1, 2, and 3 John

Constantine R. Campbell, Tremper Longman III, Scot McKnight

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310599210
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

A new commentary for today's world, The Story of God Bible Commentary explains and illuminates each passage of Scripture in light of the Bible's grand story.

The first commentary series to do so, SGBC offers a clear and compelling exposition of biblical texts, guiding everyday readers in how to creatively and faithfully live out the Bible in their own contexts. Its story-centric approach is ideal for pastors, students, Sunday school teachers, and laypeople alike.

Each volume employs three main, easy-to-use sections designed to help readers live out God's story:

• LISTEN to the Story: Includes complete NIV text with references to other texts at work in each passage, encouraging the reader to hear it within the Bible's grand story.
• EXPLAIN the Story: Explores and illuminates each text as embedded in its canonical and historical setting.
• LIVE the Story: Reflects on how each text can be lived today and includes contemporary stories and illustrations to aid preachers, teachers, and students.

—1, 2, & 3 John—

The three letters of John are ripe with immediate encouragement, practical application, and profound insight. The twin themes of love and truth dominate their theological content. If these letters seem, at times, more detached from the biblical narrative than most of the New Testament, we can still understand them in light of that story.

Edited by Scot McKnight and Tremper Longman III, and written by a number of top-notch theologians, The Story of God Bible Commentary series will bring relevant, balanced, and clear-minded theological insight to any biblical education or ministry.

Introduction to 1 John

First John has a special place in my heart. When I first became a Christian (or, perhaps more accurately, while I was becoming a Christian), I joined a small-group Bible study for the very first time. It was a ministry of the church I had been attending, and I was eager to learn more of the Bible beyond Sunday sermons. I was a young music student, freshly out of high school, and was taking “God stuff” seriously for the first time. What was the first book we studied in this small group? First John.

I remember vividly the wonder of trying to grasp what 1 John was teaching. I remember wrestling with some of the issues that have remained “wrestle worthy” to this day. But I also remember falling in love with the God who is love. The God who loves me with a profound love. The God revealed by Jesus Christ. It was truly a life-changing experience that I will always cherish.

While 1 John is ripe with immediate encouragement and profound theological insight, it certainly claims its share of challenges too. A big one is how it fits into the rest of the Bible, which is one of the major concerns of The Story of God Bible Commentary series. When we consider the story of God that runs through the entire Bible, we must ask where 1 John fits. The letter seems more detached from the biblical narrative than most other parts of the New Testament. The Gospels tell the story of Israel’s Messiah coming in fulfillment of prophetic expectation to deliver God’s people. Acts sees the message of Christ reach out to every place as the nations are brought into the knowledge of God. Then the letters of Paul sort out several pastoral and theological issues related to this story of God, particularly as Jewish and Gentile believers work out what it means to be God’s people together in Christ.

But 1 John does not connect to the big story in the same way. There is no mention of Israel. There are no quotations from the Old Testament and few unambiguous allusions to it.¹ There is no mention of Adam. Or Abraham. Or Moses. Or David. Or any of the prophets. The only Old Testament figure mentioned is Cain, who is used as a negative example (of murder).² There is no mention of anything to do with the history of the kingdom of Israel. So where is the story of God in this letter?

The answer is first addressed by appreciating 1 John’s relationship to John’s Gospel (discussed below). For what the letter lacks in references to the Old Testament, it makes up for in the abundance of references to the Fourth Gospel. John’s Gospel is the source of intertextuality (i.e., one text referring to another) for 1 John in the way that the Old Testament is the source of intertextuality for the rest of the New Testament.

Unlike 1 John, the Fourth Gospel is soaked in references to the Old Testament, albeit conceived differently when compared to the other three Gospels. As 1 John is engaged in intense “conversation” with John’s Gospel, it assumes the Old Testament richness of that earlier document. Therefore, 1 John is not written in isolation from the story of God revealed in the Old Testament and in the ministry of Jesus. That story is assumed. First John expects the reader to understand its message in light of the story.

Second, the themes of 1 John resonate strongly with the themes of God’s story. While the rest of the Bible tends to couch those themes within the unfolding story of God, 1 John explores its themes without explicitly doing so. But once we assume the story as John assumes it, we can see that his themes are very much the themes revealed in the unfolding story of God: love, the centrality of Jesus Christ, and fellowship with God.³

Love

Love is a major theme of 1 John. God is love. Love comes from God. Love is seen in Jesus’s death for us. To know God is to love him. To love God is to love others. Without love, we cannot know God. Love is central. Love is what we need.

First John is a love letter from God. And it inspires love among God’s children, as Augustine appreciated.

This book is very sweet to every healthy Christian heart that savors the bread of God, and it should constantly be in the mind of God’s holy church. But I choose it more particularly because what it specially commends to us is love. The person who possesses the thing which he hears about in this epistle must rejoice when he hears it. His reading will be like oil to a flame. . . . For others, the epistle should be like flame set to firewood; if it was not already burning, the touch of the word may kindle it.⁴

It is impossible to walk away from 1 John without being struck by the awesome love of God in Christ. We also cannot walk away without being deeply challenged to love one another in sacrificial, costly, practical ways.

The Absolute Centrality of Jesus Christ

At the very heart of God’s love for us is his Son. God sent Jesus Christ as an expression of his love to achieve for us the forgiveness of sins and to bring us into eternal fellowship with the Father and the Son. Relationship with God is only possible through Jesus. He is absolutely central.

Because of the centrality of Jesus Christ, it is a very serious problem if we get him wrong. This inspires John’s pervasive warnings against christological error. False teachers have separated themselves from the church because of erroneous views about Jesus. They deny that Jesus is the Christ and that he has come in the flesh. Because they hold to these falsehoods about Jesus, John is emphatic that these false teachers are outside fellowship with God. They have not remained “in him.”

Against the false teachers, John affirms the historical fact of Jesus’s coming into the world as the incarnate Son of God. He purifies us from all sin and died to make atonement for our sins. To have the Son is to have the Father, and thus believing that Jesus is the Christ is essential for fellowship with God. If we remain in him, we will share eternal life with the Father and the Son.

Fellowship with God

All of this has been leading to what is arguably the ultimate concern of John’s theology: fellowship with God. The centrality of Jesus is for fellowship with the Father and the Son; that is the goal of John’s proclamation.⁵ Since God is love, he is all about relationship.

And that is why he sent his Son into the world—that we might enjoy relationship with God. Through the forgiveness of sin and being made the children of God, believers live “in him,” and he lives in us. We share in the dynamics of mutual indwelling, just as the Father and the Son so indwell one another by the Spirit. The gift of eternal life is found by remaining in the Son and in the Father. Indeed, fellowship with God is the joy of eternal life; that is what it is for.

Along with the general characteristics of John’s message, we must also consider the historical elements surrounding 1 John. Who actually wrote the letter and why? What was the author’s situation? Who were the original readers? Who were the author’s opponents? We now turn to consider such matters.

Who Wrote 1 John and Why?

Authorship

It may surprise modern readers to realize that the letter universally known as 1 John does not claim to be written by John—or anyone else for that matter. It is technically anonymous, a feature shared with only one other letter in the New Testament—that written to the Hebrews.

The opening of 1 John (1:1–4) claims eyewitness testimony to Jesus’s incarnate life (and possibly his resurrection; see the commentary on these verses). This, however, does not necessitate apostolic authorship as there were other eyewitnesses who could make the same claim.

Moreover, some scholars challenge whether the apparent claims to eyewitness testimony really are what they seem. Schnackenburg suggests that the author could have been a pupil of the fourth evangelist,⁶ while Brown thinks the author is a representative of a “Johannine School.”⁷ Bultmann takes it further by suggesting that the “we” of 1 John refers to “eschatological” contemporaries of Jesus—that is, the “eyewitness” testimony is “spiritual” in nature.⁸ None of these suggestions, however, do justice to the strength of language used by the author in asserting his eyewitness credentials. Instead, Bauckham mounts a compelling argument for the eyewitness origin of John’s Gospel and John’s Letters.⁹ Indeed, there is no compelling reason not to take 1 John’s claims at face value. This does not prove the author’s claims to eyewitness testimony, but we should not resort to hyperskepticism either.

One of the strongest indicators of the authorship of 1 John is its many similarities in style, content, and theology to John’s Gospel. The relationship between the Gospel and 1 John will be explored below, but here we note that the strong similarities do not necessarily solve the problem of who wrote 1 John since many scholars ask the same question of the Gospel. What we may say with some confidence, however, is that whoever wrote John’s Gospel also wrote 1 John. As Kruse indicates, “If we are prepared to accept that the author was an eyewitness, then there exists a prima facie case for identifying the author of 1 John with the author of [ . . . ] the Fourth Gospel, because of the striking similarities of language and concepts.”¹⁰

This is not the place to unpack all the arguments surrounding the authorship of John’s Gospel,¹¹ so I will simply indicate my own preference to adhere to church tradition in ascribing authorship of the Fourth Gospel to John, the son of Zebedee, the “beloved disciple” of Jesus. Or, to put it another way, I do not find the skeptical scholarly arguments to the contrary sufficiently persuasive to overturn the tradition of the church. If tradition is correct about the Gospel, then it is also correct that 1 John was written by that same beloved disciple.

But how did this tradition begin? Early Christian tradition is unanimous in ascribing authorship of 1 John to John, the son of Zebedee and the apostle of Jesus.¹² First, there are no ancient manuscripts of John’s Epistles that do not bear his name.¹³ All manuscripts ascribe authorship to John.

Second, there are possible allusions to 1 John in several early patristic writings by Clement of Rome (ca. AD 92–101), the Didache (ca. AD 140), and The Epistle to Diognetus (ca. AD 130 or later). Polycarp of Smyrna (ca. AD 69–155) provides the earliest sure reference to 1 John in his letter to the Philippians, which dates to thirty or forty years before his death. But he did not attribute his quotations to John.

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