“Very truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.” . . . One of his disciples — the one whom Jesus loved — was reclining next to him; Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. (John 13:21-24)

Just exactly who was the “other” disciple that the evangelist talks about, “the one whom Jesus loved”? Theologians have long agreed that it was likely to have been John the son of Zebedee, which is why the Fourth Gospel is known as the Gospel of John instead of, say, the Gospel of Andrew. But in 1995, I had an idea that struck me with the blinding force of a revelation. I hope I’m right!

The obvious candidate for a favorite is Simon Peter. One of the first called, one of Jesus’ innermost circle of close friends, a powerful preacher, a dynamic leader, Simon Peter was almost certainly not the slow-of-comprehension stooge that some of the gospels depict; making Sancho, Pancho, Tonto, Robin, Little John, et al. look smaller so the hero can look larger has been a standard literary device for thousands of years. In fact, Simon Peter is so very obviously a candidate for favorite (over and over, the gospels talk of “Peter and the disciples,” like a '50s do-wop group) that the Fourth Gospel distinguishes him from the beloved disciple in almost every mention.

In one instance only, it appears that we are meant to believe that the author of the Fourth Gospel is the beloved disciple: “Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them. . . . This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written about them, and we know that his testimony is true.” (21:20, 24) This quote is most of the basis for history’s having decided that the author of the Fourth Gospel was the beloved disciple. However, this is the only place where the mention of the Gospel’s source comes hard on the heels of the mention of the “other” disciple, and I believe it is merely a juxtaposition. For both of the Gospel’s instances of what we might call self-justification — the other is, “(He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth)” (19:35) — it is easy to make the case for the idea that the text is merely claiming that it is based on eyewitness testimony. (Moreover, The Oxford Companion to the Bible believes [along with numerous other sources] that chapters 1 and 21 were added to the Fourth Gospel at a slightly later date, as prologue and epilogue.)

And, really, wouldn’t there be something distasteful about an evangelist who implied, coyly, “Jesus loved me best of all”? If the author of the Fourth Gospel had indeed been the beloved disciple, we would be stuck with that image: I was there, and I was the disciple whom Jesus loved, and nanny-nanny-boo-boo to you! Needless to say, the Fourth Gospel just does not read that way.

I have several objections to the idea that the Fourth Gospel was written by any disciple at all. First, although recent findings make the gospel more difficult to date, the best guess of most experts is still that it was probably written some time between 90 and 120 C.E. — in other words, 60 to 90 years after Jesus’ ministry on Earth. And, rather than an author who was a superannuated disciple known to us only as a former fisherman, The Oxford Companion to the Bible finds it “more plausible . . . that behind the composition of the gospel lie a number of difference sources . . . that have been combined and edited at various stages in the writing of this document, until its final publication as a unified work.”

Second is the problem of singularity. No other gospel mentions a male disciple whom Jesus loved with particularity — not one, apocryphal or canonical. And the brothers Zebedee, though mentioned elsewhere in the canon, are nowhere near as likely to have been favorites as Simon Peter; in fact, they are singled out only through their nickname, the “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17). (Some have theorized that by this Jesus meant that they were Zealots; I prefer the theory that the brothers tended to quarrel with each other, and that Jesus was making a little joke.) If John bar-Zebedee had indeed been Jesus’ favorite, why didn’t even one other gospelist say something like, “the sons of thunder, James bar-Zebedee and his brother John, whom Jesus loved”?

Some theologians have suggested that the beloved disciple was Lazarus, who, his sisters reminded Jesus, was “he whom you love” (11:3); “see how he loved him!” the locals say as they watch Jesus weep at the tomb (11:36). However, Jesus had to rearrange a number of his plans and risk considerable personal danger to go to Bethany — and why should he have had to do that when all of his (other?) disciples were with him? And again, there is the problem of singularity. Why doesn’t any other gospel, canonical or apocryphal, say “Lazarus, the disciple whom Jesus loved”?

Jesus did have a favorite: Mary Magdalene, “a woman disciple of the Lord” (the Gospel of Peter), who is a major character in almost every first-century piece of writing about Jesus extant. Not only is Mary the Great (the Hebrew/Aramaic meaning of the Greek “Magdalene”) one of the stars of “The Dialogue of the Savior” (a woman! unheard of!), but in other apocryphal gospels we get quotes like: “The Savior loved Mary Magdalene more than all the [other] disciples, and kissed on her mouth often. The other disciples . . . said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’” (Gospel of Philip, 55b). Or this: “But Mary Magdalene and John the maiden [!] will surpass all my disciples and all men who shall receive mysteries; they will be on my right hand . . . and they will be equal with you in all things” (Pistis Sophia). Peter is rebuked in several of the apocryphal gospels for his hostility to women in general and to Mary Magdalene in particular, which sounds suspiciously like jealousy to me. In the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), Levi says to Peter, “If the Savior has made her worthy, who then are you to reject her? Certainly the Savior knows her well enough; that is why he loved her more than us.” Even in the canonical gospels, Mary Magdalene is arguably the most important of Jesus’ disciples, and she is certainly the first apostle whom the risen Christ himself commissions (20:17-18; Matt. 28:7).

Thus, Mary Magdalene could have been the disciple whom Jesus loved — but the pronouns in the Fourth Gospel are always “he” and “him,” and 20:1-2 say plainly, “Mary Magdalene . . . ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.” The scholar Adeline Fehribach commented that this scene may have been included “because Jewish law demanded the witness of two men (cf. Deut. 19:5).” According to Jewish law, women were not even allowed into court; they were considered socially irresponsible liars, even less reliable than little boys.

It is of course possible that the Fourth Gospel was based on Mary’s witness, and that some pompous patriarch decided that other pompous patriarchs would have trouble accepting Christianity on the testimony of a mere woman, and so invented the beloved disciple as her “secret identity.” (There was apparently so much danger around that last Passover that women were excluded from the Last Supper, which they would normally have been expected to share in [and serve at]. I do not find it inconceivable that one or two of the braver women, such as Mary Magdalene and “John the maiden,” might have attended in “drag” — in which case, she might have been the beardless, narrow-shouldered “lad” of Mark 14:51-52.) Although both Jesus and Paul (and thus their earliest disciples) accepted women as the equals of men, women were being told to sit down, shut up, and get back to being obedient, submissive possessions as early as 60 C.E. (The biblical scholar Christopher Bryan is among those who have suggested that the author of Hebrews might have been the missionary Priscilla; Bryan adds, “The establishment of patriarchal norms in the church might then account for the extraordinary rapidity with which the Christian community forgot that she was the author.” [Alas, the Women's Bible Commentary finds Hebrews way too sexist to have been written by a woman.])

However, the scholar Adeline Fehribach has made a persuasive argument that the Fourth Gospel’s hermeneutic is the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth as humanity’s Messianic Bridegroom. The women characters who are so richly drawn are consistently marginalized and made mere spear-carriers in the Bridegroom’s drama; they appear, they speak their lines, and then they vanish forever. (The one exception, Mary of Nazareth, appears twice because she has two distinct roles in the drama: representing the Hebrew Bible’s “mother of an important son” in the wedding at Cana, and as “an exchange object that merely represents the new patriarchal kinship” that the male disciples have with Jesus in his role of the then-stereotypical “dying king.”) The Samaritan woman is the Bridegroom’s Samaritan wife; Mary of Bethany is the Bridegroom’s Jewish wife; Mary the Great, called Magdalene, is the Bridegroom’s wife representing the entire community of faith. In the scene at the Cross where Jesus hands Mary of Nazareth over to the beloved disciple, “The mother of Jesus, as the female exchange item of a dying king, is but an earthly sign for the brotherly relationship that Jesus has with those whom the beloved disciple represents. The mother of Jesus is then marginalized by being placed in the care of the beloved disciple and disappearing from the text.” (Adeline Fehribach, S.C.N., The Women in the Life of the Bridegroom: A Feminist Historical-Literary Analysis of the Female Characters in the Fourth Gospel [Collegeville, MN: The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., 1998])

What do we actually know about the beloved disciple? Not much — which is odd in itself. A zillion theologians have remarked on the literary skills of the evangelists who wrote John. To quote just one, Dorothy L. Sayers remarked that of all the gospels, John is the one in which real characters leap richly and vividly off the page: Mary and Martha of Bethany, their brother Lazarus, the Samaritan woman, Nicodemus, the menorrhagic woman, Malchus the de-eared, the woman caught in adultery, Pilate, the woman who guarded the high priest’s gate, Joseph of Arimathea. (They do seem to have had a little trouble giving names to women . . . hmmm.) Only one person in the whole Gospel lacks characterization to the point that he’s almost not there at all: the “other” disciple.

What else do we know about the “other” disciple? The evangelist wants us to see him as active in Jerusalem: “Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest.” (18:16) It has been suggested that John bar-Zebedee must have sold fish to Caiaphas. I say, hogwash! On such a night as that, and at approximately 2 a.m., would you, as Caiaphas, give two hoots about your fishmonger? My theory is that the dramatist needed the beloved disciple to be inside with Jesus during the scene with Caiaphas because Peter had to be outside denying Jesus. Someone had to be present to give us a report on what happening inside! (A.N. Wilson, among others, has made it beautifully clear that the Fourth Gospel was carefully structured and must be regarded as salvation-history rather than what we might call Gibbons-history. None of the evangelists seem to have cared about Jesus’ Social Security number, either!)

The Fourth Gospel also wants us to see the beloved disciple as quick on the uptake: “So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’ Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter. . . . Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (20:2-8; emphasis added). Not only does the beloved disciple believe on this occasion; he is equally quick to believe after the Resurrection: “That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’” (21:7)

Given that the evangelist had no trouble characterizing anyone else, and given that the beloved disciple was not John, Peter, Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, or anyone else who might readily spring to mind: Why on earth is the evangelist so elusive about the identity of this one disciple?

Here is the scene that sparked my idea: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” (19:26-27) Many theologians have supported the idea that in this scene, Mary was more than merely herself — that she was a “figure,” or metaphor, for the nascent Church. So couldn’t the evangelist have made both the humans in the scene symbolic?

Couldn’t it be that the “other” disciple was really (get ready for this, now) YOU OR ME?

Think about Mary as representing the Church: “Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” Think about the “other” disciple as representing you. Could not the evangelist be telling you that you must take Christianity into your own home and treat it as your own mother, with respect and love?

In his book Jesus: A Life, A.N. Wilson writes, “And here you approach another facet of the Fourth Gospel, another layer in its endless layers, another ingredient in its inexhaustible richness and fascination as a literary text: that is, that we ourselves, who read it, or hear it read, are meant to be characters within the story” (emphasis added).

It seems plausible to me that the evangelist who wrote the Fourth Gospel wanted his readers to imagine themselves right into the story — for each reader to see himself as the beloved disciple. (Remember that in that era, the average woman had less freedom and less access to literacy than women do today; the literacy rate was approximately three percent — for men, who had much better access to education. Unlike Jesus, the evangelist took it for granted that only men would be studying his words.)

It has been pointed out that the Fourth Gospel can be separated into two neat sections, and that both sections recapitulate salvation-history, from Isaac through Moses and David to our Redeemer. This is one reason why its chronology is so different from the chronology of the Synoptics. As Aileen Guilding points out in The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship, each half of the Fourth Gospel follows the Synagogue Lectionary for Passover, New Year, Tabernacles, Dedication, and Purim, the better to emphasize that Jesus was re-establishing Israel as Christianity. This, I believe, is why the beloved disciple does not appear until the Last Supper. There is no need for you to imagine yourself into the story of Jesus’ birth, for example, or his wowing the scholars around the time of his bar mitzvah. There is every need for you to imagine yourself into the story of his death and resurrection.

So here you are, reading the Fourth Gospel. And you come to the first mention of the beloved disciple, at the Last Supper (13:23-24). And you think, “Yeah, that could be me. Jesus loves me, this I know.”

And the second mention: Jesus is arrested. The charge is political terrorism. The Romans are afraid of an uprising in a city crowded with dissidents for the Passover. The Jews are afraid that if they don’t hand over a scapegoat, the Romans are going to start crucifying people en masse, as they were to do a few years later to Spartacus and his supporters. Jesus is hauled away by a detachment of heavily armed soldiers. The “other” disciple and Simon Peter follow, but Peter is so afraid for his own life that he cannot admit he even knows Jesus (18:15-16). Wouldn’t you, the disciple whom Jesus loves, stay with him, to give him what moral support you can? (You’re not afraid of any nasty old Romans; it’s 2,000 years too late for them to crucify you!)

Hanging on the cross, Jesus asks you to take care of his mother for him (19:26-27). If you could have seen through your tears, wouldn’t you have said, “Yes, Lord”?

Then when Mary Magdalene comes panting up to say that the tomb is empty (20:2-9) — wouldn’t you race back with her, to see the miracle yourself?

Shortly after the crucifixion, you and six other disciples go fishing. You work all night and catch nothing. Then at dawn, a shadowy figure on shore advises you to try the other side of the boat (oh, yeah, right!), and suddenly there are so many fish you can’t even haul in the net. Wouldn’t you turn to Peter and cry, “It is the Lord!” (21:1- 7)

Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them. . . . “Lord, what about him?” Jesus said to [Peter], “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die. . . . (21:20-23)

Well, not during the Ascension, anyway. But if the “other” disciple is YOU, the Christian who is reading this, then it is indisputably Jesus’ will that you remain on earth until his return. And, although Jesus did not promise you physical immortality — no one, not even Lazarus, gets physical immortality — we are all of us promised that we who believe in Christ shall never die.

And we know that, whatever the evangelist might have meant us to understand of the “other” disciple, we are each of us the one whom Jesus loves.