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The Beloved Disciple: Whose Witness Validates the Gospel of John?

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Charlesworth's careful study on the identity of the Beloved Disciple (BD) has been grossly under-rated by many of the other Amazon.com reviewers. While this monograph is anything but a influential and momentous study, it serves as a nice introduction to the sub-field of the identity and role of the BD in the Gospel of John. Charlesworth does a great job of introducing the problems and perplexities of the BD as well as offers a great overview of various speculations on the identity of the BD throughout history.

Some criticisms of the work are indeed justified. Charlesworth theorizes that Thomas Didymus was the Beloved Disciple of John and offers marginal and controversial evidence to support his claim. This is a rather liberal view for the BD and one that many conservative scholars (Brown, Dodd) would probably have rejected. In spite of this, "The Beloved Disciple: Whose Witness Validates the Gospel of John?" is a great read and is highly recommended.

This book is an excellent survey of the scholarly research that has gone into the attempt to identify the anonymous Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel. However, he fails to provide compelling arguments in support of his own thesis that the Beloved Disciple was the apostle Thomas. The chief reason for rejecting Thomas as the Beloved Disciple is MOTIVE. Charlesworth does not provide a plausible motivational hypothesis in support of his idea that the writer(s) of the Fourth Gospel concealed the identity of St. Thomas as the primary source behind this biblical text. The question here should be: "Why?" Thomas was one of the Twelve Apostles. Why would the writer(s) of the Gospel not be willing to identify one of the Twelve as their eyewitness source? ...Indeed, after careful consideration it is difficult to understand why they would have needed to suppress the identity of any MALE disciple mentioned in the Gospel. In his introduction to this book, Charlesworth says the following: "It is obviously inconceivable that the Beloved Disciple might have been a woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene, because from the cross Jesus told his mother, 'Behold your son'"(5-6). In quickly dismissing the possibility that the Beloved Disciple may have been a woman, Charlesworth probably rejected ideas that are more plausible than his own. The motive for concealing the identity of the Beloved Disciple may have been precisely because that disciple was indeed female, perhaps even Mary Magdalene. In fact, the recently discovered ancient Gnostic documents of the Nag Hammadi Library repeatedly refer to Mary Magdalene as the disciple whom Jesus loved the most. The Fourth Gospel was written at a time when the testimony of women was not considered to be very credible by the patriarchal power structure. Perhaps the reason for the anonymity of the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel was because the disciple was a woman and the final editor(s) of the text did not wish her gender to become an issue among possible detractors who would not accept their Gospel as credible if it was primarily based on the testimony of a woman. Charlesworth should have pursued this possibility rather than rejecting it outright with one sentence. There is a growing amount of research among many Scripture scholars which shows that women probably had more to do with the expansion of the early Church than traditional scholarship has led us to believe. The idea of a woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene, having been the Beloved Disciple may or may not actually be the case. But, it is a possibility that Charlesworth should have investigated. It is hardly "obviously inconceivable."

I agree completly with Charlesworth, about Thomas! Some people try to associate a women with the title of "disciple" but they forget the context where Jesus were living.

Charlesworth provides a detailed analysis of scholarship on the question of the identity of the mysterious "beloved disciple" in the gospel of John. After carefully anaysing each scholar's thesis, he lays a case for identifying Thomas as the beloved disciple. Unfortunatly, like most other scholars, he fails to consider the candidacy of Mary of Bethany, who fills the bill better than Thomas does. See Thomas W. Butler's LET HER KEEP IT: JESUS' ORDINATION OF MARY OF BETHANY, Quantum Leap Publisher (1998) for a careful study of Old and New Testament evidence to support the thesis that the beloved disciple of Jesus was a woman. Her identity was hidden because that fact was not acceptable to the established leaders in ancient Christian, Jewish and Greek culture.