Today is, along with being the day of the Swearing of the new Swiss Guards, the Feast of St. John at the Latin Gate. The Romans call it San Giovanni “sott’olio… St. John in oil”, which sounds like how you pack anchovies in a jar.
The Church of St John at the Latin Gate is at site of the attempted murder of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist.
There is a solid tradition that John was in Rome in 92 AD at the time of the Emperor Domitian. According to the very early Latin writer Tertullian who died around 220, in his work The Prescription of Heretics the Romans tried to killed John by boiling him in oil but John emerged unscathed, As legend has it, thousands of spectators were converted to Christianity when they saw John miraculous protection of harm.
There is also a story that they tried to poison john with a cup of venom filled wine. As John blessed it, the poisons emerged in the form of a snake. That is why we often see john depicted with a chalice with a little snake or dragon critter crawling out. Another good reason to bless our food and drink. This is also why there is a special blessing for wine on the Feast of St. John just after Christmas.
After his miraculous protection from harm, John would have then been banished from Rome to Patmos, where he wrote the book of Revelation. A church was built on the place where John’s martyrdom took place near the southern part of the Rome’s wall. The aforementioned church is one of the Roman Stations during Lent. The building of the church goes back to the time of Pope Gelasius who died in 496, there are still roof tiles which have the stamp of Theodoric who ruled from 493- 526. The beautiful campanile or bell tower was added in the 8th century. the baroque decorations added in the 16 and 17th centuries were removed in the 1940’s.
There are different forms of martyrdom and not all of them are bloody. But authentic martyrdom is always a witness to the Faith of the person who is suffering and that witness bears fruit for the Faith of others.
Different forms of martyrdom can include dying to the world in different modes of living in the world, active and contemplative. Our reading today in Holy Mass today was a springboard for St. Augustine to look at this paring of figures, types of the active and contemplative lives, Peter and John, Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary.
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Rome in 92 AD was a long way from Damascus or Ephesus circa 105 CE. Now that I’ve tipped my hand, in all seriousness let me ask does the tradition already attribute the Gospel to him by the time he was in Rome? Most academic opinion would say it was yet unwritten, and I’m curious if the hagiography agrees.
@PostCatholic
Relevant extracts from Cornelius a Lapide:
“S. JOHN the Apostle, the son of Zebedee and Salome, wrote this Gospel in Asia in the Greek language, towards the end of his life, after his return from Patmos, where he wrote the Apocalypse.
His reasons for writing were two. The first was that he might confute the heretics Ebion and Cerinthus, who denied Christ’s Divinity, and taught that He was a mere man. The second was to supply the omissions of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Hence S. John records at length what Christ did during the first year of His ministry, which the other three had for the most part passed over.
…
Baronius shows that S. John wrote his Gospel in the year of Christ 99, or sixty-six years after the Ascension. This was the first year of the reign of Nerva, and the twenty-seventh after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.”
TheCavalierHatherly,
Thank you very much for that. It is very interesting the account you cite lines up so well with the timeline of modern scholarship. I think too often “legends” are dismissed out of hand too easily. It’s not like we can check the db and pull up St. John the Evangelist’s boarding pass for Ephesus to Fiumicino/Da Vince and see he had an aisle seat and a gluten-free meal. Hagiography often contains kernels of historical knowledge.
I will say that overwhelming historical consensus is that Revelations is by a dfferent author than the Gospel of John and of the Johannine letters, and that none of the preceding were the the Apostle. But I will bet there’s a straight line to be drawn through all these datapoints, even if we can’t “prove” it.
“I will say that overwhelming historical consensus is that Revelations is by a dfferent author than the Gospel of John and of the Johannine letters, and that none of the preceding were the the Apostle.”
I really doubt that the interpolations of 19th century Germans are more trustworthy than the statements of those who followed closely upon the heels of the persons, events, and documents. Especially after all of the embarrassments they (the aforesaid Teutons) have suffered at the hand of archeology in the last 100 years. Im certain if there was a detectable difference in the Greek text, the people who spoke Greek fluently since birth, and read more books in Greek than any of us could ever imagine, probably would have detected the imposture. Not some Lilliputian philologist 1600 years later.
There is an “overwhelming consensus” that Cardi B is a good musician, at the present time. That doesn’t mean either of those predicates belong in that sentence.
PostCatholic,
If you compare the first two JBCs, the putative composition year of a given book or letter is usually not the same. The first JBC supposes an accuracy. the second usually backs off, offering instead a period of years.
The same happened in chemistry/physics. Years ago there were precise orbits where electrons were slotted. Later, thanks to the work of Heisenberg and Olivia Newton John’s grandfather, orbits became clouds where certain electrons could be found . . . maybe.
A prof once told me that it was interesting to see how the French twisted Scripture to fit their theories. And the Germans didn’t bother.