John was the son of Zebedee, a fisherman of Bethsaida or Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, and of Salome, who is named among the women at the cross (Matt. 27:56; Mark 15:40). His elder brother was the holy Apostle James the Greater, also called the son of Zebedee, who would be the first of the Twelve to be put to death (Acts 12:2). The synoptic gospels report the calling: the two brothers were mending their nets with their father when the Lord came along the shore and called them, and they left the nets and the boat and the hired servants and followed him at once (Matt. 4:21-22; Mark 1:19-20; Luke 5:10). The Lord gave them, together with Simon Peter, a Hebrew nickname which Saint Mark renders into Greek and translates: Boanerges, sons of thunder (Mark 3:17).

The two sons of Zebedee with Simon Peter formed the inner three of the Twelve. Together with Peter, John was present at the raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:37); at the Transfiguration upon Tabor (Matt. 17:1; Mark 9:2; Luke 9:28); and in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:37; Mark 14:33). At the Last Supper John was the one who leant on the Lord's breast and asked him who the traitor was (John 13:23-26). At the cross he received the Mother of the Lord from the Lord's own lips into his keeping, and from that hour took her into his own home (John 19:26-27). On the morning of the resurrection, hearing of the empty tomb, he ran with Peter to the sepulchre; he was the younger and outran the elder, but he waited at the door until Peter came up, and then they entered together (John 20:3-8). Five times in the Fourth Gospel John refers to himself in the third person, never by name, only as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'

After the Ascension and Pentecost, John appears in the Acts of the Apostles as the constant companion of Peter in the apostolic ministry at Jerusalem. They go up together to the temple at the ninth hour for prayer and there heal the lame man at the Gate Beautiful (Acts 3:1-10); they are arrested together by the Sanhedrin and witness Peter's bold speech before it (Acts 4:1-22); they are sent down together to Samaria to lay hands on the new believers there (Acts 8:14-17). When Saint Paul came up to Jerusalem fourteen years after his conversion to lay before the apostles the gospel he preached among the Gentiles, John was one of the three pillars he names: 'And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision' (Gal. 2:9, KJV).

The Acts of the Apostles does not follow John out of Jerusalem. The historical tradition places his removal to Asia Minor at some point after the death of his Mother (whom the Orthodox tradition reckons as her holy Dormition in Jerusalem), and certainly before the death of the Apostle Paul; from at least the time of Saint Polycarp of Smyrna, the see of John is Ephesus.

The earliest witness placing the Apostle at Ephesus is Polycrates of Ephesus himself, writing to Pope Victor c. AD 190 in the Quartodeciman controversy and preserved by Eusebius. Polycrates names John among the 'great lights' of Asia: 'and John, who reclined upon the Lord's breast, who was a priest wearing the petalon, and a martyr and a teacher; he has fallen asleep at Ephesus.' Saint Irenaeus, who as a boy knew Saint Polycarp who had been the personal disciple of John, says the same: 'and the church in Ephesus also, founded by Paul, with John continuing among them until the time of Trajan, is a true witness of the tradition of the apostles' (Against Heresies III.3.4).

Under the emperor Domitian, late in his reign and as part of his persecution of the Christians, John was banished. Tertullian (writing c. AD 200) reports the older Roman tradition: that John was plunged into a cauldron of boiling oil at Rome, before the Latin gate of the city, and came out unhurt; that for this he was sent into exile to the island of Patmos in the Aegean (De Praescriptione Haereticorum 36). The Western Church commemorates this episode on the eighth of May. On the island, the Apocalypse was given to him: 'I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet' (Rev. 1:9-10, KJV).

Saint Irenaeus, again, dates the visions of the Apocalypse precisely: 'It was seen no long time ago, almost in our own generation, towards the end of the reign of Domitian' (Against Heresies V.30.3). Eusebius is in full agreement (Hist. Eccl. III.18). The fourteenth year of Domitian, in which the chronicles place the banishment, corresponds to the Christian year 95. On the death of Domitian in 96, the Roman senate annulled his decrees, and John was released and returned to Ephesus, where he resumed the oversight of the churches of Asia.

The tradition of the Church has from the second century received as the work of the Apostle John five books of the New Testament: the Fourth Gospel, the First Epistle, the Second and Third Epistles, and the Apocalypse. The earliest witnesses to this five-fold attribution are unanimous in attaching all five to the Apostle who lived at Ephesus until the time of Trajan. Saint Irenaeus (Against Heresies III.1.1) names the Gospel and the Apocalypse as the work of the same John. Saint Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen all hold the same; Eusebius reports the position without dissent (Hist. Eccl. III.24).

An older and quieter question, however, was already raised at the dawn of the third century and concerned the Apocalypse alone. Papias of Hierapolis, a disciple of John's disciple Aristion, mentions in a passage preserved by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. III.39.4) two figures of whom he had heard: 'the elder John' and 'the Apostle John,' apparently distinguishing them. Saint Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century took this distinction up and proposed, on stylistic grounds, that the Apocalypse might be the work of a second John, an elder of Ephesus, and not of the Apostle (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. VII.25). The proposal has been debated since but has never displaced the older attribution; the Orthodox tradition has held the five-fold attribution intact. Purify follows the older tradition here, but does not pretend that the question of the elder has not been asked.

Clement of Alexandria, writing about AD 195, preserves a story of the Apostle's old age which Eusebius transmits at length (Hist. Eccl. III.23). After his return from Patmos, the Apostle was making the rounds of the churches of Asia, ordaining bishops and presbyters where needed. Coming to one city, he received from the new bishop the care of a beautiful young convert. Returning some years later, the Apostle asked after him; the bishop confessed in shame that the youth had abandoned the faith and gone off into the mountains to lead a band of robbers. The Apostle, very old by then, mounted a horse and rode out alone into the mountains to find the youth. When the robbers seized him and led him to their chief, the chief, recognising his old teacher, turned and tried to flee. The Apostle pursued him on foot, crying out to him to stop and to fear no shame, and at last embraced him and brought him back to the Church. The story is, Eusebius says, told as a witness to John's pastoral love.

Saint Jerome, in his Commentary on Galatians (vi.10), preserves another. In his very old age, when he could no longer walk to the assembly and was carried on a stretcher, the Apostle would say only one thing to the assembled brethren: 'Little children, love one another.' His disciples asked him why he always said this and nothing else; he answered that this was the commandment of the Lord, and that, if this was kept, it was enough. He died, the unbroken tradition has held, in great old age at Ephesus, the only one of the Twelve who was not martyred; the Greek Synaxarion fixes his repose on the twenty-sixth of September. The reckoning of the year is uncertain: Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. III.31) gives it as in the third year of Trajan, AD 100 or 101; some Byzantine chronographies as late as 105.

An old Christian curiosity, born of the Lord's last word concerning the Beloved Disciple, 'If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?' (John 21:22), held for some centuries that John had not died but had been translated alive. The Evangelist himself in the very next verse rebukes the rumour: 'Yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?' (John 21:23). The Orthodox tradition has received the verse and the reposed-at-Ephesus tradition together; what was rumoured in the Lord's time the Evangelist himself has corrected for his own.