First, Second, and Third John (Paideia: Commentaries on the New Testament)

Parsenios, George L., Parsons, Mikeal C., Talbert, Charles

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441221018
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Commento della Bibbia

In this addition to the well-received Paideia series, a respected New Testament scholar examines cultural context and theological meaning in First, Second, and Third John. Paideia commentaries explore how New Testament texts form Christian readers by attending to the ancient narrative and rhetorical strategies the text employs, showing how the text shapes theological convictions and moral habits, and making judicious use of maps, photos, and sidebars in a reader-friendly format.

1 John 1:1–4

Introductory Prologue

Introductory Matters

The opening lines of a literary work serve as a threshold that a reader crosses in order to leave behind the broader world of human experience and enter into the more limited world of a text. Some interpreters have compared a written work’s opening lines to the introitus of a piece of music, which introduces listeners to the musical composition that follows (Betz 1995, 92). Others have looked to architecture and compared the opening lines of a book, like the prologue of the Gospel of John, to the opening staircase of an ancient temple, which ushers one from the mundane world of the public street to the sacred space of the divine presence (Phillips 2006, 1–2; but see Fish 1980). The opening lines of 1 John function like such a threshold, but not in the usual way. These opening lines invite us into the world of the text by stopping us short and forcing us to pause. Complicated syntax and a peculiar use of key terms keep the reader from smoothly moving forward. If these verses orient us to the text that follows, they do so only by disorienting us. The misdirection is not haphazard, though. It has a theological purpose, grounded in the incarnation. Through the incarnation, according to 1 John, the invisible, immaterial God has become a person whom we can touch and see (1:1–4), while still continuing to be the God whom no one has ever beheld (4:12). A world in which God has become flesh, and yet continues to be the immaterial God, is a new and mysterious world, a world of paradoxes. God is infinitely distant and apart, and yet at the same time intimately present and near. He has been revealed, and yet remains concealed. Ephrem the Syrian neatly expresses this reality when he writes about the incarnation as follows:

Who will not give thanks to the Hidden One, most hidden of all,

Who came to open revelation, most open of all,

For he put on a body, and other bodies felt Him,

Though minds never grasped Him? (Hymns on Faith 19.7, trans. Brock 1992, 28)

When Ephrem says, “He put on a body, and other bodies felt Him,” one hears a poetic restatement of 1 John 1:1: “That which we have seen and our hands have touched.” Ephrem’s phrase “minds never grasped Him” corresponds to a later verse, 1 John 4:12: “No one has ever seen God.” The revelation of God in the incarnation does not mean that humans now understand all there is to understand about God, or even that we understand what has been revealed with mathematical certainty. It means, rather, that we are invited into a mystery that everyday patterns of speech cannot express. Ephrem presents his own theology in a poetic format for precisely this reason, so that (like all Greek and Syrian patristic writers) he can emphasize the paradoxes that lie at the heart of the incarnation. On this point, Sebastian Brock writes, “For this purpose poetry proves a far more suitable vehicle than prose, seeing that poetry is much better capable of sustaining the essential dynamism and fluidity that is characteristic of this sort of approach to theology” (1992, 24). The opening lines of 1 John operate in the same fashion: they orient us toward a paradoxical view of the world by necessarily disorienting us. Three points of confusion are especially prominent: (1) authorial anonymity; (2) style and syntax; (3) and the relationship between 1 John and the Gospel of John.

Authorial Anonymity

We call 1 John a letter, following a precedent extending back to ancient Christian commentators. In many ways the text behaves like a letter, but it does not begin like a letter. Ancient letters ordinarily open by naming their senders and recipients, and then by offering a greeting. The First Letter of John is different. It tells us neither who sent it nor to whom it was sent, and so we know very little about the circumstances that produced the document. To many interpreters, the lack of such an opening means that the document should not be understood as a letter at all (see “Introduction to the Letters of John”).

Style and Syntax

The second source of confusion and of scholarly discussion is the unusual prose style of 1:1–4. Here, too, we find opacity. Opacity does not mean sloppiness, though, and George Strecker (1996, 8) and Martin Culy (2004, 1–2) rightly argue that this style not only seems intentional but also shows an obvious plan. The circuitous syntax is easy to follow once one recognizes that the author has employed a “topic construction” (Culy 2004, 2). In a topic sentence, the item to be stressed is placed at the start of the thought in order to give it prominence. In the case of 1 John 1:1, the phrases that are given focus are the several relative clauses placed in apposition to one another. Their relationship to the rest of the sentence is not at first clear. The text simply begins by saying, “that which we have heard, that which we have beheld with our eyes, that which we have seen and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—” (1:1). These clauses are the direct objects of the verb apangellomen, “we announce,” but apangellomen does not appear until two verses later, in 1:3. Between these opening relative clauses and their accompanying verb stands a lengthy parenthetic comment in 1:2, which further delays the coordination of all the pieces of the discourse. The effect of these various delays and misdirections is to give the reader pause and to create a heightened tension that draws the reader into the discourse.

The topic construction focuses on what “we have seen and heard,” which clearly refers to the incarnate Jesus, but the name of Jesus is not given until 1:3. The most important name is thus delayed. The same effect exists in the Gospel of John, where the name of Jesus is not mentioned until 1:17, and Jesus himself does not appear in the narrative until 1:29. He does not speak until 1:38 (Culy 2004, 2). When all these effects are understood in concert in 1 John, the reader is simultaneously drawn forward into the text and repelled by the unusual syntax. Or, to repeat the language from above, the reader is oriented to the text by being disoriented.

The Relationship between 1 John and the Gospel of John

A similar quality characterizes the relationship between the opening lines of 1 John and the opening lines of the Gospel of John. The first four verses of 1 John seem in many ways to echo the prologue to the Gospel by employing the same key terms, such as “word” (logos; John 1:1, 14; 1 John 1:1); “life” (zōē; John 1:4; 1 John 1:1, 2); “testify/witness” (martyria/martyrein; John 1:7, 8, 15; 1 John 1:2); “beheld” (heōraken; John 1:18; heōrakamen; 1 John 1:1, 2, 3); “saw” (etheasametha; John 1:14; 1 John 1:1); Father (John 1:14, 18; 1 John 1:3); Son (John 1:14, 18; 1 John 1:3).

Connections between John and 1 John extend beyond the mere repetition of key terms. Phrases and styles of speech are also shared in common. For example, the Gospel famously opens by announcing, “In the beginning was the Word,” while 1 John opens with the phrase “that which was from the beginning” (1:1). The relationship between the two phrases is more obvious in Greek, where in both cases the term “beginning” (archē) is the object of a preposition and is joined to the verb of “being” (ēn, “was”) as follows:

	John 1:1	en arche ēn	In the beginning was
	1 John 1:1	ēn ap’ archēs	was from the beginning

Similarly striking is the parallel use of the preposition pros. John 1:1 famously says that the “Word was with God,” which translates the unusual phrase pros ton theon. First John repeats this unusual phrase yet varies the preposition’s object, saying that the Word of life was “with the Father,” pros ton patera (1:2). The use of pros with the accusative case as a preposition meaning “with” is uncommon. The fact that this uncommon usage appears in the opening lines of both texts suggests a relationship between the two works. Thus in various ways they are strikingly similar.

And yet their similarity is a similarity-in-difference. The same words and phrases are used, but they are not used in the same way. While the Fourth Gospel opens (1:1) by speaking of the word (Logos) that was in the beginning (archē), and 1 John discusses the word that was from the beginning (archē, 1:1), the respective meanings of “beginning” are different. In the Gospel, Jesus is the Word who existed in the beginning, where the term “beginning” refers to the time before creation. The point is clear: the Word existed before the world was created. By contrast, the “beginning” in 1 John cannot refer to a time before the existence of the physical world, since it so clearly refers to something physical that can be touched and seen and heard (1:1). Thus the same terms are used in both prologues, but they are used in very different ways, reflecting different realities and rhetorical concerns.

To sum up briefly, the opening lines of 1 John disorient the reader in various ways. First, the document does not open like a typical letter, so we do not know who sent it or to whom it was sent. Second, whatever information 1 John does provide in its opening lines is presented in a swirling array of phrases that have an obvious meaning in the end, but only after one is led along a circuitous path. Finally, the opening verses of 1 John evoke the language and style of John but in a way that makes the relationship between the two texts difficult to determine. The shared language is familiar, but only in an oblique and opaque manner. These apparent forms of madness are not without method, though. Such acts of misdirection and confusion seem designed to prepare us for the argument that follows, which is centered on the mysterious character of the incarnation.

Tracing the Train of Thought

[1:1.] First John opens by referring to that which was from the beginning (ex archēs). This phrase has generated considerable discussion among commentators, not only because of its similarity to the opening phrase of the Fourth Gospel but also because it is not immediately clear when “the beginning” was. Several possibilities present themselves. The term “beginning” is common in the Johannine literature, occurring eight times in the Gospel (1:1, 2; 2:11; 6:64; 8:25, 44; 15:27; 16:4), and ten times in 1 and 2 John (1 John 1:1; 2:7, 13, 14, 24 [2x]; 3:8, 11; 2 John 5, 6). Because the word does not always appear in the same context, it seems to carry different shades of meaning in different settings. Such an elastic use of language is not at all unusual for the Johannine literature. For example, the term pneuma in John 3:8 refers to both the wind and the Holy Spirit—a shift in reference that takes place within a single sentence. Different shades of meaning over the range of entire texts are thus very plausible, and other meanings of the term “beginning” may be operative in other verses in 1 and 2 John. But the sense in 1 John 1 seems to be that expressed in various NT texts that use either the noun archē (beginning) or the verb archein (to begin) in reference either to Jesus’s baptism (Mark 1:1; Luke 3:23; Acts 1:22) or to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry (John 6:64; 15:27; 16:4). This is clearly how the word is understood in 1 John 2:7; 3:11; and 2 John 5, 6. “From the beginning” in 1:1, then, means “from the first association” with Jesus (Brown 1982, 157). To say that the teaching extends “from the beginning” means that it is grounded in the life and ministry and teaching of Jesus.

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1 John 1:1–4 in the Rhetorical Flow

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► Introductory prologue (1:1–4)

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A further matter that deserves attention is the possible legal quality of the phrase “from the beginning.” The expression “from the beginning” is a technical phrase in legal proceedings, appearing not only in Greek and Latin courtroom rhetoric but also in scenes from dramas that imitate a legal setting. The phrase is not only legal, of course; it also has a more general usage and is found in the opening lines of narratives of all sorts. To introduce a narrative with the phrase “from the beginning” is a way to alert the reader that an elaborate and full narrative will follow (Carey 1992, 93). In Plato’s Symposium (174.1), for example, when Apollodoros begins to recount the speeches that took place at a dinner party so long ago, he says, “But it might be better for me to try to tell you the whole story right from the start [ex archēs].” Alongside this general use of the phrase exists a specific usage that applies to the legal narratio, the part of the speech in which a person presents his version of the events in question during a courtroom trial. As Alan Sommerstein says, “The phrase is regularly used by prosecutors in introducing their narrative of the facts of the case” (1989, 192). Lysias, for example, opens his speech Against Eratosthenes by saying, “Nevertheless, I will try to inform you of the matter from the beginning [ex archēs] as briefly as I can” (12.3). Demosthenes does the same in his speech Against Conon (54.2): “I shall state to you from the beginning [ex archēs] each incident as it occurred in the fewest words I can” (cf. also Lysias 32.3; Isocrates, Nic. 7.3). Playwrights followed these rhetorical models in staging trial scenes and legal scenarios of various kinds. In the famous trial that takes place in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, for example, the goddess Athena dubs the chorus leader “the prosecutor [ho diōkōn]” and invites the leader to recount the details of the issue in dispute “from the beginning [ex archēs]” (line 583). Plautus’s Andria shows the same device in Roman comedy, when the character Simo initiates a legal narration by saying, “You will hear the whole story from the begi...