BY WILLIAM T. ORR, JR.

You would think that in 2000 years, we could have figured out  just how many people named John appear in the New Testament. You would think.  But no, we still don’t know.

The image above, of course, is John Lennon of the Beatles.

Clearly, he is not one of the Johns in the New Testament, but there is a connection, as we shall see.

First, however, we will explore the New Testament and make an effort to sort, or at least identify, some of the people named John in the books of the New Testament.  A few of these are not particularly disputed by theologians and scholars but others remain quite the enigma.

We will begin simply and progress to the less explicable ones.

John the Baptist

Normally, the first John we would think of is the forerunner to Yeshua himself, John the Baptist. John the Baptist appears in all four canonical gospels. As the one who would come before the Messiah to “prepare the way,” John the Baptist plays a prominent role in the gospel stories.

John the Baptist lives in the wilderness, preaches of the coming of the savior, baptizes Yeshua in the river and finally is killed by Herod Antipas in about 30 CE.

Josephus writes that John the Baptist was extremely popular among the people and that large crowds came to hear him speak.  The Oxford Companion to the Bible lists several places in the gospels (Mark 1:5, Matthew 3:5, Mark 11:32, Luke 7:29, Acts 13:24), where “all the people came out to see him.”

John’s story is well known and there is little to indicate that he is confused with any of the other Johns mentioned in the New Testament.

John the Apostle/John the Evangelist

It seems that nothing in the Bible remains clear for very long and this business of Johns is no exception.

We know from the gospels that Yeshua called at least one man named John to be one of his disciples.  This John is the son of Zebedee and the brother of James.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theydidntteachmethat/2024/03/just-how-many-johns-are-there-in-the-new-testament/