Summary:
The authorship of the Gospel of John has long been disputed, as has the identity of the Beloved Disciple that appears in the gospel. Ramon K. Jusino suggests that Mary Magdalene was the Beloved Disciple and therefore the author of the Fourth Gospel. He suggests that the "Johannine" community was actually a Magdalene community and that the pre-canonical Fourth Gospel referred to her as Jesus' favorite. After splitting into two factions, a new version was written replacing all mentions of Mary Magdalene as the favorite disciple with an anonymous male disciple. Jusino writes that the Gnostic texts that refer to Mary Magdalene as Jesus' favorite reflect the original teaching of the pre-canonical Fourth Gospel.
The Gospel of John was most likely written in the period between 70 and 120 C.E. No one knows exactly who wrote the Gospel, but the early Church father, Irenaeus, believed he recalled hearing in his childhood that it had been written by the apostle John. From that point onward, the gospel was known as John. Because many scholars have argued against the author being John (it was, in fact, authored by what appears to be more than one person), many instead call it only "the Fourth Gospel." We will follow that convention here for reasons that will become apparent below.
One of the most intriguing things about the Fourth Gospel is a mysterious figure that appears throughout, referred to only as the "one who Jesus loved." We've come to call this figure the "Beloved Disciple" and there are many, many theories about who this person might have been. It has long been assumed by some that the author of the Fourth Gospel was the same person as the Beloved Disciple, so the question of the Beloved Disciple's identity and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel are thoroughly entwined. This is why many believe that John is the Beloved Disciple, since he is the supposed author of the Fourth Gospel.
Among the most recent theories about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel and the identity of the Beloved Disicple is the work of Ramon Jusino, a Catholic scholar who published the outline for his thesis on the subject on the Web in 1998. Jusino bases much of his argument on the work of Johannine scholar Raymond Brown and then takes it a step further to posit Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple.
The idea is that there was an early Christian community that gathered around Mary Magdalene as their central inspiration, much the way that other communities honored Peter, James, Paul, and Thomas. It was on Mary Magdalene's testimony that the Fourth Gospel was written, probably not by her directly, but by someone to whom she had told her story. At some point, however, probably after her death, the community split into two factions. One faction went in a more Gnostic/docetic direction, and the other faction integrated itself into the more mainstream branch of Christianity. Both factions took their Gospel with them, but the group that went into mainstream Christianity had a problem: a woman was Jesus' favorite disciple, not Peter.
Therefore, to make the Fourth Gospel more acceptable to the mainstream tradition, all mentions of Mary Magdalene were changed to an anonymous disciple and all pronouns referring to this mysterious person were made masculine to hide the fact that it had been a woman. In Gospel scenes in which there was already a strong Mary Magdalene tradition (such as the appearance at the tomb), Mary Magdalene's name was retained and the Beloved Disciple was added as another figure.
Jusino points to the Gnostic texts in which Mary Magdalene appears as Jesus' favorite disciple as surviving evidence that the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel could have been her. It is possible, he writes, that the faction of the community that went in a more Gnostic direction was responsible for carrying on this tradition, which is evident in texts such as Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip.
Magdalene.org articles about the Beloved Disciple perspective:
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