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New Testament

Gospel of Matthew 1 in Greek
The Apostle and Evangelist John was one of the four fishermen whom the Lord called first to the apostolic office. Both his father Zebedee and his mother Salome were pious people, especially Salome, who passed on her piety and religiousness to her children. Therefore, as soon as John the Forerunner began to preach in the wilderness, John became his disciple, until the moment when the Forerunner pointed him to Jesus.
Salome's mother was considered by some to be a sister of the Virgin Mary, in which case John would have been the first cousin of the Lord. However, it does not seem likely that John knew the Lord before the introduction that the Forerunner made to him shortly after Jesus' baptism (John 1:35-39).
When the evangelist John became a disciple of the Lord, he formed, together with his brother James and Peter, the circle of the three disciples whom the Lord took with Him both at the resurrection of Jairus' daughter and at the Transfiguration, as well as to the agonizing prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. John is the 'disciple whom Jesus loved.' Because of the fervent zeal and great love that John showed towards the Lord, as well as his brother James, they were called by the Lord 'Boanerges,' that is, 'sons of thunder.'
John is the only one of the twelve disciples who followed Jesus all the way to the Cross. He also had the honor of being entrusted by the Lord with His Mother, when He said to him, 'Behold your mother' (John 19:27). Exiled by Emperor Domitian to the island of Patmos, he saw the Revelation there. After the death of the Apostle Paul and the destruction of Jerusalem, he settled in Ephesus, where he also wrote his Gospel around 85 to 95 AD.
According to Jerome, John, when he reached old age and could no longer teach the faithful at length, limited himself to repeating, 'children, love one another.'
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NKJV translation
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