The identification of the beloved disciple in the Fourth Gospel (The Gospel of John) has prompted many and diverse interpretations in the course of the centuries. Little attention to the narrative and forgetting the old commentaries (such as that of Origen) lead to an abundance of proposals and to the fact that absurd interpretations take shape and be spread. The central idea of this paper is that, on the basis of two johannine texts (1,18 and 13,23), the beloved disciple is a prototype and cannot be identified. Starting from this assertion, the theme of typology and its function in the johannine text is briefly developed. The first part centers the attention on the analysis of the two texts in order to establish their exegetical relationship and their hermeneutical consequences, which has a bearing on the identification of the beloved disciple. The
second part deals with the typology in the Gospel of John in order to establish the way in which the figure of the beloved disciple functions.