disciple beloved of Jesus (, hon ephilei ho Iēsous) is used six times in the Gospel of John, but in no other New Testament accounts of Jesus. states that the Gospel of John is based on the written testimony of this disciple. Although since the 2nd century some people have taken verse 21:24 to mean that the author of the Gospel of John himself was the eyewitness (namely the disciple whom Jesus loved), other scholars point out that verse 21:24 indicates that the author is someone else than this disciple, because he's speaking about himself in the first person plural ('we know') and the disciple in the third person ('the disciple... who has written all these things'). Therefore, the author merely claims to have used an earlier written report, allegedly from this disciple, as a source for writing the Fourth Gospel. Even if the beloved disciple is to be accepted as the author of the Fourth Gospel, however, this still leaves open the question of what the identity of this beloved disciple was. Hugh J. Schonfield, in the controversial The Passover Plot (1965) and other works, saw evidence that the source of this Gospel was the Beloved Disciple of the Last Supper and further that this person, perhaps named John, was a senior Temple priest and so probably a member of the Sanhedrin. This would account for the knowledge of and access to the Temple which would not have been available to rough fishermen and followers of a disruptive rural preacher from the Galilee, one who was being accused of heresy besides, and probably for the evanescent presence of the Beloved Disciple in the events of Jesus' Ministry. On this reading, the Gospel was perhaps written by a student and follower of this disciple in his last years, perhaps at Patmos. Schonfield agrees that the Gospel was the product of the Apostle's great age, but further identifies him as the Beloved Disciple of the Last Supper, and so believes that the Gospel is based on first hand witness, though decades later and perhaps through the assistance of a younger follower and writer, which may account for the mixture of Hebraicisms (from the Disciple) and Greek idiom (from the assistant). Identification with John the Apostle Since the end of the first century, the Beloved Disciple has been commonly identified with John the Evangelist. In his early-4th-century Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius wrote 'the