John the Apostle (c. 6 - c. 100) was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the Bible. He was the son of Zebedee and Salome and the younger brother of James, son of Zebedee, another of the Apostles. Christian tradition holds that he adopted the Virgin Mary as his own mother at the dying Jesus' request, and was the last surviving Apostle. With the exception of Judas Iscariot who hanged himself for betraying Jesus, all of the others became martyrs of the Catholic Church and are recognized the same way by the Eastern Orthodox Church and most Protestant churches. Christians generally identify him as the author of five books in the New Testament: the Gospel of John, the three Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation. Many secular historians believe that the Revelation was not written by the same man as the other works, and some go so far as to doubt that the Gospel and the Epistles share an author either.
In an alternate known to Crosstime Traffic as Agrippan Rome, the Bible only had three Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John the Apostle had not written a Gospel, nor was he mentioned in the alternate's version of the Acts of the Apostles. Either John had never been born in that alternate, or he had simply never joined the Church. Such differences provided scholars in the home timeline with material to embark on the new field of Comparative Crosstime Bible Studies.[1]
