John — the disciple who outlived them all

John was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee, working with his brother James in a family business that employed hired men (Mark 1:20) — so not poor. His mother Salome was among the women who supported Jesus' ministry.

He is usually pictured as the gentle one, the apostle of love, leaning on Jesus at the last supper.

That is how he ended. It is not how he started.

The son of thunder

Jesus gave James and John a nickname: Boanerges, "Sons of Thunder" (Mark 3:17). Nicknames of that kind are earned.

When a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, the brothers asked: "Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). Jesus rebuked them.

They also — with their mother's assistance — asked for the top two seats in the kingdom, which understandably annoyed the other ten (Mark 10:35-41).

This is worth sitting with. The man who would write "let us love one another" (1 John 4:7) began as a young man who wanted to incinerate a village for a social slight. Sanctification is slow, and it is real.

The inner circle

Peter, James and John form a group of three admitted to things the others were not: the raising of Jairus's daughter (Mark 5:37), the transfiguration (Mark 9:2), and Gethsemane (Mark 14:33).

John's Gospel refers to a figure it never names — "the disciple whom Jesus loved" — who reclines next to Jesus at the last supper (John 13:23), and the book identifies this disciple as its author (John 21:24). The traditional and most likely identification is John himself, writing about himself in the third person.

The title has been misread as boastful. Read the other way, it is the opposite: at the end of a long life, this is the only thing he thought worth saying about himself.

At the cross

The other apostles fled. John is the only one the Gospels place at the crucifixion.

And Jesus, dying, made a domestic arrangement:

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.— John 19:26-27

In agony, with the weight of the world's sin on him, Jesus dealt with the practical question of who would look after his mother. It is one of the most quietly devastating details in the Gospels — and it settles any argument about whether spiritual mission excuses family obligation.

The Gospel

John wrote last of the four, probably in the 80s or 90s, and he wrote differently. Ninety per cent of his material is not in Matthew, Mark or Luke.

He states his purpose plainly: "these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31).

He opens not at a manger but before creation: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). He structures the book around seven signs and seven "I am" statements, each echoing the divine name of Exodus 3:14.

And for all its theological height it is full of concrete, checkable detail — the number of waterpots at Cana, the porticoes at Bethesda, the seamless tunic, the hundred and fifty-three fish. He also insists on eyewitness testimony as his warrant: "he who saw it has borne witness — his testimony is true" (John 19:35).

The letters

1, 2 and 3 John read like an old man returning to essentials.

The opening is a deliberate echo of his Gospel and an insistence on physical evidence: "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands" (1 John 1:1). He is writing against people teaching that Christ only appeared to be human — and he answers them by saying: I touched him.

Then the theme that dominates everything: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God" (1 John 4:7). "God is love" (1 John 4:8). "If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar" (1 John 4:20).

Jerome preserves a tradition that in extreme old age, when John had to be carried into the assembly and could manage only a few words, he would say each time: Little children, love one another. Asked why he always said the same thing, he replied that it is the Lord's command, and if it alone is kept, it is enough.

Patmos

"I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 1:9).

Patmos is a small rocky island off the coast of Asia Minor, used by Rome for political exiles. The date is usually placed around AD 95, under Domitian.

There, in isolation, he received the visions that became Revelation — written to seven real churches under real pressure, to tell them how the story ends. However one interprets its symbolism, the pastoral purpose is not obscure: the Lamb has already won, the persecuted will be vindicated, and God will dwell with his people.

Tertullian preserves a tradition that before his exile John was thrown into boiling oil in Rome and emerged unharmed. It is late and unverifiable, but it indicates how the early church remembered him: as the one who could not be killed.

The long life

John appears to be the only apostle who was not martyred.

Irenaeus — and this is the strongest chain of testimony we have about any apostle — writes that John lived at Ephesus until the reign of Trajan. Irenaeus knew Polycarp, and Polycarp had personally heard John. That is two steps from an eyewitness, in writing.

There is a curious moment at the end of John's Gospel. Peter, told how he will die, asks about John. Jesus answers: "if it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!" (John 21:22). John then adds a correction to a rumour that had evidently spread — Jesus did not say he would not die.

That John felt the need to correct it suggests he had lived long enough for people to start wondering.

He had watched the crucifixion and buried his own brother, the first apostle to die. He outlived every one of them. And the last surviving eyewitness of the resurrection spent his final years telling churches, again and again, to love one another.