“What was the Elder’s name?” said I. “The two epistles do not mention it,” replied Clemens. “But the Elder near Ephesus of whom I spoke above, was called by the same name as the son of Zebedee, ‘John’; and the tradition that mentions him (along with another teacher named Aristion) appears to distinguish the two Johns, mentioning both in the same sentence. I ought to add that I mentioned this same Elder above as defending Mark on the ground that he was the mere interpreter of Peter. ‘Mark,’ said the Elder, ‘made it his single object to leave out nothing of the things that he heard and to say nothing that was false therein.’ Now you will find—I think I have already mentioned the fact—that this new gospel frequently intervenes, where Luke omits, or alters, anything that is in Mark, so as to explain Mark’s obscurity or set forth Mark’s tradition in different language. This points to the conclusion that the writer of the fourth gospel agreed with the Elder called John in his verdict on Mark, which is, in effect, ‘Not erroneous in fact though imperfect in expression.’ My own belief is that this tradition about two persons of the same name is accurate; and that, besides John the Apostle, there was also the Elder John, residing in or near Ephesus about the same time.” “But,” I asked, “might not ‘John the elder’ naturally be taken to mean ‘older in age’ as opposed to ‘John the younger’? And is it not strange that, in view of the great age of John the Apostle, such a distinctive appellation should be given to his namesake?” “Perhaps it would be,” replied Clemens. “But it is not given. Have you not noticed that I did not speak of ‘_John the Elder_’ but of ‘_the Elder, John_’? The two are quite different. The former (at least among Christians) would simply mean ‘John the Presbyter or Elder’ as distinct from ‘John the Deacon,’ ‘John the Bishop,’ and so on. But ‘the Elder, John’—a phrase twice repeated in my tradition—may imply that the teacher was known during his life among his pupils as ‘_the Elder_,’ and that, after his death, ‘John’ was added for the sake of clearness. I believe it was the custom to describe the elders near Ephesus in this indefinite way.” The view here taken by Clemens has been somewhat confirmed of late years by a practice that I have noticed—a bad practice, I think—in the young Irenæus. In the course of his lectures, when referring to his authority—instead of mentioning an elder by name, Polycarp, Aristion, Papias, John, as the case may be—he used such expressions as “He that is greater than we are,” “The divine old man and herald of the truth,” “He that is superior to us,” and all these, as far as I could gather, about elders in the province of Ephesus. Concerning this indefiniteness I am in the same mind now as I was when I replied to Clemens, “It is very unfortunate.”