1-3 John (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament)

Yarbrough, Robert W., Yarbrough, Robert W., Stein, Robert

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441210593
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Robert Yarbrough, coauthor of the bestselling Encountering the New Testament, offers a historical and theological commentary on the Johannine Epistles in this addition to the BECNT series. The commentary features the author's detailed interaction with the Greek text, explores the relationship between John's Epistles and Jesus's work and teaching, interacts with recent commentaries, is attentive to the history of interpretation, and seeks to relate these findings to global Christianity. As with all BECNT volumes, this book combines academic sophistication with pastoral sensitivity and accessibility to serve as a useful tool for pastors, church leaders, students, and teachers.

1 John

Introduction to the Johannine Letters

This introduction will focus primarily on 1 John. Because 2 John and 3 John left a much smaller footprint in patristic annals, there is little to discuss by way of specific evidence for matters like their date, provenance, audience, and reception history until more than a century after their putative composition. What can be said is that the language and substance of 2 John and 3 John, like that of 1 John, relate them to the Gospel of John (demonstrated concisely long ago by Weiss 1887–88: 2.186–87, 198; see also Holtzmann 1908: 362).1 And as Hill (2004: 450) shows, knowledge of John’s Gospel and at least two of his letters is probably attested in half a dozen writers prior to Irenaeus, perhaps as early as the late first century.2 This would be within scant years of the epistles’ composition and not long after the Fourth Gospel’s first appearance. The Johannine tradition inscripturated in the extant canonical writings takes us back to within living memory of what the writer of John’s Letters seeks to describe and apply to his readers’ situation.3

Text

It would be frustrating, if not futile, to interpret ancient texts whose original wording is uncertain. The Johannine Epistles, in part or as a whole, have been preserved in about six hundred manuscripts, including two papyri (Klauck 1991: 4). They offer “relatively few text-critical problems,” and no proposed emendation has found wide assent (1991: 5, 8).

Metzger’s Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Metzger 1994: 639–51) discusses variants at some thirty-nine junctures:

1:4 (2×)

2:4

2:6

2:7 (2×)

2:14

2:17

2:18

2:20

2:23

2:25

2:27

3:1

3:5

3:13

3:14

3:19 (2×)

3:21

4:3 (2×)

4:10

4:19

4:20

5:1

5:2

5:6 (2×)

5:7–8

5:10 (2×)

5:13

5:17

5:18 (2×)

5:20 (2×)

5:21

The variants listed are significant, first, in the sense that the Editorial Committee of the United Bible Societies deemed them important for Bible translators to be aware of in their work of rendering the NT into vernacular languages around the world. These variants have also been at the center of discussion in establishing what remains today’s standard critical Greek text for scholarly research (NA27 = UBS4).4 As this commentary will demonstrate in detailed consideration of variants, no major doctrines or points of interpretation are seriously affected by manuscript deviation. The wealth of witnesses allows, if not definitive clarification, then at least well-informed conjecture, wherever ambiguities exist.

Work on the text of John’s Letters has not stood still since the labors of the UBS Editorial Committee several decades ago. The Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster in Germany conducted its own investigations and published its impressive findings on 1 John (B. Aland et al. 2003a; 2003b) and 2–3 John (B. Aland et al. 2005a; 2005b). Their selection of significant manuscript witnesses stands at 143 (not all of the six hundred extant witnesses noted above are significant for text-critical purposes): 2 papyri (𝔓9 [third century, containing several verses of 1 John 4] and 𝔓74 [seventh century, containing much of 1–3 John]), 13 uncials, 117 minuscules, and 11 lectionaries (B. Aland et al. 2003b: B91). In addition, 37 other witnesses are excluded “because they are of minor importance for the history of the text” (2003b: B91), meaning that the selection of witnesses is actually about 180. There are said to be 761 “passages with variants in 1 John,” most of which are scribal miscues of no significance (B. Aland et al. 2003a: 28*), like spelling or word order or inadvertent errors. In the end, “due to the simple style of 1 John there are very few passages where difficulties lead to major variants.”

Like the UBS Editorial Committee, the Münster Institute scholars find that about forty 1 John passages require discussion. In a striking confirmation of the UBS committee’s earlier work, as well as of the stability of the textual witness, the Institute after years of work and thousands of hours of labor concluded that it would correct the current NA27/UBS4 Greek text at only three junctures in 1 John: (1) in 1:7 δέ (de, but) should be omitted; (2) in 5:10 ἐν ἑαυτῷ (en heautō, in himself) should be ἐν αὐτῷ (en autō, in him); and (3) in 5:18 αὐτόν (auton, him) should be ἑαυτόν (heauton, himself). In the world of scholarship, this counts as valuable corroboration of academic work old and new.

Our state of textual certainty for 1 John is very high. The numerous variants inherent in the manual copying process offer rich potential for reflection on lexical possibility and semantic nuance, but they offer no room for pessimism regarding whether we know almost exactly what the original text contained.

There are discussable variants in John’s second epistle at 2 John 1, 3, 5, 8 (2×), 9, 11, 12, and 13 (Metzger 1994: 652–54). All are interesting but none critical for interpretation. The same can be said of 3 John, for which Metzger (1994: 655) discusses variants at 3 John 4, 9, and 15. These variants, plus about thirty more in 2 John and some three dozen more in 3 John, will be listed and discussed in the commentary.

Author

If the first concern of a commentary is the integrity of the text to be interpreted, the second is the identity of the writer, if this can be determined. The position taken in this commentary concurs with that expressed by Carson (2000: 132): “In line with the majority view among Christian students during the past two thousand years (though out of step with today’s majority), I think it highly probable that John the apostle wrote the Fourth Gospel and the three letters that traditionally bear his name.”

Extended technical justifications for this position—that John’s Letters have the same author as John’s Gospel and that all were written by Jesus’s disciple John son of Zebedee—are accessible in NT introductions like that of Carson and Moo (2005: 229–54), in newer commentaries like those of Köstenberger (2004: 6–8) and Keener (2003: 81–114),5 and in monographs like Blomberg’s (2001: 22–41). The emerging work of Hill (2004) appears to be tending in this direction as well. Yarid (2003) makes a detailed comparison between 1 John and the Upper Room Discourse (John 13–17). Scholtissek (2004) writes of the close relationship between John’s Gospel and 1 John seen in recent German scholarship, though his view that 1 John is simply an ad hoc epistolary rewrite of elements taken from the Fourth Gospel is unconvincing. Each of these studies cites corroborating sources. Finally, Bauckham (2006: 358–411) argues convincingly for the eyewitness origin of John’s Gospel and John’s Letters, though he thinks John is the Beloved Disciple mentioned in the Gospel, who was in turn the Elder who wrote the epistles. Bauckham’s view concurs with that of this commentary that the Johannine corpus is not a literary contrivance or spiritual meditation but grows out of personal historical reminiscence of the life, teaching, and abiding will of Jesus.

The Disputed Nature of the Authorship Question

It would be possible to leave the matter there. But as the series preface indicates, this commentary targets people who are “involved in the preaching and exposition of the Scriptures as the uniquely inspired Word of God.” Such readers typically want to know whether what the text says is true. Some may be reading and teaching John’s Letters in parts of the world where Christians face ostracism and even persecution for the faith they profess. No responsible teacher wants to be sending people into danger and perhaps death based on old writings that lack veracity. The opening verses of 1 John claim that the author was an eyewitness of Jesus’s life. If this was really the case, the credibility of the letter is considerably enhanced. And since 2 John and 3 John stand in close conceptual relation—to each other and to 1 John—the gravity of their admittedly sketchy content is maximized. The Jesus Christ presupposed and presented in John’s Letters takes the shape of a savior and master worthy of serious consideration and perhaps personal devotion. Luther (1967: 219) grasped this regarding 1 John: “This is an outstanding epistle. It can buoy up afflicted hearts. Furthermore, it has John’s style and manner of expression, so beautifully and gently does it picture Christ to us.”

D. F. Strauss (1808–74) is commonly credited with being among the first of an illustrious line of scholars who worked hard to destroy the status of the canonical Gospels as possible sources of firsthand information regarding the things they report.6 In the judgment of many, he largely succeeded, as the generations of Gospels criticism since then attest. Grant and Tracy (1984: 12) observe that “more than a century of modern critical study make[s] it impossible for us to employ the Gospel of John in interpreting the thought of Jesus himself.” But Strauss (1972: 69) also stated, “It would most unquestionably be an argument of decisive weight in favour of the credibility of the biblical history, could it indeed be shown that it was written by eye-witnesses, or even by persons nearly contemporaneous with the events narrated.” I believe it can be and has been shown on cogent grounds that John’s Gospel, and following from that John’s Letters, are rightly understood as authored by an eyewitness to Jesus’s ministry. The classic treatment, never really refuted, is Westcott (1881: v–xxxv; 1908: ix–lxvii), whose findings on this point are substantially confirmed and extended more recently by Blomberg (2001) as well as in commentaries and other works already cited above. Reim (2005: 101n15) states: “As far as I can see, in the Johannine Jesus-discourses there are virtually no words of serious substance not contained in the Synoptic words of Jesus and in Old Testament words of God or of the Messiah.” The distance between John’s writings and the Jesus of which they speak may be less vast and total than commonly supposed.

Nevertheless, it will not escape the notice of many conscientious preachers, students, and other thinking persons that a considerable mass of scholarly literature weighs heavily against the notion of the possibility of the Johannine tradition’s close proximity to Jesus and his actual times. And so I offer a short characterization of Johannine studies in recent decades to help explain why I do not view the current majority consensus as compelling. I want readers to see why the consensus rejecting Johannine and eyewitness authorship commands respect but not necessarily obeisa...