► Listen on Amazon
► Listen on Apple
► Listen on Spotify
► Listen on YouTube
You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
David Capes
Hi everybody. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” I’ve got a great guest today. Dr. Ben Witherington III is my guest, and he’s my guest because he is coming to the Lanier Theological Library to do a lecture in April of 2026. More about that in just a second, but Ben Withington is the Amos Professor of New Testament and for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. And he serves on the doctoral faculty at the University of St. Andrews. He’s going to be here at Lanier on April the 18th, 2026, so as we say in Texas, “get here if you can.” And he’s going to be lecturing on a topic, “Beloved but Unknown.” Dr. Ben Witherington, thanks for being with us. Good to see you, my friend.
Ben Witherington III
Good to see you and good to be with you.
David Capes
I am excited. You’ve been to Lanier before, but it’s changed a lot since you were here last. We’ve got more of your books for you to sign, and we’ve got more buildings for you to walk through and see and to lecture in. The title of your lecture is “Beloved but Unknown”, and I’m excited to hear what you’re going to say about it. The fourth Gospel, that’s what we’ll be talking about. So where is this lecture going to go? We want to give a bit of a preview. Give us a little bit of what you’re going to be talking about, because we want folks to see and hear your lecture. And for those who can’t be here, maybe they can stream it live. So what will you be talking about?
Ben Witherington III
Well, first of all, basic biblical principle, the internal evidence in the Gospel itself, is primary. Later testimonies by church fathers or other later kinds of evidence, clearly are secondary. When you do the evaluation that way and let the New Testament itself present itself, what you discover is that there’s no references to the beloved disciple in the first 10 chapters of John. And there’s no reference to anybody named John in the first 10 chapters except John the Baptizer. Please don’t call him John the Baptist. He was not a Protestant, you know!
And he’s the only John mentioned in the whole of John 1– 20. Zippo, about John, son of Zebedee. There are no references to the Zebedees before the appendix in John 21, when they are going on a fishing trip with Peter, after the resurrection. When you look at the internal evidence, and if you ask the question, first of all, who is the author of this Gospel, there’s just no reason to think John, the son of Zebedee, is. Because none of the special Zebedee stories are in the fourth Gospel. Not the calling from the fishing nets. Not that they were present to watch Jairus’ daughter be raised from the dead. Not that they were at the Mount of Transfiguration. Not they asked for the box seats in the kingdom from Jesus. Not the nickname “Boanerges”. Not they fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane. Zippo of those stories show up in the fourth Gospel.
And yet, whoever this person is, is an eyewitness at the cross with Mary and two other women when Jesus dies. Now, this is important. Now the other part of the evidence, that’s the non-John part of the evidence, is that we have a clear statement in John 11:1-4, that the beloved disciple is, in fact, Lazarus. The sisters write to Jesus and say, “Get here quick.” Our brother, Lazarus, the one whom you love, is very ill. We’re going to call him the BD, the beloved disciple from now on. It is not an accident that all of the references to the BD, after John 11, that phrase the beloved disciple, occurs again and again and again and again and again, from John 12 all the way through John 21.
David Capes
That’s just coincidence. That’s just coincidence, Ben!
Ben Witherington III
Yeah, right! How many Christians believe things in the Gospel are coincidence. I don’t think so. So that’s the basic thing. The Beloved Disciple is a disciple of Jesus. He’s a Judean disciple, not a Galilean disciple. He’s the source of this material. There is somebody named John involved with it. He took the testimony of the beloved disciple and put it together in the form of a gospel. My best bet is that this is John the Elder, or possibly John of Patmos. Or they may be the same person. There may be just one John between those two. But here’s the interesting bit. In recent days, in the last 20 years, a papyrus has been found. That’s one of the missing parts of Papias’ wonderful exegesis of the sayings of our Lord. And very clearly in this papyrus, it says that like his brother James, John Zebedee, died early from martyrdom. He was martyred like his brother. Jesus predicted, that. “Can you be baptized with the same baptism I’m about to face?” And of course, they say yes, we are able, strong, brave and true. They were not so able. They were martyred later.
So, we don’t have any evidence that John the son of Zebedee, had anything to do with this Gospel. His personal testimony is not there. He didn’t live long enough to make it into the 90s when this Gospel was put together. But what we do have is evidence that John the Elder was personally interviewed by Papias, and he says this. “We did not meet John the Apostle, but we looked at what he said.” Past tense. “But we did interview John the elder and what he is saying”.
So you know, here’s the scenario. If he’s John of Patmos, he’s come back from exile in 96 AD when Domitian died. Because that’s the way Roman exile worked. When an emperor sends you off into exile, you get a “get out of jail free” card when the emperor dies. So he will have come back to Ephesus. And what happened when he did was he gathered up the written testimony of the beloved disciple, and did some editing. Well, there are 50. Count them, 50 parenthetical references or explanations or expansions in the Gospel of John. This is compared to about seven in Mark. The next closest is Matthew, and that’s around 20.
There’s a huge amount of explanation. Every single pea-picking Aramaic or Hebrew word is explained. And guess why? Because the audience of John doesn’t know didley squat about Hebrew or Aramaic.
This audience does not know where the Pool of Siloam is, where the pool of Bethesda is, what the meaning of those words are, and so what we have is an editor who’s also a contributor to this Gospel named John. And I don’t think there’s any problem with the idea that there’s a John who put all this together. The question is, which John is it? And the best candidate is it’s the same guy who wrote II John and III, John the Elder. That’s the best candidate. And maybe he’s the same person as the John of Patmos, the visionary. I write about that as well in this new book I’m doing.
David Capes
Now, what’s the title of that book?
Ben Witherington III
The running title now is “The Mystery of the Beloved Disciple and the Majesty of the Johannine Christ.” What I’m trying to do is not just promote the theory that the beloved disciple is Lazarus. I’m trying to show how all of this literature, the two epistles, the sermon called I John, the gospel and the book of Revelation are all intertwined with each other because they all have the same final editor.
I’ll give you an example. Notice what three titles of Christ are introduced in John 1. He’s God, He’s the Word [LOGOS] and He’s the lamb. Okay, well, guess what? Those are the three major titles of Christ in the book of Revelation. In fact, there are 28 references to Christ as the lamb in the book of Revelation. Wow, that’s a lot. When you put all that together, it looks like this body of literature we call the Johannine literature, was meant to work together and meant to be seen together because it comes from the same orientation.
It’s why, for example, there are no Galilean miracles in John’s Gospel except the feeding of the 5,000 and walking on water, tandem. Otherwise, none of the miracles that are in the earlier Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, show up in the Gospel of John. Well, that’s passing strange. If this is written by a Galilean eyewitness, that dog won’t hunt, as we say in North Carolina. That theory won’t work. It just will not work. But isn’t it wonderful that we have three Gospels from a Galilean orientation and one from an orientation of Judean disciples of Jesus? Now, that’s fantastic.
David Capes
That’s a very interesting kind of feature.
Ben Witherington III
And it gives you a more comprehensive view of Jesus, because, on the one hand, the most common miracle in our earliest Gospel, Mark, in the early chapters is exorcism, and the most common thing that comes out of Jesus’s mouth is parables. We have 30 some parables in the synoptic gospels. Guess how many parables we have in John. Zero. Guess how many exorcisms we have in John. Zero. This suggests Jesus operated in a different way in Judea and Samaria than he did in Galilee. He approached his tasks differently. And we would not know that Jesus went up to the festivals multiple times, if we didn’t have the Gospel of John. Because you just read Mark, and it looks like he went once at the end of his life, and it didn’t go so well.
To me, this fills out the picture of the ministry of Jesus. And we now know there’s this family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus that Jesus loved. Now that’s great, but there’s more to this story. Hasn’t it struck anybody as odd that you have three adult children living together, and none of them are married? Why? Why is that? Well, in Mark 14 the anointing of Jesus by a woman in a house in Bethany was in the house of Simon the leper. Hello, Simon the leper. Maybe, not only did the father die of Hansen’s Disease, but maybe Lazarus also died of Hansen’s disease as well. And this is why none of those siblings were married. Nobody wanted to go near that family. No one wanted anything to do with them.
