John, son of Zebedee

John was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee, son of Zebedee and Salome and younger brother of James the Greater. With his brother he was called from the boat as Jesus passed along the lakeshore (Mar.1.19–20). Jesus nicknamed the pair “Boanerges, that is, sons of thunder” (Mar.3.17) — a label confirmed by their request to call down fire on a Samaritan village (Luk.9.54) and to sit at the right and left of Jesus in glory (Mar.10.37). With Peter and James, John formed the inner three apostles taken further than the rest at the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mar.5.37), the Transfiguration (Mar.9.2), and Gethsemane (Mar.14.33). The Fourth Gospel never names him but speaks five times of the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” traditionally identified as John; from the cross Jesus places his mother in this disciple’s care (Joh.19.26–27). After Pentecost he ministers in Jerusalem with Peter (Acts 3–4), is named with Peter and James as a “pillar” of the church (Gal.2.9), and according to second- and third-century tradition (Irenaeus, Polycrates, Eusebius) spent his last years at Ephesus and was exiled to Patmos under Domitian, where he received the apocalyptic visions of Revelation. He is traditionally the only apostle to die a natural death, in extreme old age, c. AD 100.