De Boor’s Fragment is more precise in its assertion, ‘Papias, in his second book, says that John the divine (ὁ θεολόγος) and James his brother were slain by the Jews.’ ‘John the divine’ is naturally questioned; it is defended by Schwartz, but may quite well be due to the fragmentist. The main arguments against the statement are the silence of the early writers, especially Eusebius, and the possibility of confusion between John the Baptist and John the Apostle, or between red martyrdom and white. No doubt this is one of the better examples of the argument from silence, and no doubt we must reckon with the possibility of mistake. Still I do not feel that the statement altogether loses its force. I said something about it in Lecture III; I will at present only add that supposing it were true, the language of Papias about the two Johns can be explained more satisfactorily. 4. The son of Zebedee and the beloved disciple. I cannot disguise from myself that if the elder John really perished at an earlier stage in the history, the position of the younger becomes much clearer. There would then be no difficulty in the way of identifying him at once with the beloved disciple and with the author of the Gospel and Epistles. We should indeed have all the advantages of Harnack’s theory without its disadvantages. We should not be compelled to attribute to the Ephesian Church any fraudulent intention or practice. We should only have to regard the younger John as succeeding in a manner to the place of the elder, much (as I said) in the way that James the brother of the Lord succeeded to the place of the elder James. I do not wish to prejudge the question. But those who are familiar with its intricacies will, I think, agree with me that it would be a real gain to have only one claimant to the Ephesian tradition[84]. 5. John of Ephesus and his Gospel. We must in any case think of John of Ephesus as ‘the aged disciple,’ for to our modern ears some such double name as that expresses most adequately the feeling that surrounded him. He called himself by preference ὁ πρεσβύτερος, but we have unfortunately no sufficient rendering for this in English. ‘Elder’ and ‘Presbyter’ have both contracted the associations of office, and of a rather formal kind of office that has lost too much of its original meaning, for the natural authority of age was at first always conveyed in it. I suppose that the Apostle thought of himself most of all as a memory—the last and strongest link with those wonderful years. It was this especially that gave him his sense at once of dignity and of responsibility. When his disciples spoke of ὁ πρεσβύτερος, I imagine that they meant, as we might say, ‘the Venerable’; they looked up to him with a feeling of awe tempered with affection.