may have been the work of teaching, organizing, ex- horting the churches of Judrea. His fulfilment of the solemn charge intrusted to him may have led him to a life of loving and reverent thought rather than to one of conspicuous activity. We may, at all events, feel sure that it was a time in which "the natural elements of his character, with aU their fieiy energy, became purified and mellowed, rising step by step to that high serenity which we find perfected in the closing portion of his fife. Here, too, we may, without much hesitation, accept the traditions of the Church as recording a his- toric fact when they ascribe to him a life of celibacy (TertuU. De Monoy. c. xiii). The absence of his name from 1 Cor. ix, 5 tends to the same conclusion. It har- monizes with all we know of his character to think of his heart as so absorbed in the higher and diviner lo\'e that there was no room left for the lower and the human. 8. Sequel of his Career. — The traditions of a later age come in, with more or less show of likelihood, to fill up the great gap which separates the apostle of Jerusalem from the bishop of Ephesus. It was a natural conjec- ture to suppose that he remained in Judaea till the death of the Virgin released him from his trust. When this took place we can only conjecture. The hypothesis of Baronius and Tillemont, that the Virgin accompanied him to Ephesus, has not even the authority of tradition (Lampe, i, 51). There are no signs of his being at Je- rusalem at the time of Paul's last visit (Acts xxi). The pastoral epistles set aside the notion that he had come to Ephesus before the work of the apostle of the Gen- tiles was brought to its conclusion. Out of many con- tradictory statements, fixing his departure under Claud- ius, or Nero, or as late even as Domitian, we have hardly any data for doing more than rejecting the two ex- tremes. Lampe fixes A.D. GG, when Jerusalem was be- sieged by the Roman forces under Cestius, as the most probable date. Nor is it certain that his work as an apostle was transferred at once from Jerusalem to Eph- esus. A tradition current in the time of Augustine (Qiicesf. Ecang. ii, 19), and embodied in some MSS. of the New Test., represented the 1st Epistle of John as addressed to the Parthians, and so far implied that his apostolic work had brought him into contact with tliera. In the earlier tradition which made the apostles for- mally partition out the world known to them. Parthia falls to the lot of Thomas, while John receives Procon- sidar Asia (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii, 1). In one of the legends connected with the Apostles' Creed, Peter con- tributes the first article, .lohn the second; but the tradi- tion appears Avith great variations as to time and order (comp. Pseudo-August. Serm. ccxl, ccxli). W^hen the form of the aged disciple meets us again, in the twilight of the apostolic age, we are still left in great doubt as to the extent of his work and the circumstances of his out- ward life. Assuming the authorship of the Epistles and the Revelation to be his, the facts which the New Test, writings assert or imply are: (1) that, having come to Ephesus, some persecution, local or general, drove him to Patmos (Rev. i, 9) ; (2) that the seven churches, of which Asia was the centre, were special objects of his solicitude (Rev. i, 11); that in his work he had to en- counter men who denied the truth on wOiich his faith rested (1 John iv, 1 ; 2 John 7), and others who, with a railing and malignant temper, disputed his authority (3 John 9, 10). If to this we r.dd that he must have out- lived all, or nearly all, of those who had been the friends and companions even of his maturer years — that this lingering age gave strength to an old imagination that his Lord had promised him immortality (John xxi, 23) — that, as if remembering the actual words which had been thus perverted, the longing of his soul gathered itself up in the cry, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus" (Rev. xxii, 20) — that from some who spoke with authority he received a solemn attestation of the confidence they re- posed in him (John xxi, 24)— we have stated all that has any claim to the character of historical truth. The picture which tradition tills up for us has the merit of
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