Among the first leaders of the Christian communities there were three teachers of commanding personality, each of the three having his own peculiar characteristic features. Two of these, Peter and John, had been with the Lord during the whole of His public ministry, and had especially enjoyed His friendship and confidence. The third, Paul, although not His companion during the three years of His public ministry, had been singled out by the Holy Spirit shortly after the Resurrection, and set apart for a peculiar and important work—a work which he carried out during many years of unresting toil with conspicuous devotion and singular success.
The career of two of these great teachers was closed, as we have seen, about the year 67-8, in the course of the persecution of Nero. The connection of Peter and Paul with the Roman congregation was very close. There, in the metropolis, they had spent a considerable time; the Roman Church in an especial way had been their care. Peter was the traditional founder of the Church of Rome, while the longest and most important of Paul's letters was addressed to the Roman Christians. Rome was the scene of the close of their devoted lives. While they lived there is no doubt that the great capital of the Empire was the center of the fast growing religion of Jesus.
Peter and Paul passed away, however, if not together, at all events at very nearly the same .time, and in the same fiery trial; and, after their death, the headquarters of Christendom for a considerable period was shifted to another center.
The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (A. D. 70), some three or four years after the death of the two Apostles, for ever put an end to any claim of the Holy City, with its undying memories, to be in any sense a Christian center. We must seek henceforth another spiritual capital.
When Peter and Paul were dead it was natural that the eyes of Christians in different parts of the Roman world should be turned to the disciple who, along with them, had been ever looked upon as a special depository of the Lords teaching; in some respects less prominent than the two who had sealed their long and faithful witness by a death of pain and agony, but in others even their superior. John was some years younger than Peter and Paul, of a nature more retiring, more contemplative. But he filled a place never occupied by those two great teachers; for when Jesus lived on earth it was well known that John was the "Disciple whom the Master loved." The memory of that love was ever the peculiar title to honor of the third of the great trio who were the acknowledged leaders of the Church of the first days; and when Peter and Paul were no longer on earth John became indisputably the central figure, to whom all the Brethren looked for guidance and teaching.
At the epoch of the catastrophe of Jerusalem, A. D. 70, John was in the Island of Patmos—banished, and probably a prisoner. But the banishment and confinement soon came to an end when the period of comparative stillness set in after the death of the tyrant Nero; for after A. D. 70 we find the loved Apostle residing at Ephesus, which seems to have been his headquarters during the thirty years which still remained for him to live and work among men. Ephesus therefore, and the region of Asia Minor round that important city, must be regarded as for many years the spiritual center of Christendom.
Others, too, of great reputation among the Christian community were attracted to Asia Minor; they probably selected this populous and famous district as their home in order to be near John. Among these, trustworthy tradition specially mentions two brother Apostles, friends of John in his youth, and, like him, originally fishermen of Bethsaida, Andrew and Philip. We learn also from the same ancient authority of two other personal disciples of Christ in these parts—Aristion and a second John, with whom Papias had talked respecting the human life of the Lord and the earliest days of the Church.
In the city of Ephesus and its neighborhood, for some thirty years after the deaths of Peter and Paul and the fall of Jerusalem (A. D. 70) John lived, dying in extreme old age about the last year of the first century, when the Emperor Trajan was reigning. In this famous center he gathered round him many disciples, ordaining bishops and presbyters. From very early notices we possess some authentic traditions respecting his busy, active life; indeed, the traditions of John, owing no doubt to the great prolongation of his life after the Church was firmly established and in part organized, and to his fixed residence in the midst of a large Christian community, are more consistent and trustworthy than those which relate to the later life of any other of the Apostles.
It was in this period that he revised his Apocalypse, written in the first instance probably between A. D. 68 and 70 while in exile at Patmos. It is some such revision or redaction by the Apostle himself to which Irenaeus most likely refers when he mentions somewhat vaguely the end of Domitian's reign as the period when the vision was seen. It was, too, in this long time of comparative stillness, when he dwelt at Ephesus, that the fourth Gospel was put out in the form in which we now possess it. The words of the ancient Muratorian Canon (circa A. D. 170) give the original tradition of how the first draft of that Gospel was suggested. The exact phraseology of this venerable fragment of early-Christian literature is peculiarly interesting.
"The fourth Gospel is (the work) of John, one of the disciples. Being exhorted by his fellow-disciples and Bishops, he said: 'Fast with me today for three days, and let us relate to one another what shall have been revealed to each.' The same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the Apostles, that 'John should write down everything in his own name, and all should certify' . . . ."
The narrative portion of the Gospel, and the great theological truths enshrined in it, had doubtless often formed part of John's teaching in public and in private. The Gospel according to John, arranged as we now have it, embodying as it does a summary of the great Apostle's teaching respecting the Person and Office of the Lord, was the result of much toil and thought, and was the great monument of the prolonged life at Ephesus.
The Muratorian fragment above referred to proceeds to quote John's own words in his first Epistle: "What we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears, and our hands have handled, these things we have written unto you." He thus declares himself to be not only an eye-witness and a hearer, but also a recorder of all the wonderful things of the Lord in order.
The "Muratorian Fragment" was discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan in a MS. of the works of Chrysostom of great antiquity. It is mutilated at the beginning and the end, and is an unskillful translation of a letter from a lost Greek original. It is a piece of the highest importance. Its date is shown by a reference to Pope Pius I., and must be placed circa A. D. 170. Internal evidence fully confirms its claim to this high antiquity; and scholars generally regard it as a summary of the opinion of the Western Church on the New Testament Canon shortly after the middle of the second century.
Any personal memories of John at this period are of rare interest. Three of these are preserved to us in undoubtedly authentic documents. Irenaeus, writing in the last quarter of the second century, gives us some of his memories of his old master Polycarp. Polycarp, it must be remembered, was a hearer and disciple of John. He relates how Polycarp used to describe to his pupils his intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate his very words.
Another of these memories of John is also given us by Irenaeus, speaking again of his old master Polycarp. "There are those who have heard him (Polycarp) tell how John the disciple of the Lord, when he went to take a bath at Ephesus, and when he saw Cerinthus [the famous heretical teacher] within, rushed away from the room without bathing, with the words 'Let us flee lest the room should fall in, for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within." The old fiery spirit of the "Son of Thunder," Boanerges, as the Lord once termed him and his brother long years before, still lived evidently in the old man John.
One more striking memory of John's life at Ephesus is preserved to us by Clement of Alexandria, who also wrote about the end of the same century (the second). It is too long for quotation, but it gives a graphic description of a young convert to Christianity who had fallen away, had taken to evil courses, and had become a robber. John seeks him out in the midst of the robber horde, and with touching reproaches wins him back again, telling the apostate how he had found pardon for him in his prayers at the hands of Christ. Clement relates the story, emphatically prefacing it with the words: "Listen to a story that is no fiction but a real history handed down, and carefully preserved, respecting the Apostle John."