medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The Catholic Encyclopedia "blames" both early Christian writers and the
conflation of John the Evangelist, writing at the end of the first c., with
the Beloved Disciple for the portrayal of John as young at the time of his
discipleship:
The Christian writers of the second and third centuries testify to us as a
tradition universally recognized and doubted by no one that the Apostle and
Evangelist John lived in Asia Minor in the last decades of the first century
and from Ephesus had guided the Churches of that province. In his "Dialogue
with Tryphon" (Chapter 81) St. Justin Martyr refers to "John, one of the
Apostles of Christ" as a witness who had lived "with us", that is, at
Ephesus. St. Irenĉus speaks in very many places of the Apostle John and his
residence in Asia and expressly declares that he wrote his Gospel at Ephesus
(Adv. haer., III, i, 1), and that he had lived there until the reign of
Trajan (loc. cit., II, xxii, 5). With Eusebius (Hist. eccl., III, xiii, 1)
and others we are obliged to place the Apostle's banishment to Patmos in the
reign of the Emperor Domitian (81-96). Previous to this, according to
Tertullian's testimony (De praescript., xxxvi), John had been thrown into a
cauldron of boiling oil before the Porta Latina at Rome without suffering
injury. After Domitian's death the Apostle returned to Ephesus during the
reign of Trajan, and at Ephesus he died about A.D. 100 at a great age.
Tradition reports many beautiful traits of the last years of his life: that
he refused to remain under the same roof with Cerinthus (Irenaeus "Ad.
haer.", III, iii, 4); his touching anxiety about a youth who had become a
robber (Clemens Alex., "Quis dives salvetur", xiii); his constantly repeated
words of exhortation at the end of his life, "Little children, love one
another" (Jerome, "Comm. in ep. ad. Gal.", vi, 10). On the other hand the
stories told in the apocryphal Acts of John, which appeared as early as the
second century, are unhistorical invention.
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