How many Johns are there in the New Testament?

By Rose Vidovix 

It is easy to lose track of which John you are reading about in the New Testament. John the Baptist and John the apostle are two different men. But was the John who wrote Revelation the same man who left his fishing boat to follow Jesus? And when the Gospel of John speaks of the disciple Jesus loved, how do we know which disciple it means?

Five people named John can be clearly distinguished in the text. The count rises to six if John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, was a different person from the apostle.

1. John the Baptist

John the Baptist preached repentance and baptised Jesus in the River Jordan (Matthew 3:1–17). We also hear about him outside the Bible. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus describes John as a man whose preaching drew crowds. In Josephus’s account, Herod Antipas feared that John’s influence might lead to an uprising, so he had him imprisoned and executed at the fortress of Machaerus (Jewish Antiquities 18.116–119). Josephus gives us a glimpse of how a ruler might have viewed a preacher who could draw so many people to hear him.

2. John the Apostle

John and his brother James were mending their nets in a boat with their father, Zebedee, when Jesus called them to follow him (Matthew 4:21–22). Christian tradition identifies John as the disciple who took Mary, the mother of Jesus, into his home. In the scene at the cross, Jesus entrusts Mary to the disciple he loved, and the disciple takes her home from that hour. The Gospel leaves the disciple unnamed (John 19:25–27).

3. John Mark

Acts introduces him as John, also called Mark, when Peter goes to the house of John’s mother, where people have gathered to pray. John Mark later travels with Paul and Barnabas but leaves them in Pamphylia and returns to Jerusalem. When Barnabas proposes taking him on another journey, Paul objects. The disagreement is sharp enough that Paul and Barnabas part ways, and Barnabas takes Mark to Cyprus (Acts 12:12, 25; 13:5, 13; 15:36–40).

4. John the Father of Simon Peter

When Jesus first meets Peter in the Gospel of John, he addresses him as Simon, son of John (John 1:42). He calls him by the same name three times after the resurrection, when he asks Peter whether he loves him (John 21:15–17). Readers may remember a different name from Matthew, where Jesus calls Peter “Simon son of Jonah” (Matthew 16:17).

5. John of the High Priest’s Family

Acts names this John alongside Annas, Caiaphas and Alexander at the hearing in Jerusalem. The authorities ask Peter and the apostle John by what power or in whose name they healed a man who could not walk. The John from the high priest’s family is listed among those present, though Acts records no words of his own (Acts 3:1–10; 4:5–7).

6. John of Patmos

The author of Revelation gives his name as John and says that he was on Patmos, an island in the Aegean Sea. He addresses seven churches in the Roman province of Asia (Revelation 1:4, 9–11). Whether he was John the apostle was already debated in the early Church. In the third century, Dionysius of Alexandria pointed to differences in vocabulary and Greek style between Revelation and the Gospel of John. He accepted that Revelation was written by someone named John and doubted that it was the son of Zebedee (Eusebius, Church History 7.25).

Who Was the Beloved Disciple

Christian tradition attributes the Gospel of John to the apostle. In the late second century, Irenaeus wrote that the John who had reclined beside Jesus at supper published his Gospel in Ephesus (Against Heresies 3.1.1). Near the end of the Gospel, the text points to the beloved disciple as the witness behind the account and vouches for his testimony, leaving his name unstated (John 21:20–24).

That leaves a question we still cannot answer. Who was Jesus’ favourite apostle, if he had one? Was it John?

Sources 

Eusebius of Caesarea. Church History. Book VII, chapter 25. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert. New Advent. https://www.newadvent.org

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Book III, chapter 1, section 1. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. New Advent. https://www.newadvent.org

Josephus, Flavius. Jewish Antiquities. Book XVIII, sections 116–119. Translated by William Whiston. Lexundria. https://lexundria.com

The Holy Bible. New International Version, UK edition. Biblica. Bible Gateway  https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-UK-NIVUK-Bible/

Denizli January 2026

Colossae

COLOSSAE

Once, kings passed through your gates.

You were rich, powerful,
heavy with people,
merchants, animals, voices,
goods arriving from distant lands
and leaving again beneath other names.

Your looms gave the world
colossinus,
wool dyed such a deep and lasting red
that your city lived within its colour.

People knew your cloth.
They knew your wealth.
They knew where you stood.

Then the earth moved.

Walls fell.
Temples broke.
Streets disappeared beneath themselves.

The rain entered your ruins.
The wind wore down what remained.
Human hands carried away your stones
and built other lives with them.

The centuries finished what the earthquakes began.

Paul wrote to your people,
warning them against beliefs
that threatened the new faith.

The letter survived.

The people did not.
The houses did not.
The markets, workshops and voices did not.

Of all your achievements,
the world remembers a heresy.
Of all your wealth,
it preserved a warning.

For centuries,
you were considered too insignificant
even to uncover.

Colossae,
once crowded,
once internationally known,
once dressed in dark red,
became a blank and silent mound.

The city vanished.

The accusation survived.

Rose Vidovix, Denizli 16/09/2026

I live near Colossae, and I am fascinated by how almost nothing of this once important city has survived.

The day before yesterday, I visited the site and stepped into a stream that once supplied water to the city. While collecting rubbish along its banks, one of my hobbies, I felt the words of a poem beginning to form in my mind.

I came home and started writing about Colossae.

Rüzgar

My name is Rüzgar.

I go wherever I want.

No wall stops me.

No border holds me back.

I have passed through Azerbaijan,

where the mountains still carry

the echo of war.

I have crossed Türkiye,

moving between old cities

and ancient olive trees

that remember hands that planted them.

I have travelled over Palestine,

where grief hangs in the air

like dust that refuses to settle.

I have flown across Brazil,

over forests that once seemed endless,

watching the green disappear

tree by tree.

I have crossed the United States,

over cities that shine all night

and plains so wide

they swallow the horizon.

Everywhere I go

I see the same story.

I watch them cut the forests

that cooled their ancestors.

I watch them choke the seas

that fed their children.

And still they ask

why the earth grows restless.

So I keep travelling.

Through ruined cities.

Through wounded forests.

Across tired oceans.

And everywhere I go

I carry the same question.

Why do you destroy

the only home you have?

My name is Rüzgar.

Unremembered

Yesterday we stumbled upon Apollonia Salbake, and as I learned about it, I realised how completely time has forgotten this place.

Forgotten walls.

Forgotten graves.

Forgotten history

Stone walls that fell with the last earthquake,

lifted, carried away, reused,

set into other buildings

that do not remember

what they replaced.

People forgot the tears.

Forgot the laughter that once moved

between these hills.

Forgot the weight of hands

pressing farewell into carved rock.

Only a few names remain,

cut into stone

with such certainty.

Names that only scholars pronounce now,

carefully,

as if speaking them too loudly

might disturb a silence

that has already erased them.

A few coins were found.

The faces on them

have no names left.

They lie in museums

where visitors drift past glass

without seeing

the vanished market,

the vanished hands,

the vanished ambition.

The women who once held a place here,

who stood with more visibility

than in other kingdoms,

who were named, honoured, remembered

in stone and ceremony,

are now only faint letters

softened by centuries.

Their authority did not survive the dust.

Their presence did not survive the forgetting.

Even the trees are gone.

The ones planted for shade,

for fruit,

for hope of continuation.

No root marks the ground.

No trunk leans into the sky.

No leaf trembles with inherited memory.

The hill does not testify.

The wind does not retell.

This is not a ruin that longs.

Not a city waiting to be rediscovered.

It is abandonment so complete

that not even the past

remembers being here.

Apollonia Salbake

is not silent.

It has been

unremembered.

Notes on Compositus Philosophy

Naming Compositus Philosophy helps us see something that was already there.

But naming is only the first step. To use it responsibly, we need to understand its limits and our own role in shaping its outcomes.

Epistemology

At the moment, we have a description of what Compositus Philosophy is, but we still need a clearer understanding of its epistemology.

• How does composed reasoning “know” anything at all?

• What kind of knowledge does it produce, and what kind does it exclude?

This may lead to a more precise framework, perhaps an Epistemology of Composed Reasoning, focused on aggregation, coherence, and acceptability rather than truth or belief.

Ethics

Systems without responsibility and without consequences cannot bear moral weight.

This does not remove ethical concerns. It shifts them.

Themes to consider include:

• design standards

• responsibility in AI governance

• accountability for decisions made with • compositus outputs

Ethics does not belong to the system. It belongs to those who build, deploy, and rely on it.

Anthropomorphism of AI

We need protective mechanisms against misplaced trust.

Probably the most important contributions of Compositus Philosophy is that it counterbalances the anthropomorphism of AI.

If the philosophy is compositus, then:

• humans choose the data

• humans set the constraints

• humans decide when to deploy

• humans accept or reject outcomes

The system does not act.

People do.

This distinction matters.

• Human philosophy involves judgment, risk, responsibility, and consequence.

• Compositus Philosophy involves arrangement, coherence, and acceptability.

They are not the same, and treating them as such is dangerous.

What happens as AI evolves?

As AI develops, Compositus Philosophy is unlikely to remain singular.

It may split into:

• Pure Compositus: fully non-agentic reasoning

• Hybrid Compositus: compositus reasoning combined with human responsibility

This distinction will become increasingly important as systems grow more fluent and more influential.

A developing taxonomy

As AI diversifies, further subcategories may emerge.

These are not levels of intelligence, but modes of composition:

• Stabilising Compositus

Systems that harmonise, summarise, and reduce disagreement.

• Generative Compositus

Systems that extrapolate and remix existing ideas.

• Constrained Compositus

Systems tightly bounded by safety, legal, or ethical rules.

• Speculative Compositus

Systems that simulate philosophical positions without endorsing them.

Naming these distinctions helps us think more clearly, and helps keep responsibility where it belongs.

Rose Vidovix 

Lympne 6th February 2026

Compositus Philosophy 05/02/2026

Compositus Philosophy

(Pronounced kom-POZ-i-tus)

A name for a new way of reasoning

We are entering a moment in history in which reasoning itself is changing shape.

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly summarise texts, compare arguments, suggest conclusions, and frame debates. They do not simply retrieve information; they organise it. Yet the way these systems reason is fundamentally different from how humans think, judge, and decide.

This difference has not been properly named.

I propose the term Compositus Philosophy to describe it.

What is Compositus Philosophy?

Compositus Philosophy is a mode of philosophical reasoning produced through the composition, aggregation, and constraint of existing human ideas by artificial systems that are non-embodied and non-intentional.

It is:

composed rather than lived

derivative rather than original

probabilistic rather than experiential

stabilising rather than truth-seeking

Compositus Philosophy does not arise from suffering, embodiment, fear, love, or responsibility. It arises from patterns in language, repetition across sources, and boundaries imposed by design.

What Compositus Philosophy is not

Compositus Philosophy is not:

• human philosophy

• wisdom

• moral authority

• consciousness

• intention

• ethics in the human sense

It does not believe.

It does not intend.

It does not choose.

It can only generate reasoned outputs within predefined limits.

Why a new term is needed

Existing labels such as AI ethics, machine ethics, or philosophy of AI do not describe what is actually happening.

They focus either on how humans should regulate artificial systems, or on whether those systems could become moral agents.

Compositus Philosophy names something else entirely: the form of philosophical reasoning that emerges when philosophy is composed rather than lived.

Without a name, this mode of reasoning risks being mistaken for neutrality, wisdom, or authority.

The limits must be explicit

Compositus Philosophy can analyse, compare, and stabilise ideas, but it cannot replace human judgment, moral courage, or lived responsibility.

Any system that cannot bear consequences cannot carry moral weight.

Responsibility remains human.

Why naming this matters

Language shapes accountability.

Once we name Compositus Philosophy, we can:

• distinguish human judgment from generated reasoning

• resist anthropomorphising machines

• keep moral responsibility where it belongs

• use artificial systems as tools without surrendering authority

The danger is not that machines think.

The danger is that humans stop thinking because machines speak fluently.

A beginning, not a conclusion

This blog exists to explore the boundaries of Compositus Philosophy, its strengths and limitations, its influence on education, politics, ethics, and culture, and the responsibility humans retain in an age of composed reasoning.

This is not a rejection of technology.

It is an attempt to name it honestly.

Rose Vidovix

Lympne, 5 February 2026

Before Knowing

You wake up knowing
nothing is guaranteed.
The day waits quietly,
undecided.
You make plans,
neatly arranged in your mind,
and life moves them elsewhere.
A surprise appears,
small or sudden,
and the direction changes.
Or nothing changes at all
except your awareness.
You notice, for a moment,
that life has not treated you gently,
but it has made you stronger,
in ways you did not choose.
And you step into the day
carrying both uncertainty
and gratitude,
side by side.

Denizli 20/01/2026

Everyone knew my son’s life except me.

This is about a mother who finds out her son hid his love and marriage from his her and from their family.

I carried you before I had a name for fear.
I learned your breathing before I learned my own rest.
Every step you took away from me
I followed with prayer, not with eyes.
They say a mother always knows.
They lie.
I knew your childhood.
I knew your hunger.
I knew the weight of your silence
and trusted it as truth.
Somewhere along the way
your life became a room
I was not allowed to enter.
I opened my home.
I set the table.
I cooked with care, with pride, with love.
I welcomed her into my house
as a guest, as a friend,
never knowing I was feeding
my son’s lover,
my son’s wife.
I smiled.
I served tea.
I asked polite questions
while a truth sat at my table
and did not speak to me.
You shared glances I did not understand.
You carried a story I was not invited into.
And I stood there believing
I was included
because I was present.
And then the truth arrived
already worn by other mouths.
Already discussed.
Already judged.
“Everyone knew my son’s life except me.”
Do you know what that does to a mother
who thought she was the last safe place
not the last to be told.
It is not the love that breaks me.
It is not the choice.
It is not even the distance.
It is the knowledge
that I offered my kindness
to a reality that hid from me
and let me believe
I was respected.
I would have listened.
I would have cried in private.
I would have learned how to hold this truth
without dropping it.
But you did not give me that chance.
So I grieve twice.
Once for the child I raised.
Once for the woman I thought I was
in his life.
I am still your mother.
But now I must learn
how to be one
after being left outside my own truth.
And that
is the heaviest lesson of all.

Courage

What we call courage is rarely measured by intention.

It is measured by results.

Success turns risk into bravery.

Failure turns the same risk into foolishness

Advice

Advice is not universal, what lifts one person up may bring another down.