St. John the Evangelist
Companion material. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
By long tradition, the Fourth Gospel is attributed to St. John the Evangelist, identified with the disciple called in the text the one whom Jesus loved, and placed in his later years at Ephesus in Asia Minor. The Gospel itself names no author. Attribution has been argued over since the second century and is argued over still, and we state the tradition as tradition rather than as settled fact.
What the text shows plainly is a writer working at a distance from the events, in Greek, for an audience that needed Jewish customs and Aramaic words explained to them.
Why it was written
It is the last of the four Gospels by almost every reckoning, and it behaves like a book written after the others were already circulating. Where Matthew, Mark and Luke mostly recount what happened, John is occupied with what it meant. Long discourses replace short sayings. Seven signs replace a crowd of miracles. The pace is slower, and the argument is deliberate.
Why we include it, and why
Our edition of Black Beauty closes with annotations drawing on the horse imagery in Revelation, using passages from the Douay-Rheims Bible as historical reading. These include the white horse in Revelation 19 and the four horsemen in Revelation 6. St. John appears in this directory because of those passages.
Black Beauty speaks to adults as well as children. Its portrayal of work, endurance, cruelty, and kindness carries a weight grown readers recognize through their own experience. The closing annotations offer another perspective on the horse after Anna Sewell's story.
How to read it
Read Black Beauty first, straight through, as a story. Then turn to the annotations at the end of the book, reading the Douay-Rheims passages from Revelation as historical reading alongside the novel, rather than as part of Sewell's original narrative.
Consider how the horse appears in each text: as the narrator of a life of work and endurance in the novel, and as a figure in the imagery of Revelation. Adults and younger readers can explore those differences without treating the two works as saying the same thing.
Pair it with
- Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, the book it accompanies, and the reason it is here.
- St. Thomas Aquinas, for a reader who wants the reasoning set out in order rather than in parable.
- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, which takes the same material inward and asks what it demands of the reader personally.
The works traditionally attributed
- The Gospel of John.
- The First, Second and Third Epistles of John, three letters, the first substantial and the other two very short.
- The Book of Revelation, attributed to a John of Patmos. Scholarly opinion on whether one author wrote all five is genuinely divided. We do not resolve it here.
General reference on John the Evangelist. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.