Who was the Beloved Disciple?

Seven Candidates for the Authorship of John

One of the great puzzles of New Testament scholarship is the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. At the risk of sounding stupid: Who wrote the Gospel of John?

The reason why we need to ask this question is twofold. For a start, it is agreed that the Gospel was originally anonymous, which is to say that its title was added sometime after its composition. In this respect, John is like the other canonical Gospels, which were likely given their common titles – The Gospel according to X – when they came together as a fourfold canon in the late second century.

On the other hand, unlike the other Gospels, we potentially have some cryptic clues within the text as to its author. These come in the form of a rather peculiar sentence nestled within the work’s epilogue: ‘This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true’ (21:24).

But who is ‘the disciple’ referred to in this passage, and what involvement did he have in crafting the Gospel as a whole? Here the mysteries only multiply, as this disciple is never actually named in the text. He goes only by the moniker, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ or the beloved disciple (‘BD’) for short. Assuming that this figure was behind the Gospel, our question becomes: who was this ‘beloved disciple’?

In this post, I want to lay out seven popular candidates for the beloved disciple. We shall sift through their strengths and shortcomings. And perhaps – towards the end of this piece – I will reveal what I find the most promising solution.

1. John, Son of Zebedee

In our shortlist, an obvious starting point is the disciple to whom the text is traditionally attributed: one of Jesus’ twelve disciples, John, the Son of Zebedee.

At first glance, the authorship of the son of Zebedee may seem promising. It appears to go back at least as far as Irenaeus, who wrote in the late second century: ‘Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia’ (Ad. He. 3.1.1). It is often supposed that this source shows a direct line to the author of the Gospel, since Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, who was thought to be a disciple of John.

Yet there are several good reasons to doubt this chain of testimony. First, Irenaeus never relays that Polycarp thought that John wrote the Gospel. Rather, Irenaeus only comments that he remembers meeting Polycarp as a child. The only authentic testimony we have from Polycarp, The Epistle to the Philippians, never attests to his knowledge of John or the disciples – a rather surprising silence in such a text.

Second, Irenaeus is unreliable in his attribution of other Gospels. For instance, Irenaeus says that Matthew wrote Matthew. Yet the earliest tradition claims that Matthew wrote Hebrew/Aramaic logia, and the internal attestation points strongly against the idea that Matthew was involved in the composition of the Greek text.

Even more tellingly, the internal evidence points away from John, the Son of Zebedee, as the Gospel’s author. To begin with, there is no evidence that an illiterate Galilean fisherman (cf. Acts 4:13) would have been able to compose a Greek work like John. Moreover the ‘Sons of Zebedee’ are actually introduced in the Gospel in John 21:2. The reader is left to think that the beloved disciple is not one of them but among the two other anonymous disciples who mentioned in the same passage.

How then did the Gospel traditionally come to be thought of John’s? Part of the reasoning was probably abductive. We know that the beloved disciple is close to Jesus, and therefore one might immediately turn to Jesus’ inner ring: Peter, James and John. Yet it could not be Peter, as he is not the beloved disciple. And it could not be James, as he was long dead (see below). This left readers only with John, the Son of Zebedee.

2. Lazarus

If John was not the author of the Gospel, perhaps we need to get a bit more creative. To that end, we might consider Ben Witherington’s proposal that the beloved disciple was none other than Lazarus, back from the dead.¹

Before you close your browser, there are some data which might give us this impression. Notably, we are told in John 11:5 that Jesus loved Lazarus, which works with the author as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved.’ The Gospel also appears to give us the perspective from Judea rather than Galilee, so Lazarus fits the bill here too.

We also hear a rumour in the work’s epilogue that the beloved disciple wouldn’t die before Christ’s return. Although this might apply to any elderly disciple, it would seem especially fitting for Lazarus, since in the narrative he had already received the gift of resurrection. In the narrative logic of the text, the question becomes whether he would die again.

Upon closer inspection, however, these arguments are not particularly suggestive. For a start, John 11:5 first describes that Jesus loved Mary and Martha; indeed, Jesus loves his disciples and the whole world. So there is a lot of love to go around in the Fourth Gospel. It is not unique to Lazarus.

Moreover, as the narrative unfolds, the beloved disciple is described as one ‘known to the high priest’ (18:15). Yet uniquely in John, the reason why the Jewish authorities decide to kill Jesus is because he raised Lazarus. And the beloved disciple cannot be Lazarus, because the chief priests wanted Lazarus dead too (12:9-10). This effectively rules him out as the BD.

3. Mary Magdalene

While the beloved disciple is presented as a man in the Gospel, there have been a couple of attempts to propose that Mary Magdalene is the true disciple whom Jesus loved. The most compelling is made by Esther de Bouer.² Rather than making the case from an alleged relationship with Jesus one might find in later apocryphal sources, she builds it from the anonymity and significance of Mary.

De Bouer begins with the observation that are several anonymous characters in John. And since we know that Jesus had female disciples, but his male disciples tend to be named, de Bouer assumes that the anonymous disciples largely remained anonymous precisely because they are women. And this goes for the beloved disciple too.

Once it is assumed that the beloved disciple is a woman, it is not too difficult to get to Mary Magdalene. Of the women at the cross, Mary is the best candidate for the role. Not only does she witness his crucifixion, she is the first to proclaim the resurrection. She is therefore central to the Gospel.

Yet in the end, de Bouer is forced to present her proposal tentatively. Aside from the fact that Mary was most likely illiterate and the beloved disciple is repeatedly portrayed as a man (even Mary’s ‘son’), Mary runs off to tell ‘the other disciple, whom Jesus loved’ when she has found the tomb. Thus, unless we posit multiple beloved disciples, we are unable to identify Mary as the author of the text.

4. James, Brother of Jesus

Another unexpected candidate is James, the brother of Jesus. This has been defended by the New Testament historian, James Tabor.³

There are a number of advantages to this view. For the start, James is a man who is never named in the Gospel – unlike Mary and Lazarus. It would also make sense that Jesus would deliver him to Mary as ‘my son’. Since James was Jesus’ brother, he is arguably the most natural person to be entrusted with the care of Mary. He also became prolific within the early Church, a ‘pillar’ alongside Peter and John.

Yet there are also strong reason to doubt Tabor’s conclusion. Most damningly, the Gospel itself says that ‘even his own brothers did not believe in him’ (7:5). There is no qualification in this verse than one of them did. So it should be taken as a fairly straightforward ruling out of the beloved disciple as James, the brother of Jesus.

Yet there are further reasons to doubt. One is that James was known to have been martyred fairly early on in the Church. Yet the beloved disciple was thought to be one of the last remaining disciples of Jesus (John 21). Moreover, John portrays the beloved disciple as reclining on Jesus’ breast, while there is no indication in the Synoptic Gospels that James was even a follower of Jesus (cf. Mk. 3:21.)

In the end, Tabor has to appeal to later apocryphal writings like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of the Hebrews to make his case. The former text claims that one is to go to ‘James the Just’ when Jesus leaves (12), while the latter portrays James as present at the last supper. The problem is that neither text is an early or reliable source.

5. Another John?

In conservative circles, a popular alternative to the view that John, Son of Zebedee wrote the Gospel is that was authored by another John – John being an even more common name in antiquity than it is today, or so I would like to think!

The most prominent and recent advocate of this view is Richard Bauckham, who identifies the ‘John’ in question as a figure Papias calls ‘John the Elder.’⁴ In Bauckham’s view, this John was presented by Papias as distinct from John, son of Zebedee. Later tradition confused these Johns, and so attributed the text to the Son of Zebedee.

The reason this position is attractive to some is that it means the beloved disciple was a real disciple of Jesus, although a non-itinerant one based in Jerusalem. This would explain his absence throughout the first twelve chapters, why he has access to the High Priest, and the strongly historical bent to the work. For Bauckham, it would also make sense of John’s incarnation theology, which almost requires a witness to the Gospel narrative.

Bauckham makes his case in an ingenious way, yet here I wish to draw attention to two common criticisms. The first is that it can be doubted that Papias was referring to a John who was distinct to the apostle. Eusebius reads Papias in this way, but it is not at all clear from the passage Eusebius cites in Papias that this is the case.⁵

Second, later sources show no knowledge of a distinct figure who was a disciple of Jesus but was not to be identified as a disciple. To the best of my knowledge, the earliest reception of the Fourth Gospel saw its author as the Son of Zebedee. Yet this attestation should be doubted for the many reasons we have outlined above.

6. The Work of a Forger

In a contrary position to Bauckham, Hugo Mendez has recently supposed that we should see the Gospel of John – alongside the Johannine epistles – as the work of literary forgers.⁶ The ‘beloved disciple’ is an invented eyewitnesses which legitimates the distinctive theological agenda of the Fourth Gospel.

There are a couple of reasons to find this plausible. As a point of background, it is well known that early Christianity was saturated with pseudonymous writings. The moral status of this phenomenon is a matter of debate. But that the practice took place is undisputed; even the most conservative scholars accept that some Christians wrote apocryphal works pretending to be disciples: Peter, Thomas and Mary among others.

Moreover, the Gospel departs from the earlier tradition in well-known ways. It removes Jesus’ ministry of exorcism, has Jesus (and all of the other characters) speak in a distinctive idiom, narrates a different set of miracles, and contains a divergent view of salvation and eschatology to the earlier accounts, to name just a few. This is difficult to account for on the view that a disciple of Jesus wrote the Gospel.

Yet I imagine that not all will be persuaded by this view. One issue is that the Gospel does seem to get some historical details right. Among other facts, the author knows the geography of Jerusalem (that there ‘are five porticoes still standing’). Presumably, Mendez would say that such details are fictional, to advance the Gospels’ credibility.

7. The Ideal Disciple

So where does that leave me with the beloved disciple?

My present view is that, whether or not he is based on a historical figure, we must recognise the way the beloved disciple is heavily idealised. Thus, in John, the beloved disciple reclines at the bosom of Jesus, just as the Son had reclined at his Father’s side; he is the only male disciple to follow Jesus to the cross, bearing witness to his crucifixion; and he is an ideal witness to the resurrection, outrunning even Peter.

In a compelling study of the role of the beloved disciple within the Fourth Gospel, Andrew Lincoln argues that the beloved disciple is a literary device, serving as an ideally perceptive disciple.⁷ Summarising his perspective, Helen Bond writes, “the Beloved Disciple’s “testimony” is not so much to specific events in the life of Jesus as to Jesus’s significance. What he “sees” are not primarily the historical episodes that constituted Jesus’s ministry but rather the deeper meaning of Jesus’s mission.”⁸

I think this view is compatible with Mendez’ idea that the Gospel of John was an implicit forgery. Yet it also consistent with the view that there was a figure – perhaps the founder of a group of Christians – behind the text. This figure may have been a disciple of Jesus, although not prominent enough to figure as a named disciple.

Yet I must admit that the jury is very much still out on this question. Whatever reason the beloved disciple had for remaining anonymous, they have succeeded in their aim. Perhaps, in the end, we may do well to apply Origen’s quip about Hebrews also to the Fourth Gospel: ‘Who wrote the Gospel of John? In truth, only God knows!’

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1. See Ben Witherington, “Was Lazarus the Beloved Disciple” https://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/01/was-lazarus-beloved-disciple.html

2. Esther A. De Boer, The Gospel of Mary: Beyond a Gnostic and a Biblical Mary Magdalene, JSNTSS 260 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 178-190.

3. See James Tabor, “Who was the Mysterious Beloved Disciple?” https://jamestabor.com/who-was-the-mysterious-disciple-whom-jesus-loved/; cf. idem., The Jesus Dynasty: Stunning New Evidence About the Historicity of Jesus (London: HarperElement, 2006).

4. See Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007).

5. See Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 95-98.

6. See Hugo Mendez, “Did the Johannine Community Exist?” JSNT 42 n.3 (2020): 350-374.

7. Andrew T. Lincoln, “The Beloved Disciple as Eyewitness and the Fourth Gospel as Witness,” JSNT 85 (2002):3-26.

8. See Helen K. Bond, “Gospel of John” in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries: Volume One: From Paul to Josephus: Literary Receptions of Jesus in the First Century CE, eds. Chris Keith et al. (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 165-186.