Section 3. St. John at Ephesus[5].
St. John's work at Ephesus.
About the time that Jerusalem was besieged by the armies of Vespasian (A.D. 67), St. John withdrew to Ephesus (whence for a while he was banished to Patmos by the Emperor Domitian[6]); and from this city he travelled about through the neighbouring country, organizing, amongst others, those Seven Churches of Asia Minor, to whose Angels or Bishops he was bidden to write the Seven Epistles contained in the Apocalypse.
Fitness of Ephesus as a centre of organization,
Here in Ephesus, the eye of Asia, the great mercantile seaport of the then known world, his influence could most easily make itself felt amongst the far-off members of the Christian body, which by this time had extended throughout the whole Roman empire. All the civilized world was then subject to the sway of Rome, except India and China; and it may be that even these two latter countries were not excluded from the influence of the Gospel. It is not, of course, meant that Christianity was the recognized religion of all or any of the Roman provinces; but that in each of them the Church had a corporate existence, and was a living power, drawing into herself here one, and there another of the souls who were brought into contact with her, and really, though gradually, spreading through and leavening the earth.
and of orthodox teaching.
Again, at Ephesus St. John could best combat and confute, both by his words and writings, the subtle and deadly heresies which were especially rife there. "False Christs," such as Simon Magus, the first heretic, Menander, Dositheus, and others, no longer troubled the Infant Church with their blasphemous impostures, but in their stead false teachers had arisen, seeking to "draw away disciples after them" into the more subtle error of misbelief about our Lord and His Incarnation. Errors of the Corinthians. The Docetae, and other variations of Gnosticism. Thus the Jew Corinthus taught that Christ was a mere man, born like other men, though united to Divinity from His Baptism to His Crucifixion; whilst to the errors of the Corinthians the Docetae added that the Body in which our Blessed Saviour suffered, was only a phantom, and a body but in appearance; both these heresies, and others of a similar nature, appear to have been variations of that Gnosticism to which St. Paul refers in his Epistles, as "science" (or gnosis) "falsely so called[7]," and which was long a source of danger and trouble to the Church. Gnosticism may be traced back to that Simon Magus, with whom St. John first came in contact at Samaria, and in all its varied distortions of the great Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, through an admixture of Jewish and heathen error, there was always an unvarying denial of our Lord's Divinity.
St. John's universal patriarchate.
For about a third of a century St. John continued to exercise a kind of universal patriarchate over the Church, being regarded, we cannot doubt, with almost unbounded reverence and affection by all its members, and perhaps first presenting that idea of one visible earthly head of the Church, which afterwards found its expression in the popedom.