Was the apostle John really the author of John?
John the Apostle (about 6–100 AD), son of Zebedee and brother of James, ranks among Jesus’s Twelve and is often called the Beloved. Tradition credits him with the Gospel, three epistles and Revelation—the Johannine works—yet most modern scholars conclude he wrote none of them.
John was raised among Jewish fishing folk who worked the Galilean lake. Church tradition names his mother Salome, and some traditions make her the sister of Jesus's mother Mary, which would make John and his elder brother James cousins of Jesus. The synoptic gospels say Jesus called the two brothers from their father's boat and nicknamed them Boanerges, sons of thunder. Some also identify John as one of the two followers of John the Baptist who left him to spend a day with Jesus.
With Peter and James he formed an inner circle, the only disciples present at the raising of Jairus's daughter, the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Jesus sent Peter and John ahead to prepare the Last Supper. After Pentecost he stood beside Peter at the healing of a lame man in the Temple, went to prison with him, and visited new converts in Samaria. Paul later named John, Peter and James the Just as the three pillars of the Jerusalem church. James was martyred in AD 44, and tradition holds that John outlived him by more than fifty years.
Whether John is the gospel's unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved is debated. That figure appears six times, only in John's gospel: leaning on Jesus at the Last Supper, standing at the cross where Jesus entrusts his mother to him, outrunning Peter to the empty tomb, and joining the catch of 153 fish. None of the other gospels places any of the Twelve at the crucifixion.
Doubts about authorship are old, going back to around AD 200. In the 4th century Eusebius reported that the gospel and first epistle were widely accepted as the apostle's, while the second and third letters were disputed and not read in some churches. Most scholars today agree that one writer produced all three epistles.
Source: John the Apostle
