Epistles of John - The Preterist Archive

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ST JOHN THE APOSTLE, AND HIS WRITINGS.
through to the last extremes. Irenaeus (User. 3, 3 ; comp.
Euseb. 3, 28 ; 4, 14) relates, as received from Polycarp, that
St John, when he once met the Gnostic Cerinthus in a bath,
instantly left the place ; fearing that the building would fall
down in which such an enemy of the truth was found. He
was—even in his natural temperament— a man who was altogether
that which he was ; a man who could only have been
altogether a Christian, or altogether a devil.
In St John, grace
celebrated a silent, and permanent, and decided victory over
the natural corruption. He had never moved in contradictories.
He had been from earliest youth piously trained ; for his mother,
Salome (Mark xvi. 1 ; Matt. xx. 20), belonged to the circle of
those few souls who found their consolation as true Israelites in
the promises of the Old Covenant, and ayIio longed for the
coming of the Messiah. Salome was one of those women who
ministered of their substance to the Lord, who had not where
to lay His head (Luke viii. 3) ; she did not leave Him when
He hung upon the cross (Mark xv. 40) ; and it was her high
distinction that the Saviour put her son in His own place, as
the son and sustainer of His mother Mary (the bosom-friend
of Salome). To such a mother was St John born — probably
in Bethsaida, 1
at least in its neighbourhood— and trained up in
the fear of God and hope of Israel. The family was not without
substance ; for Zebedee had hired servants for his fishing
trade (Mark i. 20), Salome ministered to Jesus, St John possessed
ra iBia, a dwelling (John xix. 17), and was personally
known in the house of the high-priest (John xviii. 15).
As soon as the Baptist came into trouble, St John adhered
to him with all the energy of his receptive inwardness. We
see from John iii. 27-36, that the Evangelist had formed the
peculiar style which distinguishes him from all the other New-
Testament writers— a style strong, concise, clear, sententious,
and ever reminding of the Old- Testament prophetic diction
under the express influence of the Baptist, that last and great
prophet ; not so much, however, appropriating the Baptist's to
himself, as constructing his own style, under the Baptist's influence,
in harmony with the intuitional Hebrew character of his
1
Chrysostom and others mention Bethsaida with confidence as the place
of his birth, resting upon the passages John i. 44, Luke v. 9. But those
passages do not speak with absolute precision.