“John: The ‘Disciple Whom Jesus Loved,’” Liahona, Feb. 2026.
They Knew the Savior
John: The “Disciple Whom Jesus Loved”
John the Revelator continued to learn of Christ after His Resurrection.
Illustration by Laura Serra
John was one of the Savior’s Twelve Apostles. He and his brother James and their fellow Apostle Peter were part of the Lord’s inner circle, present with Him even when the other nine were absent. Despite this trio’s closeness to the Savior, John’s relationship with Jesus seems to have been unique.
He is the only one of the Apostles recorded to have witnessed the Crucifixion. More than 90 percent of his Gospel consists of material not found in the other three (including the one written by Matthew, a fellow Apostle). It was John who sat next to and rested his head on Jesus during the Last Supper (see John 13:23). It was John whom the Savior assigned to care for His mother after His departure (see John 19:26–27).
And it was John who called himself the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 21:7). Christians have wondered for centuries what John meant by this; after all, the Lord loves everyone. Elder Karl D. Hirst of the Seventy said, “I like to think that this was because John felt so completely loved by Jesus.” He compared it to Nephi’s reference to “my Jesus” (2 Nephi 33:6; emphasis added)—a connection so deep and personal that it feels exclusive. From that perspective, as we learn of the Lord and grow closer to Him, we can all strive to be the “disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Greater Love
Love is a recurring theme in John’s writing. In English, the word love appears 57 times in the Gospel of John. That’s more than the other three Gospels combined, in part because John quotes more of the Savior’s teachings about love than the others do. Love appears another 48 times in the 105 verses of John’s First Epistle. How fitting that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” would adopt love as a central theme.
John’s discipleship began before he met Jesus. He appears to have been a follower of John the Baptist and believed the Baptist’s testimony of Jesus (see John 1:35–40). John the Apostle was later John the Revelator, foreordained to write about the end of the world (see 1 Nephi 14:20–27). He was shown things that few others have seen and has continued, with the three Nephite disciples (see 3 Nephi 28:4–10), to minister to mankind for almost 20 centuries (and counting). John’s spiritual knowledge and experience must be almost unsurpassed.
Yet that understanding came only incrementally. When John outran Peter to the empty tomb on Easter morning, he didn’t enter but “deferred to the senior Apostle, who entered the sepulchre first.” John, speaking in the third person, notes that it wasn’t until this moment that he and Peter “believed” in the Resurrection: “For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead” (John 20:8–9).
If John—one of the Lord’s closest friends and most trusted advisers, the “disciple whom Jesus loved”—didn’t fully understand Jesus’s mission until he saw the empty tomb, we should be gentle with ourselves when we fail to comprehend something. John’s life and his open-ended mission remind us that even for disciples—especially for disciples—the process of getting to know the Savior is ongoing.