I Was There
The Autobiography of John the Beloved Disciple
by
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I love old hymns and spirituals - Amazing Grace, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The
This book is a novel. It purports to be the autobiography of the man under The Cross, the autobiography of John the Beloved Disciple. It retells the familiar Bible stories and to them has been added new material, creations of my imagination.
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John was the youngest of the Disciples. He may have been a teenager when they first met, possibly around the time of Jesus’ baptism. John lived to be an extremely old man. Tradition has it more than one hundred years. So John became the last of the Disciples. The last person who had actually known Jesus and walked with Him. The growing company of the followers of Jesus incessantly tried to prevail on the old man to write or dictate his memoirs, his recollections of The Master. Before he died he finally yielded to their pressure. He managed to write it mostly all down. He may have become so weak that he had to dictate his final passages.
But the book he wrote was lost. Yet there was a second John who studied it before it disappeared and who wrote his Gospel based upon it.
And there are also many other things
which Jesus did, the which, if they
should be written every one, I suppose
that even the world itself could not
contain the books that should be written. Amen
JOHN,
In recent years a number of writings have come to light, many from Gnostic and Coptic sources, which have added strange chapters to the holy story. Perhaps someday the lost book of John will surface. If it does it will have a most profound impact on the faith of the Earth’s millions of Christians.
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About the Book
I WAS THERE
R. A. Horne
An old spiritual asks the question, “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”
John, the Beloved Disciple, was there, under the Cross, on Jesus’ left.
I WAS THERE is a novel that purports to be the first person autobiography of the disciple who Jesus loved, written down or dictated by him many years after Jesus’ death, in Ephesus where he had fled with Mary. It purports to be the “lost book of John” upon which another John based his gospel.
It retells many of the familiar Bible stories, but it also tells of John’s faith, his love, his doubts, the burdens of extreme old age, of the first followers of Jesus, and of John’s death.
About the Author
R. A. Horne has had two writing careers, scientific papers and advanced textbooks and in more recent years poetry, novels, short fiction, and nonfiction book reviews. One of his graduate degrees is in philosophy and this interest expanded into an interest in religion. He spent years reading through the great books of the world’s faiths, but the BIBLE easily remained “the greatest story ever told.” In I WAS THERE he tries to retell the familiar stories, although of course no one can improve on the splendid language of the King James translation, and to add some new stories of his own imaginative creation.