t whom Jesus said to Peter: "If I want him to remain until I come, what is thatto you? Follow Me!".Introduction Page 5It is probable that he is the "disciple . . . known to the high priest" who spoketo the maid and had Peter admitted to the court of Annas (18:15-16). It is quiteprobable that he was one of the two unnamed disciples of John the Baptist whofollowed Jesus at the beginning of His public life (1:35-39), and equally probable thathe was one of the two unnamed disciples who accompanied Peter in the boat on theLake of Galilee after the resurrection (21:2).What is certain is that the Gospel itself declares the Beloved Disciple to be "thisis the disciple who bears witness of these things, and wrote these things; and weknow that his witness is true" (21:24). The meaning of this statement is hotlydebated. It asserts at a minimum that the Beloved Disciple is the author of at leastchapter 21; at a maximum, it asserts that he is the author of the entire Gospel. Thereasons for these conclusions will be explained in the commentary on 21:24-25.However much the Gospel says about the Beloved Disciple, it nowhereidentifies him by name. Tradition, viaPolycarp, Polycrates, and Irenaeus, tes-tifiesto the belief of the Church in theearly second century that John, the sonof Zebedee, was the Beloved Disciple.This belief perdured until the twentiethcentury and was defended as recently asthe sixties by such renowned Johannine scholars as R. Schnackenburg and R. E.Brown. Brown, however, in his more recent The Community of the BelovedDisciple, has abandoned it and now goes along with the modern trend of dissociatingJohn, the son of Zebedee, and the Beloved Disciple.Contemporary scholars see the Beloved Disciple as a disciple of Jesus, but notone of the Twelve, a disciple who formed and led his own Christian communitysometime after the resurrection and became for that community a living link with theteaching of Jesus. They see him also as the leading fi...
