Who was Saint John?

Factual Questions
1

Disclaimer: I don’t want to start any big religious debate, or offend anyone. My questions are purely for the historical aspects and definitions.

Is he both “the Evangelist” and “the Baptist” ? The question stems from a religious history question posed by my wife. She is a Mormon, and the LDS Church is supposedly “evangelical”, which to my understanding is a style of preaching (Revelations, the end is near, hellfire and brimstone) and Baptists do the “reborn in the water” thing. Mormons don’t strike me as “evangelists”, and they do baptisms (even for the dead!). I know that evangelism and baptism are big in the southern U.S., but what sets them apart historically and definition-wise? The only thing I think I recall about Saint John is from the movie “Last Temptaion of Christ”, wasn’t he the leader of the river cult, and he baptises Jesus? Seems like he was doing both evangelism (yelling about the end being near) and baptisms…

2

No, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist are different.

John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin, and he baptized Christ at the beginning of His (Jesus, that is) ministry on earth. John was later beheaded by Herod at the request of Salome, his stepdaughter. John had been imprisoned for preaching that Herod was wrong to marry his former sister-in-law, which John considered incestuous. John is thought to have been an Essene, a first century religious group roughly equivalent to a monastery. His message was apocalyptic, preaching that “the kingdom of God is at hand (nearby)”. He told his disciples, of which he apparently had a few, that Jesus was the Messiah. The death of John the Baptist was apparently a shock to Jesus, who withdrew to a different part of the country upon hearing about it. It may have been Jesus’ first realization that His mission was to die.

John the Evangelist is traditionally identified with John the apostle. This is “the disciple Jesus loved”, apparently one of His favorites in the inner circle of apostles. His brother was James, and their father was Zebedee. (Jesus referred to them as the Boanerges, a Greek word meaning ‘sons of thunder’, because their father made such noise when they left the fishing business to follow Jesus. )

John the Evangelist is traditionally described as the author of the Gospel of John, the letters of John (I, II, and III John in the New Testament), and the Revelation to John, the last book of the Bible.

Evangelism is not a specific style of preaching. Evangelism means the spreading of the “good news”, that is, attempting to win converts to Christianity. All parts of the Christian church are supposed to do this. My denomination is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which means that we attempt to make converts. Different traditions have different ways of evangelizing, from door to door witnessing (I have done this) to public preaching, to acts of mercy which bear witness to the love of Jesus for all people.

Baptism is the ritual of initiation into the Christian church. It consists of sprinkling water on the head or, in some traditions, completely immersing the baptizee in water, three times “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit”. This is a symbolic washing away of sin and drowning of the old, sinful self. Some traditions (like mine) do it to infants. Others, such as many Baptists, do it when the person is old enough to decide for him or herself that they want to be Christian. I lost my taste for discussions on the topic long ago.

Mormons do lots of evangelism. One of the things devout younger Mormons will do is a two year missionary trip around the country. Buy a house and stay there for a while. You are likely to have a couple (they always travel in pairs, wearing white shirts and ties, carrying Bibles and/or the Book of Mormon, another of their Scriptures) stopping by sooner or later.

Don’t rely on any history you get from The Last Temptation of Christ, which is a work of fiction.

Is this the sort of thing you were interested in? Feel free to ask if you want more, or if any of this is not clear.

Yours in Christ,
Shodan

3

Thanks for the info Shodan! Are evangelists strictly Jesus-focused? Is there a style of preaching associated with the end of the world? Also, is the practice of Baptism strictly Christian? Why were Jews doing baptisms in Christ’s time? Can anyone shed some light on the American history of Baptists and evangelists? I know that the LDS church was formed at a time in America when other groups like the Shakers were formed, and that it coincided with some sort of religious revival, but my knowledge on the subject is obviously shaky…

4

No offense, but the books of the New Testament (as well as the Old) are also largely works of fiction. You might object by saying that they were based on actual events, but then so was the Last Temptation of Christ. The main difference is that the four canonical gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) were written from 20 years after the death of Jesus to at least 50 years after his death for the last gospels. The Last Temptation of Christ was written just under 2000 years after the events took place. Of course, the earliest copies of the gospels come from around 200 to 300 years after the death of Jesus.
As far as who wrote the Gospel of John, no one knows for sure. Definitely not the Apostle John though, and not John the Baptist (no one claims this anyway).

Incidentally, you are free to disregard this if it conflicts with your religious views. I am only going by what the historians and the biblical scholars have come up with. If you read the the Gospels (preferably in the original Greek) and compare their stories, you find that the evangelists tended to edit the stories for their own purposes. They add bits here and there and make up quotes right and left. Like I said at the beginning of the paragraph, go ahead and disregard this. Only please, please, don’t insist that your interpretation is the only one. Despite the confident tone of my post, I do not presume that I know even a part of the truth about the life of Jesus.

[fixed a broken tag --Chronos]

[Edited by Chronos on 07-27-2001 at 05:42 PM]

5

Tradition has linked the various authors of the New Testament who are identified as John to the Apostle John, none to John the Baptist who died years before the first New Testament writing.

Subsequent scholarship has tended to move away from that linkage. Clearly, the author of Revelation (John the Divine) is not the author of the Gospel of John (although that sort of comment will bring horrified cries from those who hold the tradition sacred).

The strongest tradition makes John the Apostle the author of the Gospel of John and the three Epistles of John. However, that tradition is not well supported by any internal evidence or by any statements made by the earliest Church Fathers. It appears that the Gospel of John and the three Letters of John were written by the same person (although there are challenges of one sort and another to this idea), but it does not appear that they were written by the apostle.

One point regarding the recently popular notion that John the Baptist was an Essene: My personal view is that this is based on nothing stronger than a desire by some people to create as much linkage among religious groups of first century Palestine as they can. Aside from the idea of repentance (popular with many movements throughout the ages) there is no specifically Essene nature to the little we know of John’s preaching. In addition, John the Baptist is clearly identified as a wanderer or a hermit, whereas the Essenes were clearly an organized group about whom all the evidewnce points to a sedentary and monastic lifestyle.

6

Vandergeld,
I’m not Shodan, but I hope I can help. Strictly speaking, an “evangelicalist” is, as Shodan said, a person who tries to convert other people. However, a movement has developed lately (over the past 100 years) in Christianity, called the “New Evangelical” movement, and they call themself “evangelicals” for short. Evangelicals tend to be religiously conservative and the emphasis on evangelical teaching is that it’s important for every person to have a personal relationship with Jesus. The most famous leader of the evangelical movement is probably Billy Graham.

The practice of ritual immersion is not strictly Christian, but, as far as I know, only Christians use it as a rite of initiation. Judaism, though, has the mikvah, which is a ritual bath, where a person, to become ritually clean, will immerse him or herself in running water. The most common time a person would go to a mikvah would be, for a man, in case of ejaculation, and for a woman, after her menstral period. John’s baptims were, as far as we understand it, an extension of this purification ritual, where he would preach on the banks of the Jordan river about the importance of purity and good conduct, and immerse people in the Jordan as a symbol of their purification and desire to reform their lives.

The history of Baptists in America is a complex one, but, in quick summary, the Baptist movement broke off from English Calvinism. One of the distinctive practices of the Baptists were, and still is, the baptism of adults. Because of their opposition to infant baptism, they were persecuted in England, and fled to colonial America. Still encountering religious persecution in Massachusetts, many fled to Rhode Island, where Roger Williams established a Baptist colony. The Baptists were extremely successful in America, and Baptist missionaries succeeded in converting much of the south. One of the major splits among the Baptists occured before the Civil War, when the Nation Baptist Convention expelled those people and churches that held slaves or endorsed slavery. Most of those expelled churches formed their own convention, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is currently the largest religious group in the United States. Baptists have traditionally believed that every individual is free to interpret the bible as he or she wishes, that every Baptist church is free to make its own policy, and that all people are equal in the sight of G-d. Hope this helps.

7

I have heard that biblical scholars have come to believe that the Book of Revalation is by a different John then either the Baptist or the Evangelist. IMHO, it reads like the work of someone different.

8

Captain Amazing:

Nitpick -

The water need not be flowing, or “running”; any natural body of water, including a lake, or any man-made pool filled with rainwater containing more than a certain volume of water (the Talmudic measure is 40 Se’ah; I don’t recall just how much this translates to in liters/gallons) can serve as a mikvah.

9

IANAB, but one issue that came up last year was Jimmy Carter’s quitting the Southern Baptist Convention. The Texas Baptists also protested the recent developments in the central organization requiring individual congregations to knuckle under the doctrinal pronouncements of the central authority. This is, from what I understand, very un-Baptist; it contradicts the principle of “soul competence” which holds that each individual is the final authority to interpret Scripture for his or her own self. Wasn’t that the point of the Protestant Reformation in the first place? There is very real concern about the central control of the SBC becoming more dictatorial than they have a warrant to be.

Seems you never hear about Northern Baptists. A quiet bunch, are they? Or just dwarfed in prominence by the larger Southern Baptists?

I thought the OP was about the origin of the name of St. John’s Wort (Hyperica perforatum). AFAIK, the plant was so called because it blooms around the time of the feastday of St. John the Baptist, June 24. The old-time Celts had Midsummer bonfire rites on St. John’s Eve. Like Beltane, one of the “Cross Quarter” days. A survival of pre-Christian Celtic religion that was given a Christian “baptism,” so to speak.

10

Only clue we may have in the Gospels on John the Baptist’s belonging to any religious group is from the story of his conception and birth, in the 1st Chapter of Luke, which seems to indicate J-the-B would be a Nazirite (although it’s never said so outright) – which is a personal condition, and not an organization or doctrine.

11

Without pushing this thread too hard towards “Great Debates”, I have read the New Testament in the original Greek.

Most “modern” opinion of the authorship and nature of the Gospels is based on literary and textual criticism started in Germany during the late nineteenth century. I have read many of the works putting forth the views of the New Testament to which others on this thread have referred. I would consider most of those views to be opinions rather than scientifically established facts.

This is, of course, a point on which reasonable minds can disagree.

FWIW, I believe the oldest copy of any of the Gospels is a fragment of the Gospel of Matthew, which dates to the latter half of the first century A.D.

http://www.jps.net/triumph/p20.htm

Regards,
Shodan

12

The oldest fragment is known as B52 (where B is rendered in Gothic script and the 52 is a superscript). It contains the verses fron John 18:31-33 and the beginning of verse 37. It is dated to the early second century.

B64 and B67 are fragments of Matthew’s Gospel dated to around 200.

13

How about the famous Saint John who was Noah’s brother?.. You’ve heard of Saint John of Ark?

::: wurf wurf wurf :::

14

Interesting stuff.

  1. The Saint John that was the author of the Fourth Gospel is never actually named in the text. He says that he is the “beloved disciple”, which prompts identification with the apostle John, as he has been depicted in the other gospels. See the books of G.A. Wells The Historical Evidence for Jesus, among others) for an interesting interpretation and speculation on how the gospels – which do not name their authors – got named.

  2. The author of the Book of Revelation (AKA The Book of the Apocalypse) is also named John, and many belueve that it was also written by the apostle John during his stay on the island of Patmos. There’s no internal evidence to confirm this, though, and the books are in very different styles, and you’d think that , if he wrote one he’d mention the other (but he doesn’t). An interesting twist to all this is that there was a medieval tradition that the apostle John (thought to have written both these books) was the bridegroom at the Wedding at Cana. After the miracle of the Water Into Wine, he left his bride and became an apostle. (His bride must have LOVED the Christians, if this is true.) Hieronymous Bosch paintedThe Wedding Feast at Cana and * Saint John on Patmos*, and the bridegroom in the one does bear a great similarity to Saint John.

  3. The various letters ascribed to John are probably just using the name to gain respectability. If you look through the lists of discarded books that didn’t make it into the accepted Canon you will find scores of spurious gospels that claim to be by apostles and evangelists (such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas that showed up in an SDMB thread last week.)