What does it all mean?
This is where the archeology has been found.
Oh, hi how are you?
Look at that.
I need a planter.
A shrine to a bellybutton.
Is this a rock of salt?
Look at that!
No one gets into this place?
Whoa, don't take me too far!
Now that's naked archeology.
[theme music]
[SIMCHA] He's considered by some
to be the most important figure in the Gospels
after Jesus. The Gospels themselves say
that he was Jesus' favourite.
It was said that he would not die
until the advent of the kingdom of God.
And the secret of his identity is the central mystery
of the novel "The Da Vinci Code."
And yet no one knows his identity.
He's known only as the Beloved Disciple.
People may be surprised to find out
that this Beloved Disciple appears
only in the Gospel of John
and only some three or four times.
So maybe by trying to unravel
a two thousand year old mystery
and looking at each instance
where the Beloved Disciple appears,
we can try to figure out who is the Beloved Disciple.
[SIMCHA] So who are the suspects?
He should be one of Jesus' Twelve Disciples.
The most obvious is John.
For almost two thousand years,
scholars and theologians assumed
that John was the Beloved
because he was the author of the Gospel,
and he was simply too modest to identify himself
as Jesus' favourite.
Recently, however, scholars have concluded
that the title of the Gospel was probably added later,
so it's unlikely that John was the author.
This has thrown a shroud
back over the identity of the Beloved Disciple.
I asked Professor James Charlesworth
what the Gospel does tell us
about the mysterious unnamed Disciple.
Where does it in the text-
where do we know the Beloved Disciple from?
How many times does he appear?
What does he do with each scene?
What is he doing?
Okay.
He appears for the first time
as the disciple whom Jesus loved, that is,
the Beloved Disciple in Chapter
at the Last Supper, and he is just to the right of Jesus.
The next time he appears, he's at the foot of the cross,
and Jesus commissions him:
"Son, behold your mother."
And then the next scene is
when he races with Peter to the tomb;
he gets there first.
The Beloved Disciple appears, then, only three times.
That's right.
At the last supper.
At the cross, and at the open grave.
[SIMCHA] So who could the Beloved Disciple be?
Some have suggested Judas Iscariot,
the man who betrayed Jesus.
But the novel the Da Vinci Code proposes
the most controversial candidate for
"the Disciple whom Jesus Loved": Mary Magdalene.
Although she wasn't a disciple,
some older traditions do suggest
she married Jesus and had a child with him.
Well what's wrong with that,
there are three passages in John
where the Beloved Disciple appears
and the second one he's at the cross
and Jesus says to the Beloved Disciple
"son behold your mother".
Well now we have a problem.
Is Mary Magdalene really a male? and so...
Oh you mean when he says "son"
he's addressing the Beloved Disciple.
Yes. So Mary Magdalene disappears.
And then people say how about Judas,
why not Judas?
At the Last Supper he's to the left of Jesus
and according to the Gospel of John
he's a powerful man.
But he cannot be the Beloved Disciple
because Judas is on the left,
the Beloved Disciple is on the right,
so Judas can't be in both places.
So now we're left with the question- who could it be?
[SIMCHA] If I'm going to answer that question
I need to see the places where the events took place.
The Gospel of John is clear
that the Beloved Disciple makes his dramatic first appearance
at the Last Supper where he's described resting his head
on Jesus' chest.
And a sixteen hundred year old tradition points to this
as the place where the Last Supper occurred.
This isn't the building, it's this building not that one.
[SICHA] Although most of the building was destroyed
when the Romans flattened Jerusalem in ,
the lower walls are still made up of stones
from the time of Jesus.
The second floor was rebuilt and dates
to almost a thousand years ago.
Still, some scholars believe it was the headquarters
for the early followers of Jesus,
including the Beloved Disciple.
Professor James Tabor showed me the building.
This is where the Beloved Disciple
puts the head on his shoulder.
That's right.
This is where Leonardo Da Vinci...
Yeah.
[SIMCHA] Leonardo's famous painting
depicts all twelve Disciples at the Last Supper.
Taken together the four gospels identify all of them,
but only some of them are named in the Gospel of John.
And professor Tabor thinks that's a clue.
My theory is we've got to start with the idea
that he's not named.
So I'm going to eliminate any of the twelve disciples
that are named. Like, it's not Peter.
It's not Andrew. It's not James. It's not John.
But, if you take, of the twelve,
the ones that aren't named anywhere in the gospel,
you come up with Simon and James and Jude.
I'm not talking about the well known James and Simon
and Judas Iscariot, but the ones mentioned
at the tail end of all the lists, possibly,
I think, Jesus' brothers. And so that's a clue.
It's one of those three.
[SIMCHA] The Gospel of Matthew
identifies James, Judah and Simon as Jesus' brothers.
But which one is called the Beloved in John?
I know whom I have chosen.
[SIMCHA] There must be more evidence.
So I decided to look at the most famous scene
in the Gospels: the crucifixion.
And I discovered that not only is the Beloved Disciple there,
the text seems to identify him.
[SIMCHA] I'm searching for the identity
of the mysterious Beloved Disciple
whom the Gospel says would not die
until the advent of the Kingdom of God.
So far I've definitely eliminated the disciples John,
and Judas as well as Mary Magdalene.
James Tabor has led me to the most likely suspects:
James, Judah and Simon,
whom the Gospel of Matthew say are Jesus' Brothers.
But which one is it?
The Beloved is the only Disciple to witness the crucifixion.
And there, Jesus speaks directly to him.
I asked Professor James Charlesworth
whether the text can help us
narrow down the suspects.
Let's look at the Gospel of John.
In Chapter Jesus is on the cross,
he looks down and the Beloved Disciple is there.
And Jesus calls the Beloved Disciple "son".
And he says "Behold your mother".
Does he say anything else?
Oh yes, mother behold your son,
son behold your mother.
The implication is from that moment
he's asking the Beloved Disciple
to be a son to his mother.
[SIMCHA] If the Beloved is one of Jesus' brothers,
in whose hands would Jesus commission Mary,
his mother?
The Gospels don't say, but James Tabor
thinks that what Jesus said from the cross
is the key to the identity of the Beloved Disciple.
Who would Jesus give the care of his own mother to?
I think it has to be James, the brother of Jesus.
Who do you give your mother to?
In Judaism if the elder brother dies,
the next son has to take over the custody of the mother.
So it makes perfect sense.
He says to him in a kind of formal ceremony,
"Mother, behold your son; son behold your mother."
And it says that disciple took her into his house.
So where's his house? James.
Probably right here.
[SIMCHA] If James was so important
why does the Gospel edit out his name?
What many people forget is that Jesus and James
were Orthodox Jews as were the Disciples.
Some scholars believe that
by the time John was set to paper
a new version of Jesus had begun to emerge.
Jesus the man, whose Jewish followers called
the Messiah was being replaced by Christ,
the right hand of God.
The Gospel of John needed to reflect this new reality.
James Tabor thinks that this explains
why Jesus' brother was turned into the anonymous
Beloved disciple.
Why would you knock him out?
'Cause he's the flesh-and-blood brother of Jesus,
he takes over the movement,
and he's essentially
representing Jewish Christianity.
By the time John is finally redacted and edited,
we've got a Christ who's a god,
who's preexisted and comes from Heaven.
He rules in the heavens at the right hand of God.
This "earthly brother" stuff and the idea
that Mary had sex and had children,
and a physical Jew, as a brother,
is ruling the group is just too pedestrian,
I think, for these people. These are mystics.
[SIMCHA] James Tabor's argument is compelling.
But for a Disciple who is so important
there's remarkably little sign of him
in the rest of the New Testament.
And yet, there is one more famous incident
involving the Beloved Disciple.
He races the Disciple Peter to Jesus' empty Tomb.
Some say the race eliminates James
but points to another suspect for the Beloved Disciple.
[SIMCHA] I'm trying to unravel the identity
of the Beloved Disciple
who was the only one of Jesus's Disciples
to witness the crucifixion.
There he saw a curious detail:
a Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side
to make certain he was dead.
According to the Gospels,
three days later Mary Magdalene found the Tomb empty.
Then, In what some argue is
the Beloved's most important appearance,
he races another Disciple, Simon Peter, to the empty Tomb.
To understand what happened when they got there
and why it's important I want to see the place
where a sixteen hundred year old tradition
tells us it happened.
Yisca Harani showed me what
many Christians believe is the Tomb of Jesus.
So right behind us is the tomb that used to be a cave,
and then it was covered.
But you can imagine that when Peter
and the Beloved Disciple run to see the cave
and this is a barren land
they have to go up and down,
they have to jump over rocks.
They run in order to see a tomb,
which is carved in the rock.
[SIMCHA] And what they saw inside
is the founding principle of Christianity.
What we hear is that when coming to the tomb,
what they found was as it is you see now, right?
It's a rock with nothing on it except two shrouds,
and the shrouds were folded,
the head shroud and the body shroud separately.
[SIMCHA] But the story of the footrace
between the Beloved Disciple and Simon Peter
contains an important detail.
It says that one of the disciples
was running quicker and he approached the tomb
and didn't step inside.
Peter comes second but first to enter the tomb,
and he does not seem to understand what's going on.
That's a very interesting, I would say bizarre narrative
because it insists on the running
and the fact that the one runner
was better than the other.
[SIMCHA] The Gospel is clear
that the Beloved is the first to reach the Tomb.
And yet, Simon Peter is the first to enter.
Why does the Beloved hesitate before going in?
Professor James Charlesworth thinks
that that moment may be the biggest clue
to the code of the Beloved Disciple.
Now why do you think that the beloved Disciple
doesn't go into the tomb?
Pollution. He didn't want to pollute himself.
By coming into contact with a dead body.
Or going into a grave, yes.
And then eventually he goes in.
Okay, he goes in. Now you know the rules,
for six days he must not appear to anybody.
[SIMCHA] Because he had entered a grave,
Jewish law required the Beloved to purify himself
through prayer and sacrifice,
ritual cleansing and separation for seven days.
But according to the Gospels, that very night,
Jesus appeared to the Disciples.
One of them wasn't there.
The Disciple Thomas, aka "Doubting Thomas"
whom the Gospels call "Didymus",
he was missing. Why?
Beginning of the eighth day,
now that's the first time that the Beloved Disciple
can appear again, right?
Guess who appears? Thomas.
And now we have an explanation
why Thomas wasn't there.
He was purifying himself.
And then he gives us a real insight, he says:
"I must see the wound in his side."
Wait a minute! The wound in his side?
When people are crucified
they don't have a wound in their side.
How would he know that?
The Beloved Disciple is the one that saw it.
If the Beloved Disciple is the witness
to the spear then bingo, you begin to see
the author is cleverly saying,
perhaps the Beloved Disciple is Thomas.
[SIMCHA] But if the Beloved is Thomas,
and not James, as Professor Tabor suggests,
why would the Gospels hide him?
Who was he, and why would Jesus
have thought he was special?
That becomes abundantly clear
when you study old Syriac traditions.
He was considered "the twin."
In fact, in the Gospel of John, it refers to Thomas,
Didymus Thomas.
Now, Thomas in Aramaic means twin,
and Didymus in Greek means twin.
So we have a twin.
The early tradition is that Thomas
is Judas Thomas, the Twin.
So we have a tradition that his name
is Judas Thomas Didymus.
So, we can surmise what?
That his name was Jehudah, Judah,
and that he was known as the Twin.
But whose twin is he?
Well, it has to be the twin of Jesus.
But what does the twin of Jesus mean?
Are we to take it literally that Jesus had a twin brother,
or are we to take it as spiritual?
[SIMCHA] What if it is a literal twin?
A recent archaeological discovery suggests
Judah may have been related to Jesus.
But that he wasn't his brother...
[SIMCHA] I'm on the trail
of the mysterious Beloved Disciple,
who was supposed to live until the advent
of the Kingdom of God.
Following Professor James Charlesworth,
I've discovered that the most likely candidate
may be the disciple Thomas,
who is also known as Judah,
and was said by some to be Jesus' twin.
But there's one more piece of the puzzle here,
and it shows that the Beloved
may not have been Jesus brother after all.
We're just outside of Jerusalem.
Traffic...not so much traffic now.
We're in a parking lot.
But in the middle of all this
there's a controversial tomb. Come on.
[SIMCHA] This could be
where the famous footrace took place
because, although most scholars dismiss it,
some believe that this is the Tomb of Jesus.
There you have it, a sealed tomb.
[SIMCHA] When the Tomb was reopened,
two thousand years after the crucifixion,
archaeologists found ten bone boxes,
or ossuaries. Most controversial was an ossuary
with an inscription on it that said
"Jesus, son of Joseph."
Most dismiss the inscription as referring to another Jesus.
But when I looked at the other ossuaries
there was one familiar name.
And it may explain the mystery of the Beloved Disciple.
Because the name on the ossuary is Judah,
son of Jesus.
Can you point out the inscription actually?
It says here very clearly in very good script:
Jehudah bar Jeshua, Judah son of Jesus.
Of Nazareth?
No, no. -What?
This is Judah, the son of Jesus,
one of the many Jesuses
that lived in the first century in Jerusalem.
[SIMCHA] But if the ossuary did
come from the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth,
could it be that when Jesus said
"Woman behold thy son",
he was referring to his own son,
and in effect telling Judah that he was now
the head of the family?
I asked James Charlesworth...
You've got him calling him son.
Why does he call him son?
That's a good question.
I think it's because I see Jesus
trying to keep his movement continuing, not dying.
But maybe there's some early Christian traditions
that suggests that it could be a real son of Jesus,
I don't know of any.
We have a piece of archaeology
that says Judah son of Jesus.
If you take the archaeology,
if you take the statements on the cross, "son",
if you take the tradition of the Twin.
I can tell you, my son,
I can't tell you how many people have said,
"He's your twin." Right?
'Cause he looks like me.
So the question is: couldn't twin really be Junior?
I think we just have to be open in exploring
and wondering what are we learning
and what are we capable of thinking.
And I think it's a time to be bold
and open and in dialogue with one another.
[SIMCHA] But if Jesus did have a son
why isn't he mentioned in any of the Gospels?
Maybe he is, and we just haven't noticed.
I'm in the garden of Gethsemane.
This is the traditional place where Jesus was arrested.
He might have stood by this very olive tree.
He was here with the Disciples,
and it's very interesting in terms of the mystery
of the Beloved Disciple because this is where
the Beloved Disciple is conspicuous by his absence.
The Beloved Disciple was at the Last Supper,
so why wouldn't he cross the Kidron valley later
that same night with the rest of the Disciples?
It turns out that he may have.
But the scene didn't make it into the Gospel of John...
There's a clue in the gospel of Mark.
There's suddenly a little boy,
a certain young man, in some kind of linen cloth,
that's following the arrested Jesus.
Sounds like a kid. And suddenly what do you have?
The soldiers turn around, grab him by the linen,
he escapes, they're left with the linen
in their hand and he runs naked through the streets.
Does that sound like a full grown man,
or does that sound like a little kid
following his father from a distance,
trying to be with him as he's
being led away to his death?
[SIMCHA] So is the Beloved Disciple
Jesus' brother James as Professor Tabor believes?
Or is he Jesus' twin, Judas Thomas,
as Professor Charlesworth maintains?
Or could the Beloved Disciple have been Jesus' son,
whose identity at first was hidden
because Jesus' followers didn't want his enemies
to know of an heir to the leadership,
later he could have been written out of the Gospels
because it didn't fit with the Church's
evolving conception of Christ?
If he was a son, this ossuary leaves one last problem...
The Beloved Disciple isn't supposed to die
before the advent of the kingdom of God...
But it turns out that he makes one last appearance
in the Gospel of John.
The Beloved Disciple is so important
that he's mentioned in the very last lines
of the Gospel of John.
And that's where his death is mentioned.
It seems that he was so central to their belief
and they were so sure that he would not die,
before Jesus came back that the writer
of the Gospel of John had to reassure them
that even though he d*ed before the second coming
it wasn't over. In a sense the Beloved Disciple lives.
02x22 - The Beloved Disciple
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Show examines biblical stories and tries to find proof for them by exploring the Holy Land looking for archaeological evidence, personal inferences, deductions, and interviews with scholars and experts.
Show examines biblical stories and tries to find proof for them by exploring the Holy Land looking for archaeological evidence, personal inferences, deductions, and interviews with scholars and experts.