In view of this history of the terms, it will be understood how easily one who was in the position of the beloved disciple would come to be spoken of as an Apostle, and in time to be confused with the older Apostles who bore the same name. In such a process there would be no need, as Harnack does, to bring in the hypothesis of fraud; every step in the process would be really innocent and natural. Harnack of course gets into his difficulties by minimizing the designation ‘disciple of the Lord’ as applied to John the Presbyter, who is also John of Ephesus. One who stood to the Lord in the relation of the beloved disciple would have a right to the name Apostle which the Presbyter, as Harnack conceives him, would not. ix. So far it would seem that a really strong case can be made out for distinguishing the Evangelist from the son of Zebedee and identifying him with the beloved disciple. My wish is not to make out a case either way, but to state the facts as impartially as I can. From this point of view, there seem to be two serious difficulties in the way of Delff’s hypothesis. The first is that it puts asunder two sets of phenomena that we feel sure ought to be combined. We have seen that the Gospel represents the beloved disciple and St. Peter as close friends. And we have also seen that the other Gospels, the Acts and, we might add, the Epistle to the Galatians, represent St. Peter and St. John as constantly acting together. It may indeed just be said that this joint action is a sort of official relation, which is a different thing from the private friendship implied in the Gospel. And yet we cannot doubt that the more natural and obvious view would be to regard the later relation as the direct continuation of the earlier, and so to identify the beloved disciple with the leading Apostle. Delff’s theory would make two pairs, who would be too much the doubles of each other. x. And another difficulty, or set of difficulties, turns round the statement of De Boor’s Fragment. It is certainly strange that this statement appears in no other early authority, and especially that no hint of it is found in Eusebius. I am not sure that this would weigh with me so much as it would with others, because I always discount the argument from silence, even where it is apparently strong, as it is in the present instance. But there is something more than silence. The common tradition of the church did not ascribe to St. John a violent death. And we cannot escape the inference by saying that the common tradition relates to John of Ephesus and not to the son of Zebedee; because the earliest authority for the tradition, the Apocryphal Acts of John, a second-century work, without any ambiguity identifies the two. xi. We might perhaps sum up the whole case thus.