Joannes (444) Presbyter, a shadowy personage of the sub-apostolic age, the reasons for belief in his existence being solely derived from an inference drawn by Eusebius from language used in a passage of Papias. In the middle of the 3rd cent. Dionysius of Alexandria (Eus. H. E. vii. 25) had maintained on critical grounds that the author of the fourth gospel and of the Catholic epistle could not also have been the author of the Apocalypse. Dionysius takes for granted that the author of the gospel was John the apostle, and has no difficulty in conceding that the name of the author of the Apocalypse was also John, since the writer himself says so; but urges that he never claims to be the apostle. He calls himself simply John, without adding that he was the disciple whom Jesus loved, or who leaned on our Lord's breast, or the brother of James, or in any way forcing us to identify him with the son of Zebedee. Now, there were many Johns, and it is said that there were two tombs in Ephesus, each called John's. Except in the statement last made, Dionysius does not pretend to have found any actual trace of any John of the apostolic age besides John the apostle and John Mark. His argument is merely that if we have good critical reasons for believing the authors of the gospel and of the Apocalypse to be distinct, the fact that both bore the name John does not force us to identify them. Some 75 years later Eusebius found historic evidence for regarding as a fact what Dionysius had suggested as a possibility. He produces from the preface to the work of Papias an extract, for a fuller discussion of which see .
What concerns us here is that Papias, speaking of his
care in collecting oral traditions of the apostolic
times, says, "on any occasion when a
person came in my way, who had been a follower
of the elders, I would inquire about the
discourses of the elders—what was said by
Andrew, or by Peter, or by Philip, or by
Thomas or James, or by John or Matthew or
any other of the Lord's disciples, and what
Aristion and the Elder John, the disciples of
the Lord say" (Lightfoot's trans.). Eusebius
points out that as the name John occurs here
twice: the first time in a list of apostles, no
doubt representing John the apostle; the
second time in a different list, after the name
of Aristion and with the title elder prefixed, it must represent a different person. Thus the John whose traditions Papias several times records is the elder, not the apostle. We find thus, remarks Eusebius, that "the account of those is true who have stated that two persons in Asia had the same name, and that there were two tombs in Ephesus, each of which, even to the present time, bears the name of John." "It is likely that the second (unless we allow that it was, as some would have it, the first) beheld the revelation ascribed to John" (H. E. iii. 39). Although Eusebius does not here name Dionysius of Alexandria, he plainly had in mind that passage of his writings which he gives at length elsewhere. The ambiguous way in which he speaks of the Apocalypse shews that his personal inclination was to pronounce it non-apostolical, but that he was kept in check by the weight of authority in its favour. The silence of Eusebius indicates that the other passages in Papias where John was mentioned contained no decisive indications what John was intended.
Modern writers have not been unanimous in
their judgment on this criticism of Eusebius. Several reject it, judging Papias to be mentioning one John twice. So Milligan (Journal Sac. Lit. Oct. 1867), Riggenbach (Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. xiii. 319), Zahn (Stud. und Krit. 1866, p. 650, Acta Johannis, 1880, p. cliv.). But a far more powerful array of critics endorses the conclusion of Eusebius e.g. Steitz (Stud. and Krit. 1868, p. 63), Lightfoot (Contemp. Rev. Aug. 1875, p. 379), Westcott (N. T. Canon. p. 69); while less orthodox critics with one consent base their theories with confidence on John the Elder being as historical as SS. Peter or Paul.