the Gospel that bears his name.

Who was John in the Bible? In this article, I’ll explore what the Bible says about John, how he came to be viewed as a foundational leader in the early church, and whether he could have written one of the theologically richest texts in the Christian canon.

Who Was John in the Bible?

In the New Testament, John is said to have been one of Jesus’ original disciples. He was both a disciple, a follower of a wise person, and an apostle, one who is sent, in that Jesus sent him to preach the gospel to the world.

His name, in his native Aramaic language, would have been Yochanan which means “Yahweh is gracious.” The Greek form, since Greek is the language of the New Testament, was Iōannēs. This was a common Jewish name in Jesus’ time, so this was not the only instance of a John in the Bible. There are several other prominent Johns in the New Testament besides the apostle, including John the Baptist, John Mark (Acts 12:12), and John of Patmos, who wrote the book of Revelation.

John the Apostle is first referred to, chronologically speaking, in Mark 3:17 where Jesus calls his original 12 disciples, who are said to include “James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder).” Unfortunately, we are never told why Jesus calls the brothers this, only that he did.

As we’ll see, in Matthew, Jesus first encounters John in the Bible by the sea of Galilee. Since most ancient people lived and died in one area, he was probably born and raised in Galilee, the same region where Jesus was from. He was probably also born around the turn of the 1st century CE, like Jesus, although he is traditionally said to have been the youngest apostle.

Matthew 4:21 gives us a bit more information about John in the Bible: “Going on from there, He [Jesus] saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets.” So John was apparently a fisherman, as were his brother and their father. It was the family business, so to speak. Luke 5:10 says that Simon Peter was their partner in the endeavor.

Alicia Batten writes that the life of a fisherman in Jesus’ time, a time when Israel was controlled economically by the Roman Empire, was no picnic.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though, from my use of the word “business” above. Fishermen were very poor, usually living hand to mouth, and therefore almost certainly uneducated. More on that later.

Oddly enough, the Gospel of John makes no explicit mention of John the Apostle, although it does mention unnamed “sons of Zebedee.” The Beloved Disciple, found only in the Gospel of John and traditionally assumed to be John, is never actually named.

We are also shown in the Synoptic Gospels that John in the Bible was one of the most prominent disciples, along with his brother James and Peter. How do we know this? Jesus sets these three apart for special experiences with him. In Mark 9:2-10, for example, Jesus specifically takes James, John, and Peter with him to the top of a mountain where his glory is revealed only to them, an episode known as the Transfiguration.

Similarly, in the Garden of Gethsemane before Jesus is arrested, Mark 14:33-34 says that he tells most of the disciples to sit and pray while he goes to another place to pray himself. However, he doesn’t go alone:

Even in his greatest anguish, Jesus wanted these three with him. Whether or not these incidents are historical, they indicate that John in the Bible was considered one of the most important apostles in the early Church.

Even Paul mentions the importance of these three in the Jerusalem church, saying this in Galatians 2:9:

Not only did Paul meet John the Apostle, but he recognized that John was one of the “acknowledged leaders” of the church (Galatians 2:2).

How did John die? Church tradition has long said that John was the only one of the 12 disciples who was not martyred. However, since we don’t have any historical information on him after Paul’s letter to the Galatians (written between the late 40s and early 50s CE), we really can’t know how or when he died. Nevertheless, if John in the Bible was around the same age as Jesus, he died sometime after the early 50s, making him at least 50 years old at his death.

Let’s summarize what we know so far: John the Apostle was the brother of James and the son of Zebedee, he was a fisherman living in Galilee when he met Jesus, who called him and his brother “Sons of Thunder,” although the Gospels never say why. Finally, he was one of the three most important leaders of the early church after Jesus’ death, acknowledged by Paul as such and by the Gospels as having been present at some of the most important moments of Jesus’ life.

Did John the Apostle Write the Gospel of John?

Church tradition has long held that John the Apostle was the author of the Gospel of John. Additionally, as I mentioned above, he has often been assumed to be the unnamed Beloved Disciple who is so favorably mentioned in the Gospel. But is this accurate? What evidence do we have to prove or disprove this theory?

There are several reasons for thinking that the Apostle John could not have written the Gospel of John. First, the Gospel of John, like the other three Gospels, was originally written anonymously, with the title added much later. How do we know this? In The Women's Bible Commentary, Carol Newsom notes that the oldest manuscripts we have of John contain no title or authorial information. Again, like the other Gospels, the author did not apparently care about claiming authorship. We’ll talk below about how later people ascribed the book to John.

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Second, it is highly unlikely that a Galilean fisherman in Jesus’ time would have been literate. In her book Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, Catherine Hezser, who wrote the definitive study on the topic, concludes that Jewish literacy in Jesus’ time hovered around 3%. That is, only 3% of all Jews in Palestine could read and/or write in their own language of Aramaic. Who would those 3% have been? They would certainly have been the elite, the wealthiest citizens who could afford an education and who had the leisure time to learn. The vast majority of other Palestinian Jews lived as poor laborers, John the Apostle included. It is therefore highly unlikely that he would have had the necessary knowledge to write a book.

Given that, is it likely that St. John could have not only written a book but written it in Greek? While we have some Aramaic writings from Palestine in the time of Jesus, we have no Greek writings written by Palestinian Jews during Jesus’ lifetime. In fact, Bart Ehrman points out that we only have one set of writings in Greek by a Palestinian Jew, the historian Josephus, from the entire 1st century CE. Josephus was from that top 3% class and even he admits it was difficult for him to learn Greek.

Ehrman also points out that even if John had learned some functional Greek on later missionary journeys, this would surely not have been sufficient to write an entire book in Greek. Writing a book requires years of schooling and, as I pointed out, John probably had none. How then, did Christians come to believe that John the Apostle had written the fourth Gospel?

How an Anonymous Gospel Became The Gospel of St. John

In the Gospel of John, there are several references to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 20). In John 21:24, the author writes this about this Beloved Disciple: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” Note that he doesn’t say that the disciple himself is the author of the book. Rather, the author says he used this disciple’s stories as source material, and that “we” — presumably the Christian community for whom the book was written — trust the word of this disciple.

But since the Beloved Disciple is never named, later Christians were forced to speculate about who he was. While the Gospel of John never even mentioned John the Apostle by name, the other Gospels and Paul did. As I pointed out earlier, John in the Bible was part of Jesus’ inner circle in the Gospels. Christians, knowing that Peter was not the Beloved Disciple since they were distinguished from each other in John’s Gospel, were left with either James or John as possibilities. However, they thought it probably wasn’t James because according to Acts 12:1-2, James was martyred quite early in the history of the church. Therefore, the Beloved Disciple must have been John.

The first Christian author to claim this was Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies, written around 185 CE (a little over a century after the Gospel of John was written). Scholars disagree about whether this Beloved Disciple was a real person or a real disciple of Jesus. According to Bart Ehrman, they also differ on whether the Beloved Disciple was the author of the Gospel of John, although Ehrman believes that he was not.

Whatever the case, John the Apostle was certainly a real person, and we can be reasonably sure that he did not write the Gospel of John.

Conclusion

There is very little we can say with absolute certainty about the Apostle John. He was probably a fisherman from rural Galilee and thus spoke Aramaic. As a poor fisherman, he would have received no formal education and would thus have been illiterate like 97% of the Jewish population of 1st-century Palestine. The Synoptic Gospels say that he, along with his brother James, became a disciple of Jesus and formed part of Jesus’ inner circle, along with his brother James and Peter. We can confirm this by Paul’s testimony about John in the Bible, which mentioned that these three parties were considered the “pillars” of the early church.

He has been assumed for many years to be the author of the document we know as the Gospel of John. However, there are good reasons for thinking that this is improbable. First, the book was actually written anonymously. Second, an Aramaic-speaking fisherman would have been illiterate even in his own language. Furthermore, even if he had been literate, he would not have been able to write a book in Greek, a language he probably didn’t know.

Despite this, more than a century after the book was written, Christians were ascribing the book to John the Apostle. They also identified him with the Beloved Disciple written about only in John. In these stories and speculations about him, John in the Bible lives on.