Who Was St John?

 Christine Hartley (1897-1985) was a pupil of Dion Fortune and an important figure in the revival of the Western Mystery Tradition. In later life she even wrote a book with that title. There, nestled among stories of Merlin and Arthur and the Tuatha da Danaan and the Druids, there is a short chapter called St John the Kelt. When I first read this many years ago I felt that rush of recognition you experience when something you knew but don't know you knew breaks through into the realm of conscious thought. It made complete sense.

Christine Hartley gives some reasons for this, on the face of it, unlikely assertion, and while they are plausible they certainly don't prove that the beloved apostle really was a Celt. But that is besides the point for this is more an inner plane reality than something that is factually true in the outer world - which is not to say it is not outwardly true as well. She says that the original Celts came from the mountains around Ararat and Persia and migrated westwards, but that there may have been some who remained behind at various stages of the journey. I don't think this is currently accepted by modern scholars but the Celtic people were certainly travellers and there is no reason why some may not have ended up in the Holy Land. More to the point, she says that the Celt is a mystic who thinks symbolically. He is a poet and a dreamer. His spirituality is shot through with magic and mystery, and his view of the created world is that it still shines with God's glory if you look at it right. All of this is in St John. None of it is in the rest of the New Testament nor is it part of the Jewish religious temperament which is based on law and the hard reality of this world. 

St John's Gospel and the Book of Revelation stand apart from everything else in the Bible. Their spiritual approach is mystical in a way that makes other parts of the Bible seem prosaic and earthbound. They glisten with an inner light that is typically Celtic. The imagery of the Apocalypse, its expansive visionary quality and prophetic fire, might have partial roots in the Book of Daniel but, as Christine Hartley says, "Here is the poetry and imagery of the Kelt from the first word to the last - the whole of the great Vision lies before us in a glowing tapestry of Angels and Jewels and Riders upon Horses...so superbly described...that it is almost possible to catch a glimpse of the reality that lies behind them".

Nowhere in traditional Jewish writing is there a sense of the spiritual nature of God one finds in the opening words of St John's Gospel. This is unprecedented and separates him from the other Apostles who, for all their qualities, seem dull and heavy in comparison, unable to transcend the material nature of the world and see spirit in the pure form conveyed by St John. And then, as Christine Hartley points out,  John "invariably writes 'The Jews', as though they were to him foreigners" implying that he is, at the very least, from another background.

Then you have the traditional representation of St John. Obviously, the images we have of him and St Peter and Jesus himself were not drawn from nature, but they might have come from oral tradition and, if we accept that Christianity is a divinely inspired religion, we should have no difficulty in believing that these images could also have been inspirational in origin. Peter is always a burly, bearded, rather fierce man of passion and energy, practical and tough, and somewhat bullish. St John is almost the opposite. He is youthful, sensitive and often fair-haired. A dreamy, almost ethereal quality comes from his pictures as in this one from the 19th century. This is a Celtic poet.

If Christianity was destined to spread beyond the Jewish world, as we must assume it was, then it would make sense to have a non-Jew as one of Jesus's closest disciples, someone who would then write about him from the perspective of an outsider to the very insular Jewish world. This writing would appeal more to the imagination of the intended audience and help bring them on board with the new, what was intended to be, universal religion. Its internal content and unstated but inherent cultural signatures would resonate with them and help make Christianity a European religion not a Jewish one which was its destiny.

None of this can be proved as the world seeks proof but I maintain that on the level of myth and intuition it shines out with the clarity of real truth. St John was the primary medium through whom the Christian message was transmitted to the Indo-European people, and he was one of them. The Christ he revealed was the warrior king of Revelation, the Lord and Ruler of all Creation whose face shines with the glory of the sun, the incarnation of a solar God much more than the Old Testament Jehovah.