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1, 2, and 3 John
Karen H. Jobes, Clinton E. Arnold
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1, 2, and 3 John
Karen H. Jobes, Clinton E. Arnold
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About This Book
Concentrate on the biblical author's message as it unfolds.
Designed to assist the pastor and Bible teacher in conveying the significance of God's Word, the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series treats the literary context and structure of every passage of the New Testament book in the original Greek.
With a unique layout designed to help you comprehend the form and flow of each passage, the ZECNT unpacks:
- The key message.
- The author's original translation.
- An exegetical outline.
- Verse-by-verse commentary.
- Theology in application.
While primarily designed for those with a basic knowledge of biblical Greek, all who strive to understand and teach the New Testament will benefit from the depth, format, and scholarship of these volumes.
1-3 John
In her commentary on John's letters, Karen H. Jobes writes to bridge the distance between academic biblical studies and pastors, students, and laypeople who are looking for an in-depth treatment of the issues raised by these New Testament books. She approaches the three letters of John as part of the corpus that includes John's gospel, while rejecting an elaborate redactional history of that gospel that implicates the letters. Jobes treats three major themes of the letters under the larger rubric of who has the authority to interpret the true significance of Jesus, an issue that is pressing in our religiously pluralistic society today with its many voices claiming truth about God.
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Introduction to 1, 2, and 3 John
The three books of the NT that have come to us as 1, 2, and 3 John are so similar to each other that much that can be said of any one of them can be said about all three. Thus, this introduction will address those features of these books that are common to all three. The commentary on each of the three also is prefaced by a brief introduction that addresses issues specific to each letter.
Significance of the Letters
Before turning to historical matters, the question of why bother studying these books should be considered. Their presence in the NT, of course, demands the attention of those who believe the Bible to be Godâs Word. But what is the significance of these three brief letters toward the back of our Bibles?
Do you want to know God? Is the truth about God important to you? Knowing God truly is the overarching theme of both Johnâs gospel and letters. In a world that was already filled with conflicting religions and philosophies, a world in that respect similar to our own, Jesus said, âNow this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sentâ (John 17:3, italics added). Jesus defines eternal life as knowing God, for it is only through responding to Godâs self-revelation to humankind that any of us can come to know him and enjoy life with him both now and throughout eternity. Thatâs a pretty significant issue for every person in any place in history.
Furthermore, Jesus claims that there is only one true God, the God who sent Jesus Christ into the world. There are many different, and often conflicting, views of God in various cultures today. We live in spiritually confusing times, especially as every culture becomes more religiously diverse. Many believe that it doesnât matter what you believe about a higher power as long as you believe it sincerely. But can any and all religions be trueâeverything from Eastern ideas about reincarnation to ânew ageâ spirituality to beliefs taught in the sacred synagogues, mosques, and temples across North America and around the world? John wrote these three brief letters in a spiritually confusing time when there were conflicting theologies about Jesus Christ in order to assure his readers of their eternal life after death because they truly knew God in Christ. What could be more significant than that?
Authorship and Provenance
Church tradition from the earliest days of Christianity has ascribed these letters to John, commonly believed to be the apostle Johnâone of Jesusâ chosen twelve, the son of Zebedee, and âthe disciple whom Jesus lovedâ of Johnâs gospel. But note that neither the text of the gospel nor that of the letters bears Johnâs name, or any name. Second and Third John are from the pen of âthe elder,â who is not further identified. The letters and gospel are anonymous to us, but the Christians who originally received them undoubtedly knew the identity of the author, and it is likely on the ancient testimony of those believers that the letters have been ascribed to John.
But John (Gk. ៸ĎόννΡĎ) was a common name at the time, and early in Christian history some came to doubt if âthe elderâ was the same man as the author of 1 John and Johnâs gospel. Modern scholarship has complicated the issue even further with most NT scholars rejecting the identity of the beloved disciple as the apostle John and conjecturing as many as five different author/redactors for the gospel and letters.
The earliest ascription of authorship to John comes from Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (d. AD 156), and from Papias, a contemporary of Polycarp, whose writings survive only as quotations in the later writings of Irenaeus and Eusebius. Both Polycarp and Papias lived in the greater vicinity of Ephesus in western Asia Minor, the location to which the apostle John is said to have fled at about the time when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem (AD 70), taking Mary the mother of Jesus with him. There he presumably lived for the rest of his long life, on into the reign of Trajan, the Roman emperor who ruled the empire from AD 98 to 117. Irenaeus (AD 175â195), bishop of Lyon, was born in Asia Minor and as a child personally knew Polycarp, who is said to have been appointed bishop of Smyrna by eyewitnesses of the Lord Jesus. Irenaeus says that John, the disciple of the Lord who was with Jesus in the upper room, wrote the gospel while living in Ephesus (Haer. 3.1.2). Even though such sources are subject to the same historical scrutiny as other ancient documents, this is a remarkable chain of historical witnesses enjoyed by no other NT book.
The witness of Papias is more complicated and has been the subject of more debate, for his writings are preserved only in those of Eusebius, whose interpretation of Papiasâs words raised the possibility of two men named John, one authoring the gospel and another, the elder John, the letters and the book of Revelation (Hist. eccl. 3.39.3â17). Papias mentions John twice, once as a âdisciple of the Lordâ and again as an âelder.â But Eusebius overlooked the fact that even when Papias refers to Peter and James, he doesnât at first call them âapostlesâ but âelders,â suggesting that the two titles were not mutually exclusive in Papias.1 But ever since the fourth century when Eusebius wrote, there has been debate in the church about the authorship of the three letters attributed in the NT to âJohnâ and about who is buried in âJohnâs tombâ in Ephesus.
Although the issue of authorship will not likely ever be known with certainty, the author of these letters clearly claims to be a bearer of the apostolic teaching about Jesus that was based on eyewitness testimony about his public ministry, death, and resurrection. The relationship between the three letters and between them and the gospel (see discussions below) indicates that the same author likely wrote all three letters, and he was also either the author of the gospel or a close associate. These letters insist that this apostolic testimony trumps any reinterpretation of Jesus by those who were not commissioned by him and who were far removed from personal knowledge of him.
Historical Situation: Anti-Gnostic Reading or Nonpolemical Reading?
As with every letter in the NT, we must infer the historical setting of Johnâs letters and the reason they were written from the contents of the letters themselves, an innately subjective interpretive task that we undertake with little other information. It is difficult to read any text without making some assumptions about the situation for which it was written, when and where the author lived, and how to relate references in the text to the âreal world.â But just as a color sample placed against one background can appear as if it changes color when placed against a different background, the assumptions readers bring to what they read can make a big difference in how they understand the meaning of the text. Thus, it is important to continually check our assumptions about the historical background of the biblical books. It is clear that some disagreement has disrupted the churches under the authorâs purview and spiritual authority, and that he is concerned to reassure his congregations of their salvation as they adhere to the teachings and beliefs about Jesus that the author represents.
The major themes of right belief about Jesus, a right attitude toward sin, and interpersonal relationships characterized by love are clear, but why the author has chosen to discuss these particular topics is not. He reinforces his authority as a bearer of the apostolic teaching about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, which implies that the source of truth about God in Christ was in some dispute. But the author writes with the intent of a pastor to care for his people rather than as an apologist to argue directly against those who have left the Johannine church(es). As Brooke wrote, âIt is probably true that the writer never loses sight altogether of the views of his opponents in any part of the Epistle. But it is important to emphasize the fact that, in spite of this, the real aim of the Epistle is not exclusively, or even primarily, polemical.â2
Nevertheless, scholarship throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries spent much time and ink on reconstructing the more specific nature of the false teaching with the assumption that it had an antinomian impulse motivated by (proto-)gnostic tendencies.3 The gnostic assumption was developed in the twentieth century by Rudolf Bultmann,4 after which time the three letters were routinely read against the specific christological error of Docetism, which derived from the application of gnostic thought to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and against licentious living, which was one conclusion of gnostic thought applied to Christian living. Read through this lens, the verbs of sense in the prologue of 1 John were taken to drive home the physicality of Jesus as a real human being, as also was his coming in flesh (1 John 4:2; 2 John 7).
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought another perspective that has been gaining ground, that these letters should not be read as a direct polemic against Docetism or its specific Ephesian expression, Cerinthianism.5 Tradition teaches that Cerinthus was a contemporary of John in Ephesus and taught that the divine nature descended upon the ordinary man Jesus at his baptism and departed from him in Gethsemane, a view referred to as adoptionism by modern theologians. (See commentary 1 John 2:19.) Offering several factors that argue against a presumed gnostic background, Lieu writes, âGranted that this framework of interpretation has the compelling advantage of allowing, at least superficially, a consistent exegesis of the whole letter, the question must be asked how far it is valid and true to the thought and function of 1 John.â6
This recent nonpolemical view is a needed corrective to Johannine scholarship that has depended so heavily on identify...