Annotation XCIII

”You shall indeed drink my cup.” — Matthew 20:23

On the death of John the Evangelist.

Chrysostom, homily 66 on Matthew, relates that John the Evangelist — whom many very grave authors have written to be still alive — died, slain by a violent death. For thus he introduces Christ speaking to the sons of Zebedee: “You shall indeed drink my cup. Great goods do I foretell to you: for you shall obtain the crown of martyrdom, and by a violent death, as I too, you shall depart from life, and in these [things] you shall have communion with me.” And in the homily on the Epistle to the Hebrews 27, on that word, “Others were stretched out,” etc., describing the kind of martyrdom and death of both, he says: “In this passage he seems to me to signify John and James. For ‘distention’ is said [to mean] beheading — unless perhaps by ‘John’ he understood the Baptist, beheaded by Herod.” Certainly Euthymius, in [his] commentaries, testifies that Chrysostom taught — not only in the present homily, but also in the first and second homily on the gospel of John — that the Evangelist was slain in Asia. George of Trebizond, citing this passage from the homily on Matthew, in [his] book On John [being] still alive, says that Chrysostom speaks of the martyrdom and violent death which John — preaching penance at the end of the age together with Enoch and Elijah — will suffer under the last persecution of Antichrist.