John, the Epistles of
John, The Epistles of
FIRST EPISTLE. Genuineness. Polycarp, John’s disciple (ad Philippians 7), quotes 1Jo 4:3. Eusebius (H. E., iii. 39) says of Papias, John’s hearer, “he used testimonies from the first epistle of John.” Irenaeus (Eusebius, H. E., v. 8) often quoted it; he quotes (Haeres. iii. 15, sections 5,8) from John by name 1Jo 2:18; and in 1Jo 3:16, section 7 he quotes 1Jo 4:1-3; 1Jo 5:1; 2Jo 1:7-8. Clement Alex. (Strom. ii. 66, p. 664) refers to 1Jo 5:16 as in John’s larger epistle; compare Strom. iii. 32,42; iv. 102. Tertullian adv. Marcion, vi. 16, refers to 1Jo 4:1; adv. Praxean xv to 1Jo 1:1; also 1Jo 1:28, and contra Gnost. 12. Cyprian (Ep. 28:24) quotes 1Jo 2:3-4 as John’s; and, de Orat. Domini, 5, quotes 1Jo 2:15-17; De opere et Eleemos. quotes 1Jo 1:8; De bono Patientiae quotes 1Jo 2:6.
Muratori’s Fragment on the Canon states “there are two (the Gospel and epistle) of John esteemed universal,” quoting 1Jo 1:3. The Peshito Syriac has it. Origen (Eusebius vi. 25) designates the first epistle genuine, and “probably second and third epistles, though all do not recognize the latter two”; he quotes 1Jo 1:5 (tom. 13 vol. 2). Dionysius of Alexandria, Origen’s scholar, cites this epistle’s words as the evangelist John’s. Eusebius (H. E., iii. 24) says John’s first epistle and Gospel are “acknowledged without question by those of the present day, as well as by the ancients.” So Jerome (Catalog. Ecclesiastes Script.). Marcion opposed it only because it was opposed to his heresies. The Gospel and the first epistle are alike in style, yet evidently not mere copies either of the other. The individual notices, it being a universal epistle, are fewer than in Paul’s epistles; but what there are accord with John’s position.
He implies his apostleship (1Jo 2:7; 1Jo 2:26), alludes to his Gospel (Joh 1:1, compare Joh 1:14; Joh 20:27), and the affectionate He uniting him as an aged pastor to his spiritual “children” (1Jo 2:18-19). In 1Jo 4:1-3 he alludes to the false teachers as known to his readers; in 1Jo 5:21 he warns them against the idols of the world around. Docetism existed in germ already, though the Docete by name appear first in the second century (Col 1:15-18; 1Ti 3:16; Heb 1:1-3). Hence 1Jo 4:1-3 denounces as “not of God every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” (compare Joh 2:22-23). Presciently the Spirit through John forearms the church against the coming heresy.
TO WHOM THE EPISTLES WERE ADDRESSED. Augustine (Quaest. Evang. 2:39) says it was addressed to the Parthians, i.e. the Christians beyond the Euphrates, outside the Roman empire, “the church at Babylon elected together with” (1Pe 5:13) the churches in the Ephesian region, where Peter sent his epistles (1Pe 1:1; Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia). As Peter addressed the Asiatic flock tended first by Paul, then by John, so John, Peter’s close companion, addresses the flock among whom Peter was when he wrote. Thus “the elect lady” (2Jo 1:1) answers to “the church elected together.”
TIME AND PLACE. This epistle is subsequent to the Gospel, for it assumes the reader’s acquaintance with the Gospel facts and Christ’s speeches, and His aspect as the incarnate Word God manifest in the flesh, set forth in John’s Gospel. His fatherly tone addressing his “little children” implies it was written in old age, perhaps A.D. 90. The rise of antichristian teachers he marks as a sign of “the last time” (1Jo 2:18), no other “age” or dispensation will be until Christ comes; for His coming the church is to be ever waiting; Heb 1:2, “these last days.” The region of Ephesus, where Gnostic heresy sprang up, was probably the place, and the latter part of the apostolic age the time, of writing. Contents. Fellowship with the Father and the Son is the subject and object (1Jo 1:3). Two divisions occur:
(1) 1 John 1:5 – 2:28, God is light without darkness; consequently, to have fellowship with Him necessitates walking in the light. Confession and consequent forgiveness of sins, through Christ’s propitiation for the world and advocacy for believers, are a necessary preliminary; a further step is positive keeping God’s commandments, the sum of which is love as contrasted with hatred, the sum of disobedience. According to their several stages of spiritual growth, children, fathers, young men, as respectively forgiven, knowing the Father, and having overcome the wicked one, John exhorts them not to love the world, which is incompatible with the indwelling of the Father’s love. This anointing love dwelling in us, and our continuing to abide in the Son and in the Father, is the antidote against the antichristian teachers in the world, who are of the world, not of the church, and therefore have gone out from it.
(2) 1 John 2:29 – 5:5 handles the opening thesis: “He is righteous,” therefore “every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him.” Sonship involves present self purification, first because we desire now to be like Him, “even as He is pure,” secondly because we hope hereafter to be perfectly like Him, our sonship now hidden shall be manifested, and we shall be made like Him when He shall be manifested (answering to Paul’s Colossians 3), for our then “seeing him as He is” involves transfiguration into His likeness (compare 2Co 3:18; Phi 3:21). In contrast, the children of the devil hate; the children of God love. Love assures of acceptance with God for ourselves and our prayers, accompanied as they are with obedience to His commandment to “believe on Jesus Christ, and love one another”; the seal is “the Spirit given us” (1Jo 3:24). In contrast (as in the first division), denial of Christ and adherence to the world characterize the false spirits (1Jo 4:1-6). The essential feature of sonship or birth of God is unslavish love to God, because God first loved us and gave His Son to die for us (1Jo 4:18-19), and consequent love to the brethren as being God’s sons like ourselves, and so victory over the world through belief in Jesus as the Son of God (1Jo 5:4-5).
(3) 1Jo 5:6-21. Finally, the truth on which our fellowship with God rests is, Christ came by water in His baptism, the blood of atonement, and the witnessing Spirit which is truth, which correspond to our baptism with water and the Spirit, and our receiving the atonement by His blood and the witness of His Spirit. In the opening he rested this truth on his apostolic witness of the eye, the ear, and the touch; so at the close on God’s witness, which the believer accepts, and by rejecting which the unbeliever makes God a liar. He adds his reason for writing (1Jo 5:13), corresponding to 1Jo 1:4 at the beginning, namely, that “believers may know they have (already) eternal life,” the spring of “joy” (compare Joh 20:31), and so may have “confidence” in their prayers being answered (1Jo 5:14-15; compare 1Jo 3:22 in the second part), e.g. their intercessions for a brother sinning, provided his sin be not unto death (1Jo 5:16). He sums up with stating our knowledge of Him that is true, through His gift, our being in Him by virtue of being in His Son Jesus Christ; being “born of God” we keep ourselves so that the wicked one toucheth us not, in contrast to the world lying in the wicked one; therefore still, “little children, keep yourselves from idols” literal and spiritual.
STYLE. Aphorism and repetition of his own phrases abound. The affectionate hortatory tone, and the Hebraistic form which delights in parallelism of clauses (as contrasted with Paul’s logical Grecian style), and his own simplicity of spirit dwelling fondly on the one grand theme, produce this repetition of fundamental truths again and again, enlarged, applied, and condensed by turns. Contemplative rather than argumentative, he dwells on the inner rather than the outer Christian life. The thoughts do not move forward by progressive steps, as in Paul, but in circles round one central thought, viewed now under the positive now under the negative aspect. His Lord’s contrasted phrases in the Gospel John adopts in his epistles, “flesh,” “spirit,” “light,” “darkness,” “life,” “death,” “abide in Him”; “fellowship with the Father and Son, and with one another” is a phrase not in the Gospel, but in Acts and Paul’s epistles.
It marks enjoyment experimentally of Christian verities as living realities, not abstract dogmas. Burning zeal, all absorbing love, appear in John combined with contemplative repose. Simple, withal profound, his writing is unrhetorical and undialectic, gentle, comforting, loving, the reflex of Jesus his Lord whose beloved disciple he was. Ewald speaks of its “unruffled heavenly repose … the tone not so much of a father talking with beloved children as of a glorified saint from a higher world.” Place in building up the church. Peter founded, Paul propagated, John completed it. The Old Testament puts prominent the fear of God; John, the last New Testament writer, the love of God. Yet as Old Testament also sets forth love, so John as a Boanerges also sets forth the terror of the Lord against unbelievers.
Three leading developments of Christian doctrine are: the Pauline, the Jacobean (between which the Petrine is the intermediate link), and the Johannean. James, whose molding was in Judaism, presents as a rule of life the law, under the gospel, established in its spirit, the letter only being superseded. John had not, like the apostle of the Gentiles, been brought to faith and peace through conflict, but through a quiet development from the personal view of Christ, and from communion with Him. So in John everything turns on the contrast: life in fellowship with Christ, death in separation from Him; life, light, truth, opposed to death, darkness, lie. James and Peter represent the gradual transition from spiritualized Judaism to independent Christianity; Paul, independent Christianity contrasted with Judaism. John by the contemplative element reconciles the two, and forms the closing point in the training of the apostolic church (Neander).
SECOND AND THIRD EPISTLES. Authenticity. The similar tone, style, and sentiments prove both to be by the same writer. Irenaeus (adv. Haer, i. 16, section 3) quotes 2Jo 1:10-11, and 2Jo 1:7 in iii. 16, section 8, as John’s writing. Clement Alex. (Strom. ii. 66), A.D. 192, speaks of John’s larger epistle, and in Adumbr. p. 1011, “John’s second epistle to the Parthians (so it ought to be read for parthenous; see Augustine quoted, JOHN’S FIRST EPISTLE) is the simplest; it was to a Babylonian, the elect lady.” Dionysius of Alexandria (Eusebius ,H. E. vii. 25) says “John never names himself in his epistles, not even in the second and third, though short, but calls himself the presbyter (elder)”: 2 John 1; 3Jo 1:1, so 1Pe 5:1. Alexander of Alex. cites 2Jo 1:10-11 as John’s (Socrates H. E. i. 6). Cyprian, in referring to the council of Carthage (De Haer. Bapt.), appeals to 2Jo 1:10, “John the apostle in his epistle said, If any come to you,” as recognized by the N. African church.
The Peshito old Syriac version wants these two epistles. Eusebius reckous them among the controverted (antilegomena) scriptures, as distinguished from those universally acknowledged (homologoumena); his own opinion was that they were genuine (Demoustr. Evang. iii. 5). (See CANON OF SCRIPTURE.) Origen (Eusebius, H. E. vi. 25) implies that most, though not all recognized their genuineness. Jerome (de Vir. Illustr. 9) mentions them as John’s, whose sepulchre was shown at Ephesus in his day. The antilegomena were generally recognized after the council of Nice, A.D. 325. So Cyril of Jerusalem, A.D. 349; Gregory Naz., A.D. 389; and the councils of Hippo (A.D. 393) and Carthage (A.D. 397). So the oldest extant manuscripts eight of the 13 verses in 2 John 1 are in 1 John. A forger would never call John “the elder.” Their brevity and the private nature of their contents caused the two epistles to be less read in church assemblies, and less quoted; hence their non-universal recognition at first.
Their private nature confirms their genuineness, for there seems no purpose in their forgery. The style and coloring accord with those of 1 John. Persons addressed. 3 John 1 is directed to Gaius or CAIUS, probably of Corinth, a “host of the church.” (See GAIUS.) See Rom 16:23; 1Co 1:14. Mill believes Gains, bishop of Pergamos (Apost. Const. vii. 40), a convert of John, and a man of wealth (3Jo 1:4-5), is meant. 2 John 1 is addressed to the elect lady, and closes with “the children of thy elect sister greet thee.” Now 1Pe 1:1-2, addresses the elect in Asia, and closes (1Pe 5:13) “the Church at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you.” “Lady” (kuria) in Greek is the root of church (kuriakee, belonging to the Lord). So John writes to the elect church in Babylon where his old associate Peter ministered, as Peter thence had sent salutations of the elect church in the then Parthian (see Clement Alex. quoted above) Babylon to her elect sister in Asia where John presided (Wordsworth).
DATE AND PLACE. Eusebius (H. E. iii. 25) relates that John, after Domitian’s death, returned from Patmos to Ephesus, and went on missionary tours into the pagan regions around, and visited the churches, ordaining bishops and clergy (compare 2Jo 1:12; 3Jo 1:9-10; 3Jo 1:14). On one tour he rebuked Diotrephes. If this be so, both epistles were written after Revelation, in his old age, which harmonizes with their tone, and in the Ephesian region.
Fuente: Fausset’s Bible Dictionary
John, The Epistles of
I.GENERAL CHARACTER
1.A True Letter
2.Subject-Matter
3.Characteristics of the Writer
4.Style and Diction
II.POLEMICAL AIM
1.Gnosticism
2.Docetism
3.Antinomianism
4.Cerinthus
III.STRUCTURE AND SUMMARY
1.The Prologue, 1 John 1:1-4
2.First Cycle, 1 John 1:5 through 2:28 – The Christian Life as Fellowship with God (Walking in the Light) Tested by Righteousness, Love and Belief
(a)Paragraph A, 1 John 1:8 through 2:6
(b)Paragraph B, 1 John 2:7-17
(i) Positively
(ii) Negatively
(c)Paragraph C, 1 John 2:18-28
3.Second Cycle, 1 John 2:29 through 4:6 – Divine Sonship Tested by Righteousness, Love and Belief
(a)Paragraph A, 1 John 2:29 through 3:10a
(b)Paragraph B, 1 John 3:10b-24b
(c)Paragraph C, 1 John 3:24b through 4:6
4.Third Cycle, 1 John 4:7 through 5:21 – Closer Correlation of Righteousness, Love and Belief
(a)Section I, 1 John 4:7 through 5:3a
(i) Paragraph A, 1 John 4:7-12
(ii) Paragraph B, 1 John 4:13-16
(iii) Paragraph C, 1 John 4:17 through 5:3a
(b)Section II, 1 John 5:3b-21
(i) Paragraph A, 1 John 5:3b-12
(ii) Paragraph B, 1 John 5:13-21
IV.CANONICITY AND AUTHORSHIP
1.Traditional View
2.Critical Views
3.Internal Evidence
V.RELATIONSHIP TO THE FOURTH GOSPEL
1.Common Characteristics
2.Coincidences of Vocabulary
3.Divergences of Vocabulary
4.Arguments against Unity of Authorship
5.Conclusion
6.Question of Priority
LITERATURE
Among the 7 New Testament epistles which from ancient times have been called catholic (universal) there is a smaller group of three in which the style alike of thought and language points to a common authorship, and which are traditionally associated with the name of the apostle John. Of these, again, the first differs widely from the other two in respect not only of intrinsic importance, but of its early reception in the church and unquestioned canonicity.
The First Epistle
I. General Character.
1. A True Letter:
Not only is the Epistle an anonymous writing; one of its unique features among the books of the New Testament is that it does not contain a single proper name (except our Lord’s), or a single definite allusion, personal, historical, or geographical. It is a composition, however, which a person calling himself I sends to certain other persons whom he calls you, and is, in form at least, a letter. The criticism which has denied that it is more than formally so is unwarranted. It does not fall under either of Deissmann’s categories – the true letter, intended only for the perusal of the person or persons to whom it is addressed, and the epistle, written with literary art and with an eye to the public. But it does possess that character of the New Testament epistles in general which is well described by Sir William Ramsay (Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 24): They spring from the heart of the writer and speak direct to the heart of the readers. They were often called forth by some special crisis in the history of the persons addressed, so that they rise out of the actual situation in which the writer conceives the readers to be placed; they express the writer’s keen and living sympathy with and participation in the fortunes of the whole class addressed, and are not affected by any thought of a wider public…. On the other hand, the letters of this class express general principles of life and conduct, religion and ethics, applicable to a wider range of circumstances than those which called them forth; and they appeal as emphatically and intimately to all Christians in all time as they did to those addressed in the first instance. The 1st Epistle of John could not be more exactly characterized than by these words. Though its main features are didactic and controversial, the personal note is frequently struck, and with much tenderness and depth of feeling. Under special stress of emotion, the writer’s paternal love, sympathy and solicitude break out in the affectionate appellation, little children, or, yet more endearingly, my little children. Elsewhere the prefatory beloved shows how deeply he is stirred by the sublimity of his theme and the sense of its supreme importance to his readers. He shows himself intimately acquainted with their religious environment (1Jo 2:19; 1Jo 4:1), dangers (1Jo 2:26; 1Jo 3:7; 1Jo 5:21), attainments (1Jo 2:12-14, 1Jo 2:21), achievements (1Jo 4:4) and needs (1Jo 3:19; 1Jo 5:13). Further, the Epistle is addressed primarily to the circle of those among whom the author has habitually exercised his ministry as evangelist and teacher. He has been wont to announce to them the things concerning the Word of Life (1Jo 1:1, 1Jo 1:2), that they might have fellowship with him (1Jo 1:3), and now, that his (or their) joy may be full, he writes these things unto them (1Jo 1:4). He writes as light shines. Love makes the task a necessity, but also a delight.
2. Subject-Matter:
There is no New Testament writing which is throughout more vigorously controversial: for the satisfactory interpretation of the Epistle as a whole, recognition of the polemical aim that pervades it is indispensable. But it is true also that there is no such writing in which the presentation of the truth more widely overflows the limits of the immediate occasion. The writer so constantly lifts up against the error he combats, the simple, sublime and satisfying facts and principles of the Christian revelation, so lifts up every question at issue into the light of eternal truth, that the Epistle pursues its course through the ages, bringing to the church of God the vision and the inspiration of the Divine. The influence of the immediate polemical purpose, however, is manifest, not only in the contents of the Epistle, but in its limitations as well. In a sense it may be said that the field of thought is a narrow one. God is seen exclusively as the Father of Spirits, the Light and Life of the universe of souls. His creatorship and government of the world, the providential aspects and agencies of salvation, the joys and sorrows, hopes and fears that spring from the terrestrial conditions and changes of human life, their disciplinary purpose and effect – to all this the Epistle contains no reference. The themes are exclusively theological and ethical. The writer’s immediate interest is confined to that region in which the Divine and human vitally and directly meet – to that in God which is communicable to man, to that in man by which he is capax Dei. The Divine nature as life and light, and love and righteousness; the Incarnation of this Divine nature in Jesus, with its presuppositions and consequences, metaphysical and ethical; the imparting of this Divine nature to men by regeneration; the antithesis to it – sin – and its removal by propitiation; the work of the Holy Spirit; the Christian life, the mutual indwelling of God and man, as tested by its beliefs, its antagonism to sin, its inevitable debt of love – such are the fundamental themes to which every idea in the Epistle is directly related. The topics, if few, are supremely great; and the limitations of the field of vision are more than compensated by the profundity and intensity of spiritual perception.
3. Characteristics of the Writer:
The Epistle is in a sense impersonal to the last degree, offering a strange contrast to that frankness of self-revelation which gives such charm to Paul’s letters; yet few writings so clearly reveal the deepest characteristics of the writer. We feel in it the high serenity of a mind that lives in constant fellowship with the greatest thoughts and is nourished at the eternal fountain-head; but also the fervent indignation and vehement recoil of such a mind in contact with what is false and evil. It has been truly called the most passionate book in the New Testament. Popular instinct has not erred in giving to its author the title, Apostle of Love. Of the various themes which are so wonderfully intertwined in it, that to which it most of all owes its unfading charm and imperishable value is love. It rises to its sublimest height, to the apex of all revelation, in those passages in which its author is so divinely inspired to write of the eternal life, in God and man, as love.
But it is an inveterate misconception which regards him solely as the exponent of love. Equally he reveals himself as one whose mind is dominated by the sense of truth. There are no words more characteristic of him than true (alethinos, denoting that which both ideally and really corresponds to the name it bears) and the truth (aletheia, the reality of things sub specie aeternitatis). To him Christianity is not only a principle of ethics, or even a way of salvation; it is both of them, because it is primarily the truth, the one true disclosure of the realities of the spiritual and eternal world. Thus it is that his thought so constantly develops itself by antithesis. Each conception has its fundamental opposite: light, darkness; life, death; love, hate; truth, falsehood; the Father, the world; God, the devil. There is no shading, no gradation in the picture. No sentence is more characteristic of the writer than this: Ye know that no lie is of the truth (1Jo 2:21 margin). But again, his sense of these radical antagonisms is essentially moral, rather than intellectual. It seems impossible that any writing could display a more impassioned sense, than this Epistle does, of the tremendous imperative of righteousness, a more rigorous intolerance of all sin (1Jo 2:4; 1Jo 3:4, 1Jo 3:8, 1Jo 3:9, 1Jo 3:10). The absolute antagonism and incompatibility between the Christian life and sin of whatsoever kind or degree is maintained with a vehemence of utterance that verges at times upon the paradoxical (1Jo 3:9; 1Jo 5:18). So long as the church lays up this Epistle in its heart, it can never lack a moral tonic of wholesome severity.
4. Style and Diction:
The style is closely, though perhaps unconsciously, molded upon the Hebrew model, and especially upon the parallelistic forms of the Wisdom literature. One has only to read the Epistle with an attentive ear to perceive that, though using another language, the writer had in his own car, all the time, the swing and cadences of Hebrew verse. The diction is inartificial and unadorned. Not a simile, not a metaphor (except the most fundamental, like walking in the light) occurs. The limitations in the range of ideas are matched by those of vocabulary and by the unvarying simplicity of syntactical form. Yet limited and austere as the literary medium is, the writer handles its resources often with consummate skill. The crystalline simplicity of the style perfectly expresses the simple profundity of the thought. Great spiritual intuitions shine like stars in sentences of clear-cut gnomic terseness. Historical (1Jo 1:1) and theological (1Jo 1:2; 1Jo 4:2) statements are made with exquisite precision. The frequent reiteration of nearly the same thoughts in nearly the same language, though always with variation and enrichment, gives a cumulative effect which is singularly impressive. Such passages as 1Jo 2:14-17, with its calm challenge to the arrogant materialism of the world – And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever – or the closing verses of the Epistle, with their thrice-repeated triumphant we know and their last word of tender, urgent admonition, have a solemn magnificence of effect which nothing but such simplicity of language, carrying such weight of thought, could produce. If it has been true of any writer that le style est l’homme, it is true of the author of this Epistle.
II. Polemical Aim.
The polemical intention of the Epistle has been universally recognized; but there has been diversity of opinion as to its actual object. By the older commentators, generally, this was found in the perilous state of the church or churches addressed, which had left their first love and lapsed into Laodicean lukewarmness. But the Epistle gives no sign of this, and it contains many passages that are inconsistent with it (1Jo 2:13, 1Jo 2:14, 1Jo 2:20, 1Jo 2:21, 1Jo 2:27; 1Jo 4:4; 1Jo 5:18-20). The danger which immediately threatens the church is from without, not from within. There is a spirit of error (1Jo 4:6) abroad in the world. From the church itself (1Jo 2:18), many false prophets have gone forth (1Jo 4:1), corrupters of the gospel, veritable antichrists (1Jo 2:18). And it may be asserted as beyond question that the peril against which the Epistle was intended to arm the church was the spreading influence of some form of Gnosticism.
1. Gnosticism:
The pretensions of Gnosticism to a higher esoteric knowledge of Divine things seems to be clearly referred to in several passages. In 1Jo 2:4, 1Jo 2:6, 1Jo 2:9, e.g. one might suppose that they are almost verbally quoted (He that saith; I know Him; I abide in Him; I am in the light). When we observe, moreover, the prominence given throughout to the idea of knowledge and the special significance of some of these passages, the conviction grows that the writer’s purpose is not only to refute the false, but to exhibit apostolic Christianity, believed and lived, as the true Gnosis – the Divine reality of which Gnosticism was but a fantastic caricature. The confidence he has concerning his readers is that they know him who is from the beginning, that they know the Father (1Jo 2:13). Every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God (1Jo 4:7); and the final note upon which the Epistle closes is: We know him that is true, and we are in him that is true (1Jo 5:20). The knowledge of the ultimate Reality, the Being who is the eternal life, is for Christian and Gnostic alike the goal of aspiration.
But it is against two closely related developments of Gnostic tendency, a docetic view of the incarnation, and an antinomian view of morals, that the Epistle is specifically directed. Both of these sprang naturally from the dualism which was the fundamental and formative principle of Gnosticism in all its many forms. According to the dualistic conception of existence, the moral schism of which we are conscious in experience is original, eternal, inherent in the nature of beings. There are two independent and antagonistic principles of being from which severally come all the good and all the evil that exist. The source and the seat of evil were found in the material element, in the body with its senses and appetites, and in its sensuous earthly environment; and it was held inconceivable that the Divine nature should have immediate contact with the material side of existence, or influence upon it.
2. Docetism:
To such a view of the universe Christianity could be adjusted only by a docetic interpretation of the Person of Christ. A real incarnation was unthinkable. The Divine could enter into no actual union with a corporeal organism. The human nature of Christ and the incidents of His earthly career were more or less an illusion. And it is with this docetic subversion of the truth of the incarnation that the antichrists are specially identified (1Jo 2:22, 1Jo 2:23; 1Jo 4:2, 1Jo 4:3), and against it that John directs with wholehearted fervor his central thesis – the complete, permanent, personal identification of the historical Jesus with the Divine Being who is the Word of Life (1Jo 1:1), the Christ (1Jo 4:2) and the Son of God (1Jo 5:5): Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh. In Joh 5:6 there is a still more definite reference to the special form which Gnostic Christology assumed in the teaching of Cerinthus and his school. According to Irenaeus (Adv. Haer., i. 26, 1) this Cerinthus, who was John’s prime antagonist in Ephesus, taught that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary, and was distinguished from other men only by superiority in justice, prudence and wisdom; that at His baptism the heavenly Christ descended upon Him in the form of a dove; that on the eve of His Passion, the Christ again left Jesus, so that Jesus died and rose again, but the Christ, being spiritual, did not suffer. That is to say, that, in the language of the Epistle, the Christ came by water, but not, as John strenuously affirms, by water and blood … not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood (1Jo 5:6). He who was baptized of John in Jordan, and He whose life-blood was shed on Calvary, is the same Jesus and the same Christ, the same Son of God eternally.
3. Antinomianism:
A further consequence of the dualistic interpretation of existence is that sin, in the Christian meaning of sin, disappears. It is no longer a moral opposition (anoma), in the human personality, to good; it is a physical principle inherent in all nonspiritual being. Not the soul, but the flesh is its organ; and redemption consists, not in the renewal of the moral nature, but in its emancipation from the flesh. Thus it is no mere general contingency, but a definite tendency that is contemplated in the repeated warning: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us…. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us (1Jo 1:8, 1Jo 1:10).
With the nobler and more earnest spirits the practical corollary of this irreconcilable dualism in human nature was the ascetic life; but to others the same principle readily suggested an opposite method of achieving the soul’s deliverance from the yoke of the material – an attitude of moral indifference toward the deeds of the body. Let the duality of nature be boldly reduced to practice. Let body and spirit be regarded as separate entities, each obeying its own laws and acting according to its own nature, without mutual interference; the spiritual nature could not be involved in, nor affected by, the deeds of the flesh. Vehement opposition to this deadly doctrine is prominent in the Epistle – in such utterances as Sin is lawlessness (1Jo 3:4) and its converse All unrighteousness is sin (1Jo 5:17), but especially in the stringent emphasis laid upon actual conduct, doing righteousness or doing sin. The false spiritualism which regards the contemplation of heavenly things as of far superior importance to the requirements of commonplace morality is sternly reprobated: Little children, let no man lead you astray: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous (1Jo 3:7); and the converse application of the same doctrine, that the mere doing of sin is of little or no moment to the spiritual man, is met with the trenchant declaration, He that doeth sin is of the devil (1Jo 3:8). The whole passage (1 Jn 2:29 through 3:10) presupposes, as familiar to its readers, a doctrine of moral indifferentism according to which the status of the spiritual man is not to be tested by the commonplace facts of moral conduct. It is only as a passionate contradiction of this hateful tenet that the paradoxical language of 1Jo 3:6, 1Jo 3:9 and 1Jo 5:18 can be understood.
To the same polemical necessity is due the uniquely reiterated emphasis which the Epistle lays upon brotherly love, and the almost fierce tone in which the new commandment is promulgated. To the Gnostic, knowledge was the sum of attainment. They give no heed to love, says Ignatius, caring not for the widow, the orphan or the afflicted, neither for those who are in bonds nor for those who are released from bonds, neither for the hungry nor the thirsty. That a religion which banished or neglected love should call itself Christian or claim affinity with Christianity excites John’s hottest indignation; against it he lifts up his supreme truth, God is love, with its immediate consequence that to be without love is to be without capacity for knowing God (1Jo 4:7, 1Jo 4:8). The assumption of a lofty mystical piety apart from dutiful conduct in the ordinary relations of life is ruthlessly underlined as the vaunt of a self-deceiver (1Jo 4:20); and the crucial test by which we may assure our self-accusing hearts that we are of the truth is love not in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth (1Jo 3:18).
The question is raised whether the polemic of the Epistle is directed against the same persons throughout or whether in its two branches, the Christological and the ethical, it has different objects of attack. The latter view is maintained on the ground that no charge of libertine teaching or conduct is brought against the antichrists, and there is no proof that docetism in Asia Minor lay open to such a charge. But the other view has greater probability. The Epistle suggests nothing else than that the same spirit of error which is assailing the faith of the church (1Jo 4:6) is also a peril to the moral integrity of its life (1Jo 3:7). And if there is no proof that docetism in Asia Minor was also antinomian, there is no proof that it was not. The probability is that it was. Docetism and the emancipation of the flesh were both natural fruits of the dualistic theory of life.
4. Cerinthus:
The name, which unvarying tradition associates with the Epistle, as John’s chief antagonist in Ephesus, is that of Cerinthus. Unfortunately the accounts which have come down to us of Cerinthus and his teaching are fragmentary and confused, and those of his character, though unambiguous, come only from his opponents. But it is certain that he held a docetic view of the incarnation, and, according to the only accounts we possess, his character was that of a voluptuary. So far as they go, the historical data harmonize with the internal evidence of the Epistle itself in giving the impression that the different tendencies it combats are such as would be naturally evolved in the thought and practice of those who held, as Cerinthus did, that the material creation, and even the moral law, had its origin, not in the Supreme God, but in an inferior power.
III. Structure and Summary.
In the judgment of many critics, the Epistle possesses nothing that can be called an articulate structure of thought, its aphoristic method admitting of no logical development; and this estimate has a large measure of support in the fact that there is no New Testament writing regarding the plan of which there has been greater variety of opinion. The present writer believes, nevertheless, that it is erroneous, and that, in its own unique way, the Epistle is a finely articulated composition. The word that best describes the author’s mode of thinking is spiral. The course of thought does not move from point to point in a straight line. It is like a winding staircase – always revolving around the same center, always recurring to the same topics, but at a higher level.
Carefully following the topical order, one finds, e.g., a paragraph (1Jo 2:3-6) insisting upon practical righteousness as a guaranty of the Christian life; then one finds this treated a second time in 1 Jn 2:29 through 3:10a; and yet again in 1Jo 5:3 and 1Jo 5:18. Similarly, we find a paragraph on the necessity of love in 1Jo 2:7-11, and again in 1Jo 3:10-20, and yet again in 1Jo 4:7-13, and also in 4:17 through 5:2. So also, a paragraph concerning the necessity of holding the true belief in the incarnate Son of God in 1Jo 2:18-28, in 1Jo 4:1-6, and the same subject recurring in 1Jo 4:13-16 and 1Jo 5:4-12. And we shall observe that everywhere these indispensable characteristics of the Christian life are applied as tests; that in effect the Epistle is an apparatus of tests, its definite object being to furnish its readers with the necessary criteria by which they may sift the false from the true, and satisfy themselves of their being begotten of God. These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life (1Jo 5:13). These fundamental tests of the Christian life – doing righteousness, loving one another, believing that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh – are the connecting themes that bind together the whole structure of the Epistle. Thus, if we divide the Epistle into 3 main sections, the first ending at 1Jo 2:28, the second at 1Jo 4:6, the result is that in the first and second of these sections we find precisely the same topics coming in precisely the same order; while in the third section (4:7 through 5:21), though the sequence is somewhat different, the thought-material is exactly the same. The leading themes, the tests of righteousness, love, and belief, are all present; and they alone are present. There is, therefore, a natural division of the Epistle into these three main sections, or, as they might be descriptively called, cycles, in each of which the same fundamental themes appear. On this basis we shall now give a brief analysis of its structure and summary of its contents.
1. The Prologue, 1Jo 1:1-4 :
The writer announces the source of the Christian revelation – the historical manifestation of the eternal Divine life in Jesus Christ – and declares himself a personal witness of the facts in which this manifestation has been given. Here, at the outset, he hoists the flag under which he fights. The incarnation is not seeming or temporary, but real. That which was from the beginning – the eternal life, which was with the Father – is identical with that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled.
2. First Cycle, 1 John 1:5 Through 2:28:
The Christian life, as fellowship with God (walking in the Light) tested by righteousness, love and belief. – The basis of the whole section is the announcement: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1Jo 1:5). What God is at once determines the condition of fellowship with Him; and this, therefore, is set forth: first, negatively (1Jo 1:6): if we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in the darkness; then, positively (1Jo 1:7): if we walk in the light, as he is in the light. What, then, is it to walk in the light, and what to walk in darkness? The answer is given in what follows.
(a) Paragraph A, 1 John 1:8 through 2:6:
(Walking in the Light tested by righteousness): First, in confession of sin (1 Jn 1:8 through 2:2), then in actual obedience (1Jo 2:3-6). The first fact upon which the light of God impinges in human life is sin; and the first test of walking in the light is the recognition and confession of this fact. Such confession is the first step into fellowship with God, because it brings us under the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus, His Son (1Jo 1:7), and makes His intercession available for us (1Jo 2:1). But the light not only reveals sin; its greater function is to reveal duty; and to walk in the light is to keep God’s commandments (1Jo 2:3), His word (1Jo 2:5), and to walk even as Christ walked (1Jo 2:6).
(b) Paragraph B, 1Jo 2:7-17 :
(Walking in the Light tested by love):
(i) Positively:
The old-new commandment (1Jo 2:7-11). Love is the commandment which is old, because familiar to the readers of the Epistle from their first acquaintance with the rudiments of Christianity (1Jo 2:7); but also new, because ever fresh and living to those who have fellowship with Christ in the true light which is now shining for them (1Jo 2:8). On the contrary, He that saith he is in the light and hateth his brother, is in the darkness (1Jo 2:9). The antithesis is then repeated with variation and enrichment of thought (1Jo 2:10, 1Jo 2:11). (Then follows a parenthetical address to the readers (1Jo 2:12-14). This being treated as a parenthesis, the unity of the paragraph at once becomes apparent.)
(ii) Negatively:
If walking in the light has its guaranty in loving one’s brother, it is tested no less by not loving the world. One cannot at the same time participate in the life of God and in a moral life which is governed by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vain-glory of the world.
(c) Paragraph C, 1Jo 2:18-28 :
(Walking in the Light tested by belief): The light of God not only reveals sin and duty, the children of God (our brother) and the world in their true character; it also reveals Jesus in His true character, as the Christ, the incarnate Son of God. And all that calls itself Christianity is to be tested by its reception or rejection of that truth. In this paragraph light and darkness are not expressly referred to; but the continuity of thought with the preceding paragraphs is unmistakable. Throughout this first division of the Epistle the point of view is that of fellowship with God, through receiving and acting according to the light which His self-revelation sheds upon all things in the spiritual realm. Unreal Christianity in every form is comprehensively a lie. It may be the antinomian lie of him who says he has no sin (1Jo 1:8) yet is indifferent to keeping God’s commandments (1Jo 2:4), the lie of lovelessness (1Jo 2:9), or the lie of Antichrist, who, claiming spiritual enlightenment, yet denies that Jesus is the Christ (1Jo 2:22).
3. Second Cycle, 1 John 2:29 Through 4:6:
Divine Sonship tested by righteousness, love and belief. – The first main division of the Epistle began with the assertion of what God is as self-revealing – light. He becomes to us the light in which we behold our sin, our duty, our brother, the world, Jesus the Christ; and only in acknowledging and loyally acting out the truth thus revealed can we have fellowship with God. This second division, on the other hand, begins with the assertion of what the Divine nature is in itself, and thence deduces the essential characteristics of those who are begotten of God.
(a) Paragraph A, 1 John 2:29 through 3:10a:
(Divine sonship tested by righteousness): This test is inevitable. If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one also that doeth righteousness is begotten of him (1Jo 2:29). But this new idea, Begotten of God, arrests for a time its orderly development. The writer is carried away by wonder and thanksgiving at the thought that sinful man should be brought into such a relation as this to God. Behold what manner of love! he exclaims. This leads him to contemplate, further, the present concealment of the glory of God’s children, and the splendor of its future manifestation (1Jo 3:1, 1Jo 3:2). Then the thought that the fulfillment of this hope is necessarily conditioned by present endeavor after moral likeness to Christ (1Jo 3:3) leads back to the main theme, that the life of Divine sonship is by necessity of nature one of absolute antagonism to all sin. This necessity is exhibited (1) in the light of the moral authority of God – sin is lawlessness (1Jo 3:4); (2) in the light of Christ’s character, in which there is no sin, and of the purpose of His mission, which is to take away sin (1Jo 3:5-7); (3) in the light of the diabolic origin of sin (1Jo 3:8); (4) in the light of the God-begotten quality of the Christian life (1Jo 3:9). Finally, in this is declared to be the manifest distinction between the children of God and the children of the devil (1Jo 3:10).
(b) Paragraph B, 1Jo 3:10-24 :
(Divine sonship tested by love): This test is inevitable (1Jo 3:10, 1Jo 3:11). The thought is then developed pictorially instead of dialectically. Cain is the prototype of hate (1Jo 3:12). Cain’s spirit is reproduced in the world (1Jo 3:13). Love is the sign of having passed from death into life (1Jo 3:14); the absence of it, the sign of abiding in death (1Jo 3:14, 1Jo 3:15). In glorious contrast to the sinister figure of Cain, who sacrifices his brother’s life to his morbid self-love, is the figure of Christ, who sacrificed His own life in love to us His brethren (1Jo 3:16); whence the inevitable inference that our life, if one with His, must obey the same law (1Jo 3:16). Genuine love consists not in words, but in deeds (1Jo 3:17, 1Jo 3:18); and from the evidence of such love alone can we rightly possess confidence toward God (1Jo 3:19, 1Jo 3:20) in prayer (1Jo 3:22). Then follows recapitulation (1Jo 3:23, 1Jo 3:14), combining, under the category of commandment, love and also belief on His Son Jesus Christ. Thus a transition is made to Paragraph C.
(c) Paragraph C, 1 John 3:24b through 4:6:
(Divine sonship tested by belief): This test is inevitable (1Jo 3:24). We know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he gave us; and the Spirit which he gave us is the Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (1Jo 4:2). On the contrary, the Spirit that confesseth not Jesus is the spirit of Antichrist (1Jo 4:3) Then follows a characterization of those who receive the true and of those who receive the false teaching (1Jo 4:4-6).
4. Third Cycle, 1 John 4:7 Through 5:21:
Closer correlation of righteousness, love and belief. – In this closing part, the Epistle rises to its loftiest heights; but the logical analysis of it is more difficult. It may be divided into two main sections dealing respectively with love and belief.
(a) Section I, 1 John 4:7 through 5:3a.
(i) Paragraph A, 1Jo 4:7-12 :
This paragraph grounds more deeply than before the test of love. Love is indispensable, because God is love (1Jo 4:7, 1Jo 4:8). The proof that God is love is the mission of Christ (1Jo 4:9); which is also the absolute revelation of what love, truly so called, is (1Jo 4:10). But this love of God imposes upon us an unescapable obligation to love one another (1Jo 4:11); and only from the fulfillment of this can we obtain the assurance that God abideth in us (1Jo 4:12).
(ii) Paragraph B, 1Jo 4:13-16 :
This paragraph strives to show the inner relation between Christian belief and Christian love. The true belief is indispensable as a guaranty of Christian life, because the Spirit of God is its author (1Jo 4:13). The true belief is that Jesus is the Son of God (1Jo 4:14, 1Jo 4:15). In this is found the vital ground of Christian love (1Jo 4:16).
(iii) Paragraph C, 1 John 4:17 through 5:3a:
Here the subject is the effect, motives and manifestations of brotherly love. The effect is confidence toward God (1Jo 4:17, 1Jo 4:18); the motives: (1) God’s love to us (1Jo 4:19); (2) that the only possible response to this is to love our brother (1Jo 4:20); (3) that this is Christ’s commandment (1Jo 4:21); (4) that it is the natural instinct of spiritual kinship (1Jo 5:1). But true love is inseparable from righteousness. We truly love the children of God only when we love God, and we love God only when we keep His commandments (1Jo 5:2, 1Jo 5:3).
(b) Section II, 1 John 5:3b-21.
(i) Paragraph A, 1Jo 5:3-12 :
Righteousness is possible only through belief. It is our faith that makes the commandments not grievous because it overcomes the world (1Jo 5:3, 1Jo 5:4). Then follows a restatement of the contents of the true belief, specially directed against the Cerinthian heresy (1Jo 5:5, 1Jo 5:6); then an exposition of the witness upon which this belief rests (1Jo 5:7-10); then a reiterated declaration of its being the test and guaranty of possessing eternal life (1Jo 5:11, 1Jo 5:12).
(ii) Paragraph B, 1Jo 5:13-21 :
This closing paragraph sets forth the great triumphant certainties of Christian belief: its certainty of eternal life (1Jo 5:13), and of prevailing in prayer (1Jo 5:14, 1Jo 5:15). Then the writer guards himself by citing an instance in which such certainty is unattainable – prayer for those that sin unto death – and reminds his readers that all unrighteousness, though not sin unto death, is sin (1Jo 5:16, 1Jo 5:17). He then resumes the great certainties of Christian belief: the certainty that the Christian life stands always and everywhere for righteousness, absolute antagonism to all sin (1Jo 5:18); the certainty of the moral gulf between it and the life of the world (1Jo 5:19); its certainty of itself, of the facts on which it rests, and the supernatural power which has given perception of these facts (1Jo 5:20). With an abrupt, affectionate call to those who know the true God to beware of yielding their trust and dependence to idols, the Epistle ends.
IV. Canonicity and Authorship.
1. Traditional View:
As to the reception of the Epistle in the church, it is needless to cite any later witness than Eusebius (circa 325), who classes it among the books (homologoumena) whose canonical rank was undisputed. It is quoted by Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria (247-265), by the Muratorian Canon, Cyprian, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus. Papias (who is described by Irenaeus as a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp) is stated by Eusebius to have used some testimonies from John’s former epistle; and Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians (circa 115) contains an almost verbal reproduction of 1Jo 4:3. Reminiscences of it are traced in Athenagoras (circa 180), the Epistle to Diognetus, the Epistle of Barnabas, more distinctly in Justin (Dial. 123) and in the Didache; but it is possible that the earliest of these indicate the currency of Johannine expressions in certain Christian circles rather than acquaintance with the Epistle itself. The evidence, however, is indisputable that this Epistle, one of the latest of the New Testament books, took immediately and permanently an unchallenged position as a writing of inspired authority. It is no material qualification of this statement to add that, in common with the other Johannine writings, it was rejected, for dogmatic reasons, by Marcion and the so-called Alogi; and that, like all the catholic epistles, it was unknown to the Canon of the ancient Syrian church, and is stated to have been abrogated by Theodore (Bishop of Mopsuestia, 393-428 AD).
2. Critical Views:
The verdict of tradition is equally unanimous that the Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle are both the legacy of the apostle John in his old age to the church. All the Fathers already mentioned as quoting the Epistle (excepting Polycarp, but including Irenaeus) quote it as the work of John; and, until the end of the 16th century, this opinion was held as unquestionable. The first of modern scholars to challenge it was Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), who rejected the entire trio of Johannine Epistles as unapostolic; and in later times a dual authorship of the Gospel and the First Epistle has been maintained by Baur, H.J. Holtzmann, Pfleiderer, von Soden, and others; although on this particular point other adherents of the critical school like Julicher, Wrede and Wernle, accept the traditional view.
3. Internal Evidence:
Thus two questions are raised: first, what light does the Epistle shed upon the personality of its own author? And second, whether or not, the Gospel and the Epistle are from the same hand. Now, while the Epistle furnishes no clue by which we can identify the writer, it enables us very distinctly to class him. His relation to his readers, as we have seen, is intimate. The absence of explicit reference to either writer or readers only shows how intimate it was. For the writer to declare his identity was superfluous. Thought, language, tone – all were too familiar to be mistaken. The Epistle bore its author’s signature in every line. His position toward his readers was, moreover, authoritative. As has already been said, the natural interpretation of 1Jo 1:2, 1Jo 1:3 is that the relation between them was that of teacher and taught. (By this fact we may account for the enigmatic brevity of such a passage as that on the three witnesses. The writer intended only to recall fuller oral expositions formerly given of the same topics.) The writer is at any rate a person of so distinctive eminence and recognized authority that it is not necessary to remind the readers either who he is or by what circumstances he is compelled now to address them through the medium of writing; their knowledge of both facts is taken for granted. And all this agrees with the traditional account of John’s relation to the churches of Asia Minor in the last decades of the 1st century.
Further, the writer claims to be one of the original witnesses of the facts of the incarnate life: That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us); that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us (1Jo 1:1-3). To understand the Word of life here as the gospel (Westcott, Rothe, Haupt) seems to the present writer frankly impossible; and not less so theories by which the words what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, etc., are regarded as utterances of the faith-mysticism or the collective testimony of the early church. It is difficult to imagine words more studiously adapted to convey the impression that the writer is one of the original, first-hand witnesses of Christ’s life and resurrection (that what we beheld, and our hands handled; compare Luk 24:39). At furthest, the use of such language is otherwise compatible with veracity only on the supposition that the writer was recognized by the church as so closely identified with the original witnesses that he could speak of their testimony as virtually his own. But, apart from the presumption that he cannot have been one of the actual disciples of Jesus, there is really nothing to be said for this supposition. So far as the internal evidence is concerned, the ancient and unbroken tradition which assigns it to the apostle John must be regarded as holding the field, unless, indeed, the traditional authorship is disproved by arguments of the most convincing kind. Whether the arguments brought against the apostolic authorship of the Johannine writings as a whole possess this character is too large a question to be investigated here. Yet the kernel of it lies in small compass. It is whether room can be found within the 1st century for so advanced a stage of theological development as is reached in the Johannine writings, and whether this development can be conceivably attributed to one of Our Lord’s original disciples. To neither of these questions, as it appears to the present writer, is a dogmatically negative answer warranted. If within a period comparatively so brief, Christian thought had already passed through the earlier and later Pauline developments, and through such a development as we find in the Epistle to the Hebrews, there is no obvious reason why it may not have attained to the Johannine, within the lifetime of the last survivor of the apostles. Nor, when we consider the nature of the intellectual influences, within and without the church, by which the apostle John was surrounded, if, as tradition says, he lived on to a green old age in Ephesus, is there any obvious reason why he may not have been the chief instrument of that development.
V. Relationship to the Fourth Gospel.
1. Common Characteristics:
The further question remains as to the internal evidence the Epistle supplies regarding its relation to the Fourth Gospel. Prima facie, the case for identity of authorship is overwhelmingly strong. The two writings are equally saturated with that spiritual and theological atmosphere; they are equally characterized by that type of thought which we call Johannine and which presents an interpretation of Christianity not less original and distinctive than Paulinism. Both exhibit the same mental and moral habit of viewing every subject with an eye that stedfastly beholds radical antagonisms and is blind to approximations. There is in both the same strongly Hebrew style of composition; the same development of ideas by parallelism or antithesis; the same repetition of keywords like begotten of God, abiding, keeping his commandments; the same monotonous simplicity in the construction of sentences, with avoidance of relative clauses and singular parsimony in the use of connecting particles; the same apparently tautological habit of resuming consideration of a subject from a slightly different point of view; the same restricted range of vocabulary, which, moreover, is identical to an extent unparalleled in two independent writings.
2. Coincidences of Vocabulary:
The evidence for these statements cannot be presented here in full; but the following are some of the words and phrases characteristic of both and not found elsewhere in the New Testament – the Word, joy fulfilled, to see (or behold) and bear witness, to do the truth, to have sin, Paraclete, to keep the word (of God or Christ), to abide (in God or in Christ), the true light, new commandment, little children (tekna), children (paida), to abide for ever, begotten of God, to purify one’s self, to do sin, to take away sins, works of the devil, to pass from death into life, murderer, to lay down one’s life, to be of the truth, to give commandment, to hear (= to hear approvingly), no man hath beheld God at any time, knowing and believing, Saviour of the world, water and blood, to overcome the world, to receive witness, to give eternal life, to have eternal life (in present sense), to believe in the name. The following are some of the terms common to both, which are found very rarely elsewhere in the New Testament: Beginning (= past eternity), to be manifested (9 times in each), to bear witness (6 times in the Epistle, 33 times in the Gospel, once only in Matthew, once in Luke, not at all in Mark), light (metaphorical), walk (metaphorical), to lead astray, to know (God, Christ, or Spirit, 8 times in the Epistle, 10 times in the Gospel), true (alethinos), to confess Jesus (elsewhere only in Rom 10:9), children of God, to destroy (luein, elsewhere only in 2 Pet), the spirit of truth, to send (apostellein, of mission of Christ), only begotten son, to have the witness (elsewhere only in Apocrypha), to hear (= to answer prayer).
3. Divergences of Vocabulary:
On the other hand, the divergences of vocabulary are not more numerous than might be expected in two writings by the same author but of different literary form. The rather notable difference in the choice and use of particles is accounted for by the fact that dialogue and narrative, of which the Gospel is largely composed, are foreign to the Epistle. The discrepancy, when closely examined, sometimes turns out to be a point of real similarity. Thus the particle oun occurs nearly 200 times in the Gospel, not at all in the Epistle. But in the Gospel it is used only in narrative, no occurrence of it being found, e.g. in John 14 through 16.
Of the words and phrases contained in the Epistle, but not in the Gospel, the great majority are accounted for by the fact that they are used in connection with topics which are not dealt with in the Gospel. Apart from these, the following may be noted, the most important being italicized: Word of life, fellowship, to confess sins (nowhere else in the New Testament), to cleanse from sin, propitiation (hilasmos, nowhere else in the New Testament), perfected or perfect love, last hour, Antichrist, anointing, to give of the spirit, to have (Father, Son) boldness (Godward), Parousia, lawlessness, seed (of God), come in the flesh, God is love, Day of Judgment, belief (pstis), to make God a liar, understanding. As regards style and diction, therefore, it seems impossible to conceive of two independent literary productions having a more intimate affinity. The relation between them in this respect is far closer than that between the Acts of the Apostles and the Third Gospel, or even any two of Paul’s Epistles, except those to the Ephesians and the Colossians.
4. Arguments Against Unity of Authorship:
Arguments for a dual authorship are based chiefly on certain theological emphasis and developments in the Epistle, which are absent from the Gospel; and invariably these arguments have been pressed with complete disregard of the fact that the one writing purports, at least, to be a Gospel, the other, an utterance of the writer in propria persona. If, for example, it is urged that the words He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins have a more Pauline ring than any utterance of the Fourth Gospel, or that the conceptions in the Epistle of propitiation, intercession, and cleansing, are presented in a more explicit and technical form than in the Gospel, it is a fair reply to ask, Why not? Is it to be accepted as a canon of criticism that the writer of that Gospel must necessarily have put all his own theological expressions into the mouth of Him whose teaching he proposed to report? Much is made of the assertion that in the matter of the last things the Epistle recedes from the idealism of the Gospel, placing itself more nearly in line with the traditional apocalyptic eschatology. Whereas the Gospel speaks of Christ’s bodily departure as the necessary condition of His coming again in the Spirit to make His permanent abode with His disciples (Joh 16:7), the writer of the Epistle thinks of a visible Parousia as nigh at hand (1Jo 2:28); and whereas the Gospel conceives of judgment as a present spiritual fact (Joh 3:18, Joh 3:19), the Epistle clings to the popular idea of a Judgment Day. But it ought to be noted that in the Epistle, as compared with the Gospel, the eschatological perspective is foreshortened. The author writes under the conviction that the world is passing away and that the last hour of its day has come (1Jo 2:17, 1Jo 2:18). And it is an unwarrantable assumption that he must, if he wrote the Gospel, have been guilty of the manifest anachronism of importing this conviction into it also. Apart from this the fundamental similarities between the eschatology of the Epistle and that of the Gospel are far more striking than the differences. In both, eternal life is conceived of as a present and not merely a future possession. In both, Christ’s presence is an abiding reality – Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ (1Jo 1:3). If the Gospel speaks of the revelation of Christ as bringing present and inevitable judgment into the world, the Epistle is saturated with the same thought. If, on the other hand, the Epistle speaks of a visible future Parousia, this is plainly implied in Joh 5:28, Joh 5:29. If the Epistle makes a single reference to the Day of Judgment (1Jo 4:17), the Gospel has 6 passages which speak of the last day, and in these the last day is explicitly the day of resurrection (Joh 11:24) and of judgment (Joh 12:48). In the two writings different features of the eschatological picture may be made more or less conspicuous; but there is no such diversity as to warrant the hypothesis of a separate authorship. Again, it is urged that in the Epistle the conception of the Logos is modified in the direction of conformity to traditional doctrine. The conception of the personal, preexistent Logos, who in the beginning was, and was with God, and was God (Joh 1:1) was new, it is said, and, because of its Gnostic tinge, suspect; and was therefore avoided and becomes in the Epistle the depersonalized Word of life (1Jo 1:1). But why should the Word of life necessarily signify anything less personal than the phraseology of the Gospel? The phraseology in both cases is exactly adapted to its purpose. In the Gospel, in the beginning was the Word … and the Word became flesh is right, because it sums up the contents of the Gospel, announces its subject, the history of the Incarnate Logos. In the Epistle, the Word of life is right, because theme is to be the life, not as to its historical manifestation in Jesus, but as to its essential characteristics, whether in God or in man.
5. Conclusion:
Other arguments of a similar kind which have been put forward need not be considered. On the whole, it seems clear that, while there are between the Gospel and the Epistle differences of emphasis, perspective and point of view, these cannot be held as at all counterbalancing, on the question of authorship, the unique similarity of the two writings in style and vocabulary and in the whole matter and manner of thought, together with the testimony of a tradition which is ancient, unanimous and unbroken.
6. Question of Priority:
Regarding the question of priority as between the two writings, the only certainty is that the Epistle presupposes its readers’ acquaintance with the substance of the Gospel (otherwise such expressions as Word of life, new commandment would have been unintelligible); but that does not imply its subsequentness to the composition of the Gospel in literary form. By Lightfoot and others it is supposed to have been written simultaneously with the Gospel, and dispatched along with it as a covering letter to its original readers. In view, however, of the independence and first-rate importance of the Epistle, it is difficult to think of it as having originated in this way; and by the majority of scholars it is regarded as later than the Gospel and separated from it by an appreciable interval. That it was written with a mediating purpose (Pfleiderer), to popularize the ideas of the Gospel (Weizsacker), or to correct and tone down what in it was obnoxious to the feeling of the church, and at the same time to add certain links of connection (such as propitiation, Paraclete, Parousia) with the traditional type of doctrine, or to emphasize these where they existed (Holtzmann), is a theory which rests on an extremely slender basis; theory that it was written as a protest against Gnostic appropriation of the Fourth Gospel itself (Julicher) has no tangible basis at all.
That there was an appreciable interval between the two writings is probable enough. Gnostic tendencies have meanwhile hardened into more definite form. Many, false prophets have gone out into the world. The antichrists have declared themselves. The time has come for the evangelist to focus the rays of his Gospel upon the malignant growth which is acutely endangering the life of the church.
Literature.
Commentaries are numerous and excellent. The most important are those by Calvin, Lucke, Ebrard, Haupt (of fine insight but grievous verbosity), Huther (specially valuable for its conspectus of all earlier exegesis), Westcott (a magazine of materials for the student of the Epistle), Alexander (in the Speaker’s Commentary), Rothe (original, beautiful, profound), B. Weiss, H.J. Holtzmann, Plummer (in Cambridge Greek New Testament – scholarly and very serviceable); Brooke (in International Critical Commentary, excellent). Among the numerous expositions of the Epistle are those by Neander, Candlish, Maurice, Alexander (Expositor’s Bible), Watson, J.M. Gibbon (Eternal Life), Findlay (Fellowship in the Life Eternal), Law (The Tests of Life – combined exposition and commentary); among books on Introduction, those by Weiss, Bleek, Hilgenfeld, Holtzmann, Julicher, Zahn, Salmon, Gloag, Peake; and, among books of other kinds, the relevant sections in Beyschlag, New Testament Theology; Pfleiderer, Urchristenthum; Harhack, Geschichte clef altchristl. Litteratur; Farrar, Early Days of Christianity; McGiffert, History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age; Stevens, Johannine Theology and Theology of the New Testament; articles by Salmond in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible (five volumes); by Schmiedel in Encyclopedia Biblica, and by Haring in Theologische Abhandlungen, Carl von Weizsacker … gewidmet. In German, the fullest investigation of the relationship of the Epistle to the Fourth Gospel will be found in a series of articles by H.J. Holtzmann in the Jahrbucher fur protestantische Theologie (1882-83); in English, in Brooke’s commentary in Law, Tests of Life, 339-63. See also Drummond, Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, chapter iii.
The Second and Third Epistles
1. Canonicity and Authorship:
It is not surprising that these brief and fugitive Epistles are among the New Testament writings which have had the hardest struggle for canonical recognition. One is probably, the other certainly, a private letter; and neither the same reason nor the same opportunity for their circulation existed, as in the case of church letters. The 2nd Epistle contains little that is distinctive; the 3rd Epistle is occupied with a vexatious episode in the internal history of a single congregation. Both are written by a person who designates himself simply as the Presbyter; and the names of the person (or church) to which the one is addressed and of the church with whose affairs the other is concerned are alike unknown. The fact, therefore, that, in spite of such obstacles, these letters did become widely known and eventually attained to canonical rank is proof of a general conviction of the soundness of the tradition which assigned them to the apostle John.
Like all the catholic epistles, they were unknown to the early Syrian church; when 1 John, 1 Peter and James were received into its Canon, they were still excluded, nor are they found even in printed editions of the Syriac New Testament till 1630. They were not acknowledged by the school of Antioch. Jerome distinguishes their authorship from that of the 1st Epistle. They are classed among the disputed books by Eusebius, who indicates that it was questioned whether they belonged to the evangelist or possibly to another of the same name as he. Origen remarks that not all affirm them to be genuine; and, as late as the middle of the 4th century, the effort to introduce them in the Latin church met with opposition in Africa (Zahn).
On the other hand, we find recognition of their Johannine authorship at an early date, in Gaul (Irenaeus); Rome (Muratorian Canon, where, however, the reading is corrupt, and it is doubtful whether their authorship is ascribed or denied to the apostle John); Alexandria (Clement, who is reputed by Eusebius to have commented upon them, and who in his extant works speaks of John’s larger epistle, implying the existence of one or more minor epistles); Africa (Cyprian reports that 2 John was appealed to at the Synod of Carthage, 256 AD). Dionysius, Origen’s disciple and successor, speaks of John’s calling himself in them the Presbyter. Eusebius, though conscientiously placing them among the antilegomena, elsewhere writes in a way which indicates that he himself did not share the doubt of their authenticity.
The internal evidence confirms the ultimate decision of the early church regarding these letters. Quite evidently the 2nd Epistle must have been written by the author of the 1st, or was an arrant and apparently purposeless piece of plagiarism The 3rd Epistle is inevitably associated with the 2nd by the superscription, ‘the Presbyter, and by other links of thought and phraseology.
2. The Presbyter:
The mention of this title opens up a wide question. The famous extract from Papias (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, III, 39) vouches for the existence, among those who were or had been his contemporaries, of a certain Presbyter John (see JOHN, GOSPEL OF, II, 5). Jerome, moreover, speaks of the two smaller Epistles as, in contrast with the 1st, ascribed to the Presbyter (De Vir. Illustr., ix); Eusebius inclines to ascribe to him the Book of Revelation; and modern critics, like Weizsacker and Harnack, have improved upon the hint by finding in this shadowy personage the author of the Fourth Gospel. Into this far-reaching controversy, we cannot here enter. It may be noted, however, that whether, in the confusedly written passage referred to, Papias really intends to distinguish between John the Apostle and John the Presbyter is a point still in debate; and that Eusebius (Evangelica Demonstratio, III, 5) does not regard the title Presbyter as inapplicable to John, but observes that in his Epistles he either makes no mention of himself or calls himself presbyter, nowhere apostle or evangelist. Dionysius, too, remarks that in the 2nd and 3rd Epistles ascribed to him, he writes anonymously, as the Presbyter. These Fathers, both exceptionally learned men and presumably well acquainted with primitive usage, saw nothing anomalous, although they did see something characteristic, in the fact, or supposed fact, that an apostle should designate himself by the lowlier and vaguer title. In the very sentence from Papias already referred to, the apostles are called presbyters; not to say that in the New Testament itself we have an instance of an apostle’s so styling himself (1Pe 5:1).
To sum up, it is evident that no one desiring falsely to secure apostolic prestige for his productions would have written under so indistinctive a title; also, that these brief and very occasional letters could never have won their way to general recognition and canonical rank unless through general conviction of their Johannine authorship – the very history of these Epistles proving that the early church did not arrive at a decision upon such matters without satisfying itself of the trustworthiness of the tradition upon which a claim to canonicity was rounded; finally, the internal evidence testifies to an authorship identical with that of the 1st Epistle, so that the evidence cited regarding this is available also for those. These letters, along with Paul’s to Philemon, are the only extant remains of a private apostolic correspondence which must have included many such, and for this reason, apart from their intrinsic worth, possess an interest, material and biographical, peculiar to themselves. We proceed to consider the two Epistles separately, and since an interesting question arises as to whether the 2nd is that referred to in 3Jo 1:9, it will be convenient to reverse the canonical order in dealing with them.
The Third Epistle.
This brief note gives a uniquely authentic and intimate glimpse of some aspects of church life as it existed in Asia Minor (this may be taken as certain) somewhere about the end of the 1st century. It concerns a certain episode in the history of one of the churches under the writer’s supervision, and incidentally furnishes character-sketches of two of its members, the large-hearted and hospitable Gaius, to whom it is written (and whom it is merely fanciful to identify with any other Gaius mentioned in the New Testament), and the loquacious, overbearing Diotrephes; also of the faithful Demetrius, by whose hand probably the letter is sent. The story which may be gathered from the Epistle seems to be as follows. A band of itinerant teachers had been sent out, by the Presbyter’s authority, no doubt, and furnished by him with letters of commendation to the various churches, and among others to that of which Gaius and Diotrephes were members. Diotrephes, however, whether through jealousy for the rights of the local community or for some personal reason, not only declined to receive the itinerant teachers, but exerted his authority to impose the same course of action upon the church as a whole, even to the _ length of threatening with excommunication (3Jo 1:10) those who took a different view of their duty. Gaius alone had not been intimidated, but had welcomed to his home the repulsed and disheartened teachers, who when they returned (to Ephesus, probably) had testified to the church of his courageous and large-hearted behavior (3Jo 1:6). A 2nd time, apparently, the teachers are now sent forth (3Jo 1:6), with Demetrius as their leader, who brings this letter to Gaius, commending his past conduct (3Jo 1:5) and encouraging him to persevere in it (3Jo 1:6). The Presbyter adds that he has dispatched a letter to the church also (3Jo 1:9); but evidently he has little hope that it will be effectual in overcoming the headstrong opposition of Diotrephes; for he promises that he will speedily pay a personal visit to the church, when he will depose Diotrephes from his pride of place and bring him to account for his scornful prating and overbearing conduct (3Jo 1:10). So far as appears, the cause of friction was purely personal or administrative. There is no hint of heretical tendency in Diotrephes and his party. Pride of place is his sin, an inflated sense of his own importance and a violent jealousy for what he regarded as his own prerogative, which no doubt he identified with the autonomy of the local congregation.
The Second Epistle.
The letter is addressed to the elect lady (better, to the lady Electa). Its tone throughout is peculiarly affectionate; there is a warmer rush of emotion, especially in the opening verses, than is characteristic of John’s usual reserve. But in these verses the keynote of the Epistle is struck – truth. The writer testifies his love for his correspondent and her children in truth; this love is shared by all who know the truth (2Jo 1:1), and it is for the truth’s sake which abideth in us, and it shall be with us for ever (2Jo 1:2). What follows (2Jo 1:4-9) is in effect an epitome of the 1st Epistle. After declaring his joy at finding certain of her children walking in truth, he proceeds to expound, quite in the style of the 1st Epistle, what walking in truth is. It is to love one another (2Jo 1:5; compare 1Jo 2:7-11); but this love is manifested in keeping God’s commandments (2Jo 1:6; compare 1Jo 5:2, 1Jo 5:3); and no less in stedfast adherence to the genuine doctrine of the Gospel (compare 1Jo 3:23). For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh (2Jo 1:7; compare 1Jo 4:1-3). Then follows an exhortation to stedfastness (2Jo 1:8), and a warning that whoever in the name of progress departs from this teaching hath not God, while he who abides in it hath both the Father and the Son (2Jo 1:9; compare 1Jo 2:23, 1Jo 2:14). This leads up to the immediately practical point, a warning to extend no hospitality and show no friendliness to the false teachers (2Jo 1:10, 2Jo 1:11); and the Epistle closes with the hope of a speedy and joyful meeting face to face of the writer and his correspondent, to whom he conveys greetings from the children of her elect sister.
Whether the elect lady, or lady Electa of his letter is a real person or the personification of a church is a point which has been debated from ancient times and is still unsolved. The solution has been found, it is true, if we can accept the hypothesis (put forward by Zahn and Schmiedel and adopted by Findlay) that this is the letter referred to in 3Jo 1:9. It is urged on behalf of this supposition that the two Epistles are curiously identical in phraseology. In both the writer begins by describing his correspondent as one whom I love in truth; in both he uses a distinctive phrase (echaren lan), 2Jo 1:4, I rejoice greatly, not found elsewhere in the New Testament to declare his joy at finding thy (my) children walking in the truth; and in both he concludes by saying that he has many things to write, but that, looking forward to an early interview face to face, he will not commit these further thoughts to paper and ink. It is argued that none but a chancery clerk could have clung so closely to his epistolary formulas in two private letters written at different periods. But the force of this argument largely vanishes when we look at the formulas in question. If a modern writer may conclude hundreds of friendly letters by subscribing himself yours sincerely, or something equivalent, why may not the Presbyter have commenced these two and many similar letters by assuring his correspondents that he sincerely loved them? And again, one in his official position must often have had occasion to say that he hoped soon to pay a personal visit, in view of which, writing at greater length was unnecessary. Even if the likeness in phraseology makes it probable that the two letters were written simultaneously, this by no means proves that the one was written to Gaius, the other to the church of which Gaius and Diotrephes were members. Zahn calculates that 2 John would occupy 32 lines, and 3 John not quite 31 lines of ancient writing, and infers that the author used two pages of papyrus of the same size for both letters; but why we are to identify 2 John with the letter mentioned in 3 John because both happen to fill the same size of note paper is not quite clear.
On the other hand, the difficulties in the way of this attractive hypothesis are too substantial to be set aside. The two Epistles belong to entirely different situations. Both deal with the subject of hospitality; but the one forbids hospitality to the wrong kind of guests, and says nothing about the right kind, the other enjoins hospitality to the right kind and says nothing about the wrong kind. In the one the writer shows himself alarmed about the spread of heresy, in the other, about the insubordination of a self-important official. Is it conceivable that the Presbyter should send at the same time a letter to Gaius in which he promises that he will speedily come with a rod for Diotrephes (who had carried the church along with him), and another to the church in which that recalcitrant person was the leading spirit, in which he expresses the hope that when he comes and speaks face to face their joy may be made full – a letter, moreover, in which the real point at issue is not once touched upon? Such a procedure is scarcely imaginable.
We are still left, then, with the question What kind of entity, church or individual, is entitled the lady Electa? (See ELECT LADY, where reasons are given for preferring this translation.) The address of the letter is certainly much more suggestive of an individual than of a church. After all that has been so persuasively argued, notably by Dr. Findlay (Fellowship in the Life Eternal, chapter iii), from the symbolizing of the church as the Bride of Christ, it remains very hard for the present writer to suppose that, in the superscription of a letter and without any hint of symbolism, anyone could address a particular Christian community as the elect lady or the lady elect. On the other hand, the difficulties urged against the personal interpretation are not so grave as sometimes represented. The statement, I have found certain of thy children walking in truth, does not imply that others of them were not doing so, but emphasizes what had come under the writer’s personal observation. Nor can we pronounce the elevated and didactic love of the letter more suitable to a church than to an individual without taking into account the character, position and mutual relations of the correspondents. The person (if it was a person) addressed was evidently a Christian matron of high social standing – one able in a special degree to dispense hospitality, and of wide influence, one beloved of all them that know the truth, whose words would be listened to and whose example would be imitated. And, in view of the ominous spreading of the leaven of Antichrist, it is not difficult to suppose that the Presbyter should write to such a person in such a strain. Nor does there seem to be anything especially odd in the fact of the children of a private family sending their respects to their aunt through the apostle John (Findlay). If he was intimate with that family, and in their immediate vicinity at the time of writing, it appears a natural thing for them to have done. Possibly Dr. Harris’ exploded prehistoric countess of Huntington is not so far astray as a modern equivalent of the lady Electa.
Literature.
On the 2nd and 3rd Epistles see Commentaries: Lucke, Huther, Ebrard, Holtzmann, Baumgarten, Westcott, Plummer, Bennett, Brooke; Expositions: Findlay, Fellowship in the Life Eternal; S. Cox, The Private Letters of Paul and John; J.M. Gibbon, The Eternal Life.
Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
John, the Epistles of
For the authenticity of the first epistle very ancient testimony may be adduced. Papias, the disciple of John, quotes some passages from it. Polycarp, also, another disciple of John, quotes a passage from this epistle. So, also, Irenaeus.
The author of the first epistle describes himself, at its commencement, as an eye-witness of the life of our Lord. The style and language manifestly harmonize with those of the author of the Gospel of John. The polemics, also, which in Joh 2:18-25, are directed against the Docetic Gnostics, in Joh 4:1-3, agree with the sphere of action in Asia Minor in which the Evangelist John was placed. We may, therefore, suppose that the epistle was written to Christian congregations in Asia Minor, which were placed under the spiritual care of the apostle. It is generally admitted that Joh 1:2 refers to the Gospel. If this is correct, the apostle wrote this epistle at a very advanced age, after he had written his gospel. The epistle breathes love and devotion, but also zeal for moral strictness (Joh 3:6-8; Joh 5:16). There is a remarkable absence of logical connection in the form of separate expressions, and in the transitions from one thought to another. Some writers have been inclined to find a reason for this in the advanced age of the writer. Old age may, perhaps, have contributed to this characteristic, but it is chiefly attributable to the mental peculiarity of the apostle. There has been no subject connected with Biblical literature which has attracted more attention than this epistle, in consequence of the controversies which have existed since the commencement of the sixteenth century, respecting the celebrated passage in 1Jn 5:7-8. We cannot enter here into the history of that controversy, which has continued with more or less of asperity to our own day. We shall merely remark that the disputed passage is found in no Greek manuscript, save only in two, both belonging to the fifteenth century; and that it has not once been quoted by any of the Greek, Latin, or Oriental fathers. It is now, therefore, generally omitted in all critical editions of the New Testament.
The second and third epistles of John were originally wanting in the ancient Syriac translation. From their nature, it may easily be explained how it happened that they were less generally known in ancient Christian congregations, and that the fathers do not quote them so often as other parts of Scripture, since they are very short, and treat of private affairs. The private nature of their contents removes also the suspicion that they could have been forged, since it would be difficult to discover any purpose which could have led to such a forgery.
The second epistle is addressed to a lady, called Kuria, which name frequently occurs in ancient writers as that of a woman.
The third epistle is addressed to Gaius, a person otherwise unknown. It is remarkable that the writer of this epistle calls himself ‘the presbyter’ or ‘elder.’ Some writers have been inclined to ascribe these letters to the presbyter John, who is sometimes spoken of in the ancient church, and to whom even the Apocalypse has been attributed; but if the presbyter John wrote these epistles, John’s Gospel also must be ascribed to the same person, of whom otherwise so little is known. This, however, is inadmissible. We may suppose that the term ‘presbyter’ or ‘elder’ expressed in the epistles of John a degree of friendliness, and was chosen on account of the advanced age of the writer. The apostle Paul, also, in his friendly letter to Philemon, abstains from the title Apostle. The circumstances and events in the church, to which the second epistle alludes, coincide with those which are otherwise known to have happened in John’s congregation. Here, also, are allusions to the dangers arising from the Gnostic heresy. The admonition, in 3Jn 1:10, not to receive such heretics as Christian brethren, agrees with the ancient tradition, that John made haste to quit a public bath after Cerinthus the Gnostic entered it, declaring he was afraid the building would fall down.