Head of Saint John the Evangelist, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres;1820

“HE WAS was taken to Rome in the year 95, during the reign of the cruel Emperor Domitian, and cast into a kettle of boiling oil; by divine assistance he was preserved in a wonderful manner, but was banished by the emperor to the island of Patmos, now called Palmosa. Here he received those marvellous revelations, called the Apocalypse, which are included in the holy Scriptures, and foretell the fate of the Church of God. After the death of Domitian, St. John returned to Ephesus, where at the prayer of the faithful, and to refute the heresy which denied the divinity of Christ, he wrote his gospel, in which he soars like an eagle to the subject of Christ’s divinity, and proves it indisputably against the heresies of Ebion and Cerinthus.

“About the same time he also wrote his three epistles, wherein he urges especially the love of God and our neighbor. He constantly inculcated this love especially in his old age, and when he could no longer, because of the weakness of age, deliver long sermons, he would always, when he appeared among the faithful, repeat these words: “My children, love one another,” and when once asked why he said always the same thing, he replied: “This is the commandment of the Lord, and who observes this, does enough.” St. John believed he could not better repay the love which Christ had shown him, than by infusing into all hearts the holy love, which is the perfect bond and the mark of the true disciple of Jesus. St. John survived all the apostles; at last, in the year 100 of our era, Christ called to Himself by a placid death, the man of nearly a hundred years, whom He loved so much. The sepulchre of the saint, which is on a hill outside the city of Ephesus, has been glorified by many miracles.”

— “Instruction on the Feats of St. John the Apostle,” Rev. Leonard Goffine, 1880

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