by Lorenzo Bianchi
John was martyred in Rome. The places where he passed through the city still testify today to his faithfulness, but also to the Lord's predilection.
SAccording to what ancient sources tell us, John, the favorite of Jesus and brother of James the Greater, was the only one of the apostles who did not die by suffering martyrdom, but by natural death, at a venerable age.
After Jesus' ascension into heaven, the Acts of the Apostles show him next to Peter on the occasion of the healing of the cripple in the Temple of Jerusalem and then in the speech to the Sanhedrin, after which he was imprisoned with Peter. In 53 John is still in Jerusalem: Paul in fact names him (Gal 2, 9) together with Peter and James as one of the "pillars" of the Church. But around 57 Paul mentions only James the Less in Jerusalem; therefore John is no longer there, having moved to Ephesus, as the ancient sources unanimously testify, among which it will be enough to cite, for all, Irenaeus (Against heresies, III, 3, 4): «The Church of Ephesus, which Paul founded and in which John remained until the time of Trajan, is a truthful witness to the tradition of the apostles».
John's stay in Ephesus, where he wrote the Gospel (according to what Irenaeus still states), was interrupted, as the same ancient sources tell us, by the persecution suffered under Domitian (emperor from 81 to 96), probably around the year 95 Here comes the tradition, also reported by many ancient authors, of his journey to Rome and his death sentence in a terracotta jar filled with boiling oil, from which he miraculously emerged unharmed. The oldest source that tells us about it is Tertullian, around the year 200: «If you then go to Italy, you will find Rome, from where we too can draw the authority of the apostles. How happy is that Church, to which the apostles poured out the entire doctrine together with their blood, where Peter is configured to the Lord in the passion, where Paul is crowned with the same death as John the Baptist, where the apostle John, immersed without suffer injury in boiling oil, he is condemned to exile on an island" (The prescription against heretics, 36). Another testimony is that of Jerome, who at the end of the XNUMXth century writes: «John ended his life with a natural death. But if we read the ecclesiastical histories we learn that he too was placed, because of his testimony, in a cauldron of boiling oil, from which he emerged, as an athlete, to receive the crown of Christ, and immediately afterwards he was relegated to the the island of Patmos. We will then see that he did not lack the courage of martyrdom and that he drank the cup of testimony, equal to that which the three children drank in the fiery furnace, even if the persecutor did not shed his blood" (Commentary on the Gospel according to Matthew, 20, 22).
The ancient Christian sources on the martyrdom of John in Rome are strengthened by some recent studies (in particular those by the ancient historian Ilaria Ramelli) which have also found traces of the story in contemporary texts by pagan writers. For example, the poet Juvenal (early 2nd century) recounts in his 4th Satire that the Senate was summoned by the emperor Domitian to decide what to do with an enormous fish that came from far away and was brought as a gift to the emperor. This fish, in which the allusion to Christ but also to the figure of the apostle John can be recognised, was destined by the Roman Senate to be cooked in a deep pan in boiling oil.
The place that tradition assigns to the martyrdom suffered by John in Rome is located near Porta Latina, within the walls of the Aurelian Walls; there stands the small octagonal temple of San Giovanni in Oleo, whose current structures date back to 1509 but which must have been present (we do not know whether in this form, and whether it was originally dedicated to the pagan cult of Diana) certainly from a period prior to the construction of the nearby church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, which dates back to the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496).
Eusebius of Caesarea, an author from the time of Constantine (4th century), tells us that then by Domitian John «was condemned to confinement on the island of Patmos because of the testimony given to the divine Word» (Ecclesiastical history, III, 18, 1), and takes this news from the words of John himself in the Apocalypse, where the apostle says of himself that he was deported "because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Rev 1, 9 ). There, on that island of the Sporades about seventy kilometers from Ephesus, John writes the Apocalypse.
After the death of Domitian in 96, the apostle returns to Ephesus, as Eusebius again testifies (Ecclesiastical history, III, 23, 1), perhaps died in 104 and was buried there. Around 190 Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, in a letter addressed to Pope Victor says: «Even John, the one who abandoned himself on the chest of the Lord, who was a priest and carried the banner, a martyr [here perhaps in the sense of witness] and master, lies in Ephesus" (the passage is quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history, V, 24, 2).
His tomb, still visible today, is located in an underground burial chamber on Ayasuluk Hill, one and a half kilometers from ancient Ephesus. At the beginning of the 4th century, a quadrangular martyrion was built above it, named in the Itinerary of the pilgrim Egeria (4th-5th century); a cruciform church was built around it about a century later; in the 6th century the emperor Justinian had a grandiose basilica built in its place. John's tomb came to be located in the crypt under the altar. After the basilica was destroyed by earthquakes and looting, its imposing ruins, the subject of various archaeological research and restorations, have recently been partially raised.