Disciple Whom Jesus Loved - Reasons For Concealing The Identity By Name

Reasons For Concealing The Identity By Name

Theories about the reference usually include an attempt to explain why this anonymizing idiom is used at all, rather than stating an identity.

Suggestions accounting for this are numerous. One common proposal is that the author concealed his name due simply to modesty, even though calling him/herself the "beloved" disciple may not sound that humble. Another is that concealment served political or security reasons, made necessary by the threat of persecution or embarrassment during the time of the gospel's publication. The author may have been a highly placed person in Jerusalem who was hiding his affiliation with Christianity (see above reference to Richard Bauckham). Capper (see above reference) suggests that anonymity would have been appropriate for one living the withdrawn life of an ascetic, and that under the unnamed disciples of the Gospel may be present either the Beloved Disciple himself or others under his guidance who out of the humility of their ascetic commitment hid their identity or subsumed their witness under that of their spiritual master.

Martin L. Smith, a member of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, writes that the author of John's gospel may have deliberately obscured the identity of the Beloved Disciple in order that readers of the gospel may better identify with the disciple's relationship with Jesus:

Perhaps the disciple is never named, never individualized, so that we can more easily accept that he bears witness to an intimacy that is meant for each one of us. The closeness that he enjoyed is a sign of the closeness that is mine and yours because we are in Christ and Christ is in us."

The idea of a beloved or special disciple is sometimes evoked in analysis of other texts from the New Testament Pseudepigrapha. In the Gospel of Thomas, Judas Thomas is the disciple taken aside by Jesus. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas Iscariot is favored with privy enlightening information and set apart from the other apostles. Another more recent interpretation draws from the Secret Gospel of Mark, existing only in fragments. In this interpretation, two scenes from Secret Mark and one at Mark 14:51-52 feature the same young man or youth who is unnamed but seems closely connected to Jesus. As the account in Secret Mark details a raising from the dead very similar to Jesus' raising of Lazarus in John 11:38-44, the young man is identified as Lazarus and associated with the Beloved Disciple.