I don't know where your getting your information John was the only Apostle not to die a martyrs death, and was living in Ephesus around 98 AD when he died.
He just told you where he is getting his information. So you have to address his evidence, not say 'I don't know where you're getting your information'. He told you where he got it. The gospels speak of the martyrdom of the Apostle John, Papias (the disciple of the Evangelist) spoke of the martyrdom of the Apostle John, and the early ecclesiastical calendars spoke of it. The John who died at Ephesus, the Beloved Disciple and Seer of Revelation, consequently could not have been the Apostle, the son of Zebedee.
I was asking more to see what people believe rather than to figure out where he was. A few sources place him in Rome before Patmos; that he was familiar with Asia Minor can be inferred from Revelation, but no early source explicitly places the Seer in Ephesus prior to his exile (or none that come to mind anyway).
He has told me nothing, there was no source material in that statement. Let's see the quote and the context because there isn't anything in these posts indicating any such thing.
Investigating this question I found the following on where these supposed fragments of Papias are located:
You'll have to do a search. It's in Tertullian and Jerome who say that John was exiled after being thrown into a vat of burning oil at Rome.
Yes, and he quotes the names of those who didn't suffer martyrdom. John's name is NOT included among those who weren't martyred (see Charles' commentary for the reference).
Well thanks for that, I think church tradition is pretty clear that John died in old age of natural causes. He was martyred in a sense, he was boiled in oil with no harm.
Of course I have but I think you should have done that before challenging me. I always check the source material, I would advise you to do the same.
I don't think that will be necessary. If you have the quote then we have something to talk about, otherwise this looks like nothing much.
The problem here is George Hamartoulos explicitly said John wrote the gospel bearing his name in that fragment of Papias, so is therefore contradicting your claimed statement by Clement and Deadworm's claim that he is not the Evangelist.
I agree, but it's easily explainable because the two Johns came to be identified. In fact you can kind of see this in Hamartolus, that he is trying to reconcile two separate traditions by placing John's martyrdom in Trajan's reign. I still think it's more problematic to just dismiss the whole thing altogether.
I disagree there. How many early references are there to the Evangelist's late natural death? Not that many. Can you think of any? How many early references are there to Peter's martyrdom. For the Apostle, we have two canonical Gospels (Matthew and Mark), Papias, the ecclesiastical calendars, Clement of Alexandria (who doesn't mention John's name when speaking of those apostles who escaped martyrdom), the anonymous third century author of De rebaptismate (often attributed to Cyprian), and Aphrahat of Nineveh (all these in Charles). What is there for the Evangelist's peaceful death (I don't doubt his peaceful death--just trying to put the question of relative evidence in perspective).
