John 21:2 - Exposition

There were together . Not the whole company of the eleven apostles; five are especially mentioned, and two are left unnamed. The five, of whom the Gospel knows much, are Simon Peter , whose twofold name denotes that, notwithstanding his grievous failure, he had not lost his faith, and still stood at the head of the company, the man of rock and the man of impetuous energy. Thomas called Didymus , whose incredulity had vanished, and whose devoted love had emerged from the depths of despondency to the loftiest faith, who had come to feel and say that the risen Christ was both Lord and God. Thomas, who had shrunk from the society of his fellow-apostles, was now closely united with them, more than he had ever previously seemed to have been. Thomas is the apostle last mentioned by the evangelist. Elsewhere he is associated with Philip of Bethsaida, and this town may have been his home. Nathanael of Cana in Galilee is mentioned by way of recalling the two miracles recorded by John as having taken place in this "Cana of Galilee" ( John 2:1-12 ; John 4:16 ). The former of the miracles followed immediately on the mention of the calling of Nathanael ( John 1:45 ). The reference to the little place in Galilee where the glory of Christ had been first of all seen and had led to the faith of the disciples, calls attention to the place and province of this manifestation, and to what was contained in the memory of one of the witnesses. And the ( sons £ ) of Zebedee —a phrase used for James and John in Matthew 20:20 ; Matthew 26:37 ; Matthew 27:56 . This is the only time that Zebedee is mentioned in this Gospel; but the reason for his sons being thus designated points unmistakably to the first call of these two men to discipleship by the side of this very lake, after they had witnessed the draught of fishes, becoming from that time forward "fishers of men". That they should here be mentioned after Thomas and after Nathanael corresponds with the reticence and modesty of the evangelist. This is still more probable if the two other disciples were μαθηταί in the broader sense. The simple fact that they are mentioned after the five apostles has been thought by some to imply that, whosoever these were, they were not of the number of the eleven. No one writing the story in the second century would, in an enumeration like this, have placed the proto-martyr James and the intimate friend of Peter, the great "light of Asia," the admitted author of the Apocalypse, and the spiritual father of Polycarp and Papias, after Thomas and Nathanael. After his manner, he (the author) here prepared for the implicit subsequent identification of the "disciple whom Jesus loved," and also the author of the Gospel, with one of the sons of Zebedee. The supposition that Andrew and Philip are meant by the "two other disciples" is not without verisimilitude, from their mention in John 1:1-51 . If this were the case, both of them are practically discriminated from the "disciple whom Jesus loved" by the obvious references to them elsewhere by name, while "John" never thus signalizes himself. The mention of seven disciples reveals the love of the writer for the number "seven," with its division into two groups of three and four. And it is remarkable that, if Andrew and Philip are the unnamed ones, the seven would correspond with the first seven apostles mentioned in Matthew's enumeration ( Matthew 10:2-4 ). Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Judas the brother of James, or Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot were not present. This, of course, rests on the hypothesis that Nathanael and Bartholomew are identical ( John 1:45 , note).