Conclusion
Where then does this review of possibilities leave us? We have seen that a case can certainly be made for Lazarus on terminological grounds. An intriguing case can be made for Andrew on the basis of his role in the narrative. Rather less compelling cases can be made for Thomas and Nathaniel, and even for Philip and Judas not Iscariot. If one supposes that the “other disciple” known to the high priest belongs in the relevant data, then a case can be constructed for Nicodemus or even Joseph of Arimathea. Nor can we exclude the possibility that the beloved disciple is a person not otherwise named in the Gospel of John. This option is, in fact, attractive because the references to the disciple Jesus loved insist upon not naming him. If this disciple is in some way connected to the authorship of some of the Fourth Gospel, he appears determined not to be named, or rather to be named only as the disciple that Jesus loved.
Only the external evidence of later tradition seems to point toward the name of John, and only an even later interpretation of that data points to the identification of such a “John” with the like-named son of Zebedee.
The upshot of this review of possibilities is that none of them are conclusive. This in itself is intriguing. Why are we are not told in the text which of the disciples is the beloved one? Why is it that so few of the disciples (Judas Iscariot and Peter) can be completely ruled out from this list of possibilities? What is the point of so strongly underlining a relationship to Jesus while leaving the one who occupies so important a role unidentified?
Despite the inconclusive result of our search for the identity of the disciple Jesus loved, our inquiry has by no means been in vain. This review of the evidence and of the possibilities has at least produced from the text an array of strong relationships to Jesus. To this list, if we were to attempt to make it complete, we should have to add the special relationship to the sisters Mary and Martha as well as the bond between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene (19:25; 20:11–18) and even the Samaritan woman of 4:7–42. We obviously have a series of strong and special relationships, any one of which would be remarkable in itself. Indeed one of the characteristic features of this narrative in comparison to the others we find in the New Testament is that so much is made of strong personal ties. In the other Gospels, we have nothing comparable to the number and intensity of personal relationships between Jesus and individual followers. The picture we have of Jesus from the Fourth Gospel is of one who had a gift for friendship and who awoke in others a strong bonding of affection and loyalty.
Therefore, that among so many powerful relationships one is singled out as the man Jesus loved becomes all the more striking. What makes this relationship so special among so many other remarkable relationships? We are left again with the physical and emotional intimacy of lovers as the most likely way of understanding the distinctive character of this relationship. But this increasingly plausible interpretation of their relationship opens up a number of issues and questions to which we must turn if our interpretation is to be accepted.
1. This conclusion is true as well if we include the reference to “another disciple” who gets Peter into the trial of Jesus. Here, too, this “other disciple” cannot be the sole source for information regarding the trial since Peter is there; presumably also (if they are not the other disciple) Nicodemus and even Joseph of Arimathea should be there.
2. C. K. Barrett also recognizes this insignificance: “It is no special revelation which is accorded him but a plain statement of fact.” See The Gospel According to St. John, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), 447.
3. Raymond Brown, for example, suggests that “the claim to possess the witness of the Beloved Disciple enabled the Johannine Christians to defend their peculiar insights in Christology and ecclesiology.” The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 31.
4. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 483.
5. Ibid., 671–73, 684–85.
6. Among those later commentators who agree in rejecting Bultmann’s interpretation we may cite Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple, 31; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St John, vol. 3, trans. Cecily Hastings (London: Burns and Oates, 1982), 375; Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 116; and Ernst Haenchen, A Commentary on the Gospel of John, chapters 7–21, trans. Robert Funk (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 193.
7. Bultmann attributed this view to, among others, Dibelius and Loisy (in Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 484). But the commentators cited above (note 6) who reject Bultmann’s own hypothesis also reject this one.
8. This point is also noted by James N. Sanders in “Who Was the Disciple Jesus Loved?” Studies in the Fourth Gospel, 2d ed., ed. F. L. Cross (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1957), 72–82.
9. As far as I have been able to determine, the only traditional association of Andrew with the beloved disciple comes from the Muratorian Canon (a list of books received as authoritative by a Christian community perhaps from the late second century [cited by Sanders, p. 79]), which claims that the Gospel was written by “John, one of the disciples,” after it had been revealed to “Andrew, one of the apostles, that John should narrate all things in his own name as they called them to mind.” The text may be found in “Fragments of Caius,” trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1885), 603. This external evidence would concord quite well with the supposition that Andrew was the disciple Jesus loved and that he entrusted the task of writing to a certain John who, though a disciple (in the sense of one who sought to follow the way of Jesus), was not an apostle (in the sense of one who had been with Jesus in the beginning). This assessment would agree then with the scenario that the Gospel is based in some way on the witness of Andrew/beloved but that it receives its current form from another hand (a disciple named John who, however, is not the son of Zebedee). Only later, for church political reasons and to separate the Gospel forever from suspicion of heterodoxy, does the association of John the disciple or John the elder with John the son of Zebedee come into play. Curiously, Sanders does not raise the question of the possible connection between Andrew and the disciple loved by Jesus.
10. Oddly, those commentators who try to link the beloved to Jerusalem and thus connect him to the one who gains admittance to the trial for himself and Peter do not think of identifying Nicodemus with the beloved, although this connection would seem obvious on the basis of their presuppositions. Sanders, who argues for Lazarus as the most likely identity of the beloved, does suppose that the beloved was “a man of the same class as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea” (81), yet does not take the route of even entertaining the possibility that he was Nicodemus (or Joseph). He also cites (79–80) the tradition recalled by Eusebius of a certain Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus at end of the second century, that John, supposed to be the beloved, was or became a “priest wearing the petalon.” As Sanders notes, this comment may be simply a guess based on John 18:15.
11. We know from the other Gospels that the sons