John the Presbyter

John the Presbyter ("the Elder") is an obscure figure of the early Church who appears in the fragments of Saint Papias of Hierapolis as one of the author's sources. The sources consulted show no canonization and no service for him; he appears here as a person of the apostolic age, not as a saint with a feast.

Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the first half of the second century, wrote an "Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord" in five books, now lost, preserved in quotations in Irenaeus and Eusebius of Caesarea. In one fragment, kept by Eusebius, Papias says that he asked those who had come from the elders what Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, Matthew or other disciples of the Lord had said, and what "Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord" say, since he preferred the living voice to books.

Eusebius is the first to distinguish him clearly from the Apostle John, son of Zebedee; on his view there were two persons, and the Presbyter stood at the origin of the Johannine community of Ephesus. Other scholars, from 1831 on, see only one person in the text. Some exegetes held him to be the author of the Gospel of John or of the epistles, but the hypothesis no longer has wide support. He would have lived between the years 50 and 100.