St. John the Apostle and Evangelist was the son of Zebedee and Salome, brother to James the Greater. He was called the Beloved disciple of Christ and stood by at his Crucifixion. He wrote the Gospel after the other Evangelists, about sixty-three years after our Lord's Ascension. Many things that they had omitted were supplied by him. The original was written in Greek; and by the Greeks he is titled: The Divine, St. Jerome relates that, when he was earnestly requested by the brethren to write the Gospel, he answered he would do it, if by ordering a common fast, they would all put up their prayers together to the Almighty God; which being ended replenished with the clearest and fullest revelation coming from Heaven, he burst forth into that preface: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD. The Student's Douay-Rheims series has been designed to help students of all ages develop a deeper love of Christ and his Church by providing low cost, easy-to-read editions of each of the books of Scripture. The text inside is Challoner's 1749 revision of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Holy Bible, reformatted to emphasize the narrative. No text from Challoner's revision of the translation has been altered. The only changes have been to the formatting.