“Then why,” said I, “should the gospel be called by his name?” “I explain it thus,” said Clemens. “When John returned from Patmos a very old man, saved from the fiery trial of the sufferings he had undergone—both before his condemnation and also afterwards in the mines—it was natural that every word uttered by him should be treasured up. I have heard it said that he could hardly be carried into the church, and that, when there, he repeated nothing but ‘Little children, love one another.’ In time, the brethren grew weary of this and remonstrated with him. This seems to have gone on for a long while. For (as I have said above) a report was current about him that he would ‘never die’ but would wait for the Lord’s coming. There is no record (known to me) of any time, place, or manner, of his departure. I infer that, during the period of his decrepitude, the brethren at Ephesus would collect traditions from him and preach his gospel for him as far as they could. Afterwards, when it was clear that he would die, the gospel would be reduced to writing.” “But this,” said I, “greatly lowers the value of the gospel as history.” “It does,” said he, “and its historical value may also be lowered by the fact that, even before the gospel was written, the apostle was a great seer of visions. A seer is not the best kind of historian. He is liable to mix vision with fact. Especially might this be done by a seer that had seen Christ both before and after Christ’s death. But still I greatly value this gospel because, like the epistles of Paul, it seems to me to go to the root of the matter. I told you just now that the old man, when he could say nothing else, repeated over and over again the words ‘Little children, love one another.’ When they asked him to say something else, he said ‘that was enough.’ And the old man was right. It is ‘enough’—if we can receive strength to do it.”
“This greatly attracts me,” said I. “But, if your explanation is true, a great deal depends upon the apostle’s friend, or friends, who wrote down the substance of his traditions and arranged them as a gospel.” “A great deal, as you say,” replied Clemens. “I have been informed that there was a great teacher near Ephesus, who was called preeminently ‘the Elder’—a name given, I believe, by students to their teacher, even in some of the schools of the Stoics. Has that ever fallen within your experience?” “Something of the kind,” I replied. “I remember that Epictetus lately spoke of himself as ‘the Elder.’ It seemed to me a modest way of saying ‘I whom you call your Teacher, or your Master, but I merely call myself your Elder.’ He said we ought to be so superior to the fear of death that his great business ought to be to keep us from dying too soon, not to make us fearless of death. ‘This,’ he said, ‘ought to engage the attention of the Elder sitting in this chair.’ And then he added, ‘This ought to be the great struggle of your Teacher and Trainer, if indeed you had such a one’—as though Elder and Teacher were much the same thing.”
“That,” said Clemens, “is exactly to the point. Well then, you must know that John the son of Zebedee is commonly supposed to have written not only a gospel but also an epistle, or perhaps three epistles. The first epistle is quite in the style of the gospel, but it mentions not ‘John,’ nor even ‘I,’ at the beginning, but ‘we,’ ‘That which we have heard.’ The two other letters, which are very short, begin, ‘The Elder to so-and-so.’ These two letters are in style similar to that of the first, but some doubt exists as to their authorship, and I have seen it written, in connexion with them, that the Wisdom of Solomon was not written by Solomon but ‘by his friends to do him honour.’ Whoever wrote that, seems to have believed that ‘the Elder’ mentioned in the two epistles was not John the son of Zebedee but one of his ‘friends’.”
“What was the Elder’s name?” said I. “The two epistles do not mention it,” replied Clemens. “But the Elder near Ephesus of whom I spoke above, was called by the same name as the son of Zebedee, ‘John’; and the tradition that mentions him (along with another teacher named Aristion) appears to distinguish the two Johns, mentioning both in the same sentence. I ought to add that I mentioned this same Elder above as defending Mark on the ground that he was the mere interpreter of Peter. ‘Mark,’ said the Elder, ‘made it his single object to leave out nothing of the things that he heard and to say nothing that was false therein.’ Now you will find—I think I have already mentioned the fact—that this new gospel frequently intervenes, where Luke omits, or alters, anything that is in Mark, so as to explain Mark’s obscurity or set forth Mark’s tradition in different language. This points to the conclusion that the writer of the fourth gospel agreed with the Elder called John in his verdict on Mark, which is, in effect, ‘Not erroneous in fact though imperfect in expression.’ My own belief is that this tradition about two persons of the same name is accurate; and that, besides John the Apostle, there was also the Elder John, residing in or near Ephesus about the same time.”
“But,” I asked, “might not ‘John the elder’ naturally be taken to mean ‘older in age’ as opposed to ‘John the younger’? And is it not strange that, in view of the great age of John the Apostle, such a distinctive appellation should be given to his namesake?” “Perhaps it would be,” replied Clemens. “But it is not given. Have you not noticed that I did not speak of ‘John the Elder’ but of ‘the Elder, John’? The two are quite different. The former (at least among Christians) would simply mean ‘John the Presbyter or Elder’ as distinct from ‘John the Deacon,’ ‘John the Bishop,’ and so on. But ‘the Elder, John’—a phrase twice repeated in my tradition—may imply that the teacher was known during his life among his pupils as ‘the Elder,’ and that, after his death, ‘John’ was added for the sake of clearness. I believe it was the custom to describe the elders near Ephesus in this indefinite way.”
The view here taken by Clemens has been somewhat confirmed of late years by a practice that I have noticed—a bad practice, I think—in the young Irenæus. In the course of his lectures, when referring to his authority—instead of mentioning an elder by name, Polycarp, Aristion, Papias, John, as the case may be—he used such expressions as “He that is greater than we are,” “The divine old man and herald of the truth,” “He that is superior to us,” and all these, as far as I could gather, about elders in the province of Ephesus. Concerning this indefiniteness I am in the same mind now as I was when I replied to Clemens, “It is very unfortunate.”
“It is,” said he, “but I believe it is fact. Well then, according to my view, one particular elder of these Johannine elders—I mean the elders in the region of Ephesus collected round the aged apostle, John the son of Zebedee—was so much superior to the rest that he was called preeminently ‘the Elder.’ If ‘the Elder’ preached and wrote for John the Apostle, and if the Elder’s name was John, there would be an additional reason why the writer of the gospel would avoid the name John (except in connexion with John the Baptist) throughout the gospel.
“But my conviction is that the aged apostle, besides preferring oral tradition to books (as you will see from the last lines of his work), shrank from putting himself forward as the author by the name of ‘John,’ and insisted that, if he was to be mentioned at all, it was to be only by the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ John the Elder may have accepted this condition because he felt it to express a deep truth—namely, that the Lord Jesus is best known through some one whom He has loved.
“You know how carefully the Greeks distinguish ‘voice’ or ‘sound’ from ‘word.’ Well, this new gospel introduces John the Baptist as testifying to Christ and saying that he was a mere voice, ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.’ To the inferior and preparatory witness is given a distinctive name ‘John.’ The superior and perfected witness was also called ‘John’ after the flesh; but the writer of the gospel preferred that the name after the flesh should be dropped, yes, and even his distinctive personality merged, as it were, in the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.”