John 21:21-23 Peter seeing him said to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?… The earliest recorded tradition respecting St. John had apparently sprung up, not like most of them after the Apostle's death, but during his lifetime, and professed to be founded on an express prediction of our Lord that "St. John should never die." In this case it was possible to confront the traditionary statement with the historical, and this chapter was added to the Gospel, apparently, to state the true fact that "Jesus said not unto him," &c. Whether a misunderstanding of our Lord's words was the sole origin of the tradition may be questioned; it is, perhaps, most likely to have been in the first instance occasioned partly by the Apostle's great age, and partly by the general expectation that our Lord's coming was near. Nor was the opinion without some ground of truth if we consider that the language in which our Lord's coming is identified, or at least blended with the images which equally describe the fall of Jerusalem. This last feeling, however, had evidently passed away before the time when the tradition assumed the particular shape specified in the text, and it now therefore took its ground on the supposed saying there referred to. The "coming of the Lord" was now to them, what it is to us, another expression for the end of all things; the next and natural process consequently was to limit the words to the new view. Yet neither the express caution of the Evangelist, nor the contradiction of the story by his death was sufficient entirely to eradicate it. The story of his being not dead but asleep in his grave at Ephesus was related to by persons who professed to have witnessed the motion of the dust by the supposed breath of the sleeper, and the notion that he was still living not only became a fixed article of popular belief in the Middle Ages, but has been revived from time to time by later enthusiasts, and is still partially commemorated in the Greek Church in the Feast of the Translation of the Body of St. John. Compare, amongst other instances the well-known story of the apparition of St. John to Edward the Confessor and the Ludlow pilgrims, and again to James IV., at Linlithgow, before the Battle of Flodden, the belief in Prester John in Central Asia, and the ancient legendary representations of the search for the body in the empty tomb. (Dean Stanley.) Parallel Verses KJV: Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?WEB: Peter seeing him, said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" |
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