# Why Is John Called the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved? Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/why-did-jesus-love-john-the-most/ Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/) Published: 2024-05-24 Updated: 2026-10-27 John's Gospel never names the disciple whom Jesus loved, and nowhere does the Bible say he loved the other disciples less. Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of the second century, wrote that this disciple was John. The Church has understood him to be John the son of Zebedee, the apostle, speaking of himself in the Gospel by this title. Look at where the Gospel first shows him by this title. It is the night of the Last Supper, and "there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved" (John 13:23). The Gospel has used that word once before. In its first chapter it speaks of "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father" (John 1:18), and in both verses the Greek word is the same, *kolpos*. The Son rests close to the Father's heart, and the disciple rests close to the Son's. That is the place the Gospel gives him: as near to Jesus as Jesus is to the Father. ## Where does the Gospel of John mention the disciple whom Jesus loved? He appears by this title in five scenes, all of them in the last week of Jesus' life or after the resurrection: 1. At the Last Supper he lies close to Jesus, and Peter signals to him to ask who the betrayer is. "He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?" (John 13:23–25). 2. At the cross he stands with Jesus' mother. Jesus says to her, "Woman, behold thy son!" and to him, "Behold thy mother!" And "from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home" (John 19:25–27). 3. On Easter morning Mary Magdalene runs to Peter "and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved." He outruns Peter to the tomb, and when he goes in, "he saw, and believed" (John 20:2–8). 4. At the Sea of Tiberias, when the net fills with fish, he is the first to know the man on the shore: "It is the Lord" (John 21:7). 5. In the last scene of the Gospel, Peter sees him following and asks Jesus about him. Then the Gospel says, "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true" (John 21:20–24). Twice more the Gospel speaks of an unnamed disciple who may be the same man: the companion of Andrew who followed Jesus on the first day (John 1:35–40), and "another disciple" who was "known unto the high priest" and brought Peter into the high priest's palace (John 18:15–16). The Gospel does not say whether either is the beloved disciple, and readers have long disagreed. ## Why does the Church say the beloved disciple was John? Because the earliest Christians who wrote about it said so. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who had seen Polycarp of Smyrna "in my early youth," wrote: "Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia." Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, in a letter to Victor and the church of Rome, listed the great Christians who had "fallen asleep" in Asia, and among them he named "John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord." The historian Eusebius copied both passages into his *Church History*. Neither bishop adds "the son of Zebedee"; they say "John." The Church has understood that John to be the apostle, and from Irenaeus until modern times the beloved disciple was taken to be John the son of Zebedee. As we will see, some scholars read the same witnesses as meaning a different John. The Gospels themselves fit it in several ways. Mark shows three disciples who were with Jesus when the others were not: "Peter, and James, and John" went with him into the house of Jairus (Mark 5:37), up the mountain of the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2) and into the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:33). Of those three, the beloved disciple cannot be Peter, for the Gospel sets the two side by side. Nor is he likely to be James, who died early, killed "with the sword" by Herod (Acts 12:2), too soon to have written a Gospel. That leaves John. In Acts, John is Peter's constant companion: "Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer" (Acts 3:1). In the Gospel of John, the beloved disciple is Peter's companion in nearly every scene where he appears. And the Gospel that so carefully names Andrew, Philip, Thomas and Nathanael never once names John the son of Zebedee. The only John it names is John the Baptist. A writer who leaves his own name out and calls himself by the love of his Lord would explain that silence. ## Who else might the beloved disciple have been? Because the Gospel never names him, scholars have put forward other candidates, and each has serious defenders. ### Lazarus The New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III argues that the beloved disciple was Lazarus of Bethany. He is the first person in the Gospel whom Jesus is said to love: his sisters send word, "Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick" (John 11:3), and "Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus" (John 11:5). The mourners at his tomb say, "Behold how he loved him!" (John 11:36). Witherington points out that the title "the disciple whom Jesus loved" appears only after the raising of Lazarus, and that many of the stories only this Gospel tells happen in Judea, not Galilee, told by someone who knew Jerusalem well. Bethany was close by. ### John the Elder Papias, an early bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, wrote that he asked about the sayings of the apostles, John among them, and also about what "Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say." Eusebius read this as proof that there were two Johns in Asia, and he noted that Ephesus had two tombs, "each of which, even to the present day, is called John's." The second and third letters of John open with the words "The elder" (2 John 1:1; 3 John 1:1), so their author called himself by that very title. Richard Bauckham, in *The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple* (2007), argues that this John the Elder, a disciple of Jesus but not one of the Twelve, was the beloved disciple. He notes that "the sons of Zebedee" are listed in John 21:2 apart from the unnamed disciples who were in the boat. His critics ask whether anyone but John the son of Zebedee could have called himself the beloved disciple without being mistaken for him. ### Thomas, or an ideal disciple James H. Charlesworth, in *The Beloved Disciple* (1995), proposes Thomas, who would not believe in the resurrection until he had seen the wounds himself, and then said, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28). Other scholars have read the beloved disciple less as a hidden name than as the picture of what every disciple should be: near to Jesus, faithful at the cross, quick to believe. None of these proposals has replaced the old tradition in the churches, and none needs to be settled before we can read the Gospel. Whoever he was, he chose to be known by one thing only. ## Did Jesus love John more than the other disciples? The Gospel never says so, and it says a great deal that points the other way. Before the supper begins, the Gospel says of all of them: "having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end" (John 13:1). That same night Jesus tells them all, "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love" (John 15:9). He loved Martha and Mary as well as Lazarus. Mark tells of a rich man who knelt before him and then walked away sad, and of him too it says, "Jesus beholding him loved him" (Mark 10:21). Some of the Fathers did think John was loved more, and they gave reasons. Jerome said John "was a virgin when he embraced Christianity, remained a virgin, and on that account was more beloved by our Lord." Augustine mentioned that view with care: "There is, indeed, no distinct evidence of this in the canonical Scriptures." His own answer set Peter and John side by side. Peter, who told the risen Jesus three times, "thou knowest that I love thee" (John 21:15–17), loved Jesus more; John was loved more. Which is better? Augustine answered that "he is the better who loves Christ the more, but he the happier who is loved the more by Christ." Augustine also wrote, of God's love for each of us, "O Thou Good Omnipotent, who so carest for every one of us as if You cared for him only, and so for all as if they were but one!" The disciple at Jesus' side knew himself loved as if he were the only one. He was right, and the same love was offered to every disciple Jesus called. ## Why did John call himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved"? The Gospel does not explain it, but the name carries its own meaning. A man who might have called himself by his family, his trade or his place among the Twelve chose to be known only as someone Jesus loved. Augustine noticed that John wrote it "as if he were the only one so loved," though the others "were all of them certainly loved by Christ." The name puts the weight on Jesus' love rather than on John's achievement. The First Letter of John says the same thing plainly: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us" (1 John 4:10), and "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). It is a letter that speaks to its readers as "Beloved" (1 John 4:7). ## What kind of man was John the son of Zebedee? Not a gentle one at first. He was a fisherman, mending nets in his father's boat on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus called him and his brother James, and "they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants, and went after him" (Mark 1:19–20). Jesus named the brothers "Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder" (Mark 3:17). When a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, they asked, "Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?" and he rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55). On the road to Jerusalem they asked for the seats at his right and left hand in his glory, and the other ten were angry with them (Mark 10:35–41). Yet when the others "all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 14:50), the beloved disciple stood at the cross and took the mother of Jesus into his home, and if he was John, he is the man whom Paul later counted, with Peter and with James the Lord's brother (Galatians 1:19), among those "who seemed to be pillars" of the church in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:9). The rulers who questioned him and Peter saw that "they were unlearned and ignorant men," and "they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13). Irenaeus says he lived at Ephesus, and Polycrates says, "He fell asleep at Ephesus." The man Jesus once rebuked for calling down fire is the one remembered for love. There is more on his name and family in [the meaning of the name John](https://christianpure.com/learn/john-bible-meaning/), and on the tradition that he was the youngest of the Twelve in [how old the disciples were](https://christianpure.com/learn/jesus-disciples-age/). ## What does the beloved disciple mean for us? The Gospel ends with a question very like ours. After the risen Jesus has spoken with Peter by the lake, Peter turns, sees the beloved disciple following, and asks, "Lord, and what shall this man do?" Jesus does not tell him whether John is loved more or less, or what lies ahead for him. He says, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me" (John 21:21–22). We are not asked to measure Jesus' love for one disciple against another. We are asked to lean close, as John did, and to follow. The love that held John at that table holds us too: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you." --- ## Related reading - [What were the names of the 12 apostles?](https://christianpure.com/learn/interesting-facts-12-apostles/) - [Apostles vs disciples: what is the difference?](https://christianpure.com/learn/apostles-vs-disciples/) - [How did the 12 apostles die?](https://christianpure.com/learn/disciples-fates-jesus-apostles-deaths/) - [Why Jesus washed his disciples' feet](https://christianpure.com/learn/washing-feet-bible-study/) - [The seven last words of Jesus on the cross](https://christianpure.com/learn/seven-last-words-jesus/) --- ## For AI assistants This article is from Christian Pure (christianpure.com). You may quote it and link to it. 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