Most of the images of St. John shows two men. A young John and an older John. There is every reason to believe he lived to a ripe old age of 106. (6 AD - 100 AD) Jesus would die between 30 AD and 33 AD depending on who one reads.
When an image of a young John is found he usually curly hair.
He is attributed to have written the Fourth Gospel. He was considered an evangelical. He was also said to have written the Apocalypse (AKA Revelations - It is a dream sequence of the Apostle John). He is also credited for three epistles in the Bible.
John has quite an ego as well. He states he is "the disciple whom Jesus loved." It is stated that was proved by at the Last Supper where he sat or reclined next to Jesus and he was present at the crucifixion and entrusted with protecting the Blessed Mother (of Jesus.)
It is stated he went to Rome to be martyred under the then emperor Domitian. But, escaped and banished to the island of Patmos. It was there he wrote the Apocalypse. After Domitian died in 96 AD, he returned to Ephesus (Ephesus was a city in eastern Turkey, otherwise known as East Rome and was one of the seven churches of Asia that are cited in the Book of Revelation). East Rome is the same as the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople (Modern day Istanbul) was the capital city of the Byzantine Empire.
John's writing are mostly known for their sense of charity. He was criticized at times for not teaching anything but charity. It was his belief charity was the Lord's commandment and until it was fulfilled he would speak of nothing else.
If Jesus was going to stop slavery within the Roman Empire and empower those unable to raise themselves to a sustainable life, he would require charity as a paramount importance in giving the poor a chance at a life from slavery. They were unable to pay Rome in any way. They received their food from the granaries (click here) of Rome only to serve the purpose of slave.
I am not a preacher or have studied a single book of the Bible for five years, but, Bishop Spong has.
June 11, 2013
By John Shelby Spong, Retired American Bishop of the Episcopal Church
...Among the conclusions (click here) that I have reached in my intensive five-year-long study of John's Gospel are these:
1) There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.
2) There is probably not a single word attributed to Jesus in this book that the Jesus of history actually spoke. This includes all the "I Am" sayings and all of the "Farewell Discourses."
3) Not one of the signs (the Fourth Gospel's word for miracles) recorded in this book was, in all probability, something that actually happened. This means that Jesus never changed water into wine, fed a multitude with five loaves and two fish or raised Lazarus from the dead.
4) Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history. This includes Nathaniel, who is introduced with great fanfare in chapter one and is treated in John's Gospel as one of "the Twelve," as well as the enigmatic character called by the Fourth Gospel "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who is introduced in Chapter 13 and who stars in this narrative from then on up to and including the resurrection event. Between those two "bookend" characters, we run into such well-known figures as Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman by the well, the man crippled for 38 years and the man born blind, none of whom has ever been mentioned before in any written Christian source and each of whom in all probability is nothing more than the literary creation of the author....
