John2 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 08, 2018 7:25 pmThat's starting to "feel" right.
I think it "feels" right to keep John the elder in line as the one intended as "the elder" in 2 & 3 John. "The elder" comes off as an epithet, not as a mere descriptor, in both cases.
But I'm also getting the "feeling" that the author of the gospel of John might be pretending to be John the son of Zebedee.
I do not get that feeling at all. John of Zebedee as he appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is a Galilean; the "beloved disciple" in John does not seem to appear until the passion sequence in Judea. Also, John of Zebedee is listed in the appendix (in John 21.2) along with all the other
named or
identified disciples; so why keep his name a secret? What in the gospel of John, on its own merits, even suggests John of Zebedee as either the author or the beloved disciple?
So my only question now is, how does 1, 2, and 3 John (which strike me as being Jewish Christian too) compare with Revelation? Could they have been written by the same person?
No, almost certainly not. The Greek of Revelation is notoriously barbaric. The Greek of the epistles is fine. As Dionysius of Alexandria wrote (according to Eusebius,
History of the Church 7.25.24-25), "Moreover, it can also be shown that the diction of the gospel and epistle differs from that of the apocalypse. For they [= the gospel and the epistle, 1 John] were written not only without error as regards the Greek language, but also with elegance in their expression, in their reasonings, and in their entire structure. They are far indeed from betraying any barbarism or solecism, or any vulgarism whatever." Dionysius is contrasting the barbarisms and solecisms of the apocalypse with the elegant diction of the gospel and the first epistle of John (2 & 3 John being too short to do much with).
Do Polycrates and Irenaeus really have Papias' second John in mind as being the disciple John? I'll have to explore that more too.
No, I think they both assumed that Papias was talking about only one John, and that this John was the son of Zebedee, the apostle, the disciple, the elder, and the evangelist all rolled up into one.