There can be little doubting that a relationship exists between the Johannine Epistles and the Fourth Gospel. The opening words of 1 John are so similar to the opening words of the prologue of the Fourth Gospel that this can hardly be doubted. The author of 1 John writes with the same style as the Fourth Evangelist, and the language he uses is that which the narrator, Jesus, and John the Baptist all use in the Gospel. This does not necessarily automatically answer the question of whether they were written by the same author (presumably a faithful disciple could imitate his master’s style), but it certainly places these works firmly in the same tradition, as products (at the very least) of the same Christian community. But which came first? Perhaps, by ordering the treatment of the Gospel and Epistles as I have, I have already given away what I imagine to be the answer, but that should not be taken to mean that the answer is completely obvious and straightforward!
(This question can be complicated further if we bring into consideration the fact that scholars largely agree that the Gospel of John was revised and edited at least once in the history of its composition. In other words, even if we conclude that the Gospel of John was written first, it may have been revised and edited after the time of the Epistles. But since we haven’t gone into the history of editing of the Gospel of John, we’ll leave this aspect to one side, at least for the present).
The strongest arguments in favor of the priority of the Gospel are as follows: First, the Gospel of John focuses on a Christian community’s conflict with ‘the Jews’, that is to say, with a Christian community that is in the process of breaking away from (and being expelled from) the parent Jewish community of which these Jewish Christians had once been a part. In the Johannine Epistles, one finds that this Christian community is now faced, not with ongoing conflict with its parent community, so much as with division, dissent and secession within the community. Also, whereas the Gospel has almost no interest in Gentiles, in the letters Greco-Roman names are commonplace (Gaius, Diotrephes, and Demetrius in 3 John). As Raymond Brown argues in his commentary, “I maintain that the struggle in I and II John between the author and his opponents is centered on two contrary interpretations of the Johannine Community’s tradition as known to us in [the Gospel of John]” (Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John, New York: Doubleday, 1982, p.xi; see also his groundbreaking study Community of the Beloved Disciple). If it is legitimate to appeal to the work of sociologists on the usual processes of sect formation, it certainly would be more usual for a group being persecuted by the parent group from which it is breaking away to put up as united a front as possible, and only after the split we might expect subsequent splits within the community (as was for the most part the case, for example, during and after the Protestant Reformation, although this example also warns us against generalizing too much!).
At the end of the day, the letters are not dated, nor is the Gospel, and so the only way to even try to settle the matter is to offer an interpretation that does as much justice as possible to the evidence. Coherence of interpretation will have to decide the issue since other evidence is lacking. (Please note as well that, if we assume that the internal conflicts within the Christian community came about after they had been expelled from the synagogue once and for all, then parts or all of John 6 and 8, where the opponents are not simply ‘the Jews’ but are among those ‘who believed in him’, may have been composed or included when the Gospel was revised and edited – probably after the death of the Beloved Disciple, if John 21 is any indication. John 21 offers a ‘postscript’, after a more than adequate ending of the Gospel has already taken place, and is usually regarded as a response to issues raised by the death of the Beloved Disciple).
Who wrote the ‘letters of John’? The association of them with the name ‘John’ is due to the similarities with the Gospel and the authority of Church tradition. In fact, the author does not give his name: 1 John is completely anonymous, although the recipients presumably knew who wrote it. 2 and 3 John are from ‘the elder’ – which could mean ‘the old man’ but probably more likely refers to someone who was an ‘elder’ or ‘presbyter’ in the sense of a recognized leader in the community. That 2 and 3 John were written by the same author seems essentially beyond doubt, but apart from that it is difficult to know for certain whether we are dealing with one, two, or three authors! So let us examine what evidence we have, and see where it leads us. We may focus in particular on 1 John, since 2 and 3 John are much shorter, personal notes to friends and/or colleagues, and thus have understandable differences from both the Gospel and 1 John in terms of the language and style used.
To begin with, some of the differences between the Gospel and the letters that are often taken as arguments in favor of the letters being earlier, may perhaps indicate something about authorship. That the language of the Gospel and 1 John has a lot in common is presumably obvious to any reader. They share common themes and language like: the beginning, the Word, light and darkness, love, and truth. Yet there are also differences. ‘Glory’ and related terminology are key words in the Gospel, but do not appear in 1 John. On the other hand, in 1 John one finds terms like ‘seed’ and ‘anointing’ which are not used in the Gospel in the same way. Some of the different language of 1 John has been taken as indicating a more ‘primitive’, less developed theology. For example, in 1 John, there is an emphasis in the cleansing value of the blood of Jesus, which is not emphasized in the Gospel, which focuses on the cross in terms of the glorification and ‘lifting up’ of the Son of Man. The letter also speaks of it as being the ‘last hour’ and uses apocalyptic-sounding language like ‘antichrist’ which is absent from the Gospel (with its apparently more strongly realized eschatology). These points probably do suggest that one needs either to trace the development in a single author’s thought, or to posit that we are dealing with two different authors. If 1 John was written around the time that the Gospel was edited for publication, after the death of the Beloved Disciple, then the differences may be due to the differences in thought and theology between the ‘Beloved Disciple’ and ‘the Elder’, who may then be assumed to be two different individuals. Yet there is a need for caution when discussing ‘development’ in theology. To suggest that there was a straight line of evolution in early Christianity from ‘primitive’ futuristic eschatology to ‘advanced’ realized eschatology is simply to ignore much of the evidence. Luke, writing probably not long before John did and perhaps around the same time, presents Jesus in a very different way and deals with the problem of the ‘delay of the parousia’ in quite a different manner than the author of the Fourth Gospel. The Gospel of John has not wholly eliminated the future element of eschatology, nor is the idea of Jesus’ death as atoning for sin completely absent from the Gospel. The differences are real and important, but they should not be exaggerated. They may perhaps be explained as due to both a difference of author and the different contexts in which they wrote and the respective issues that each faced.
Papias, our earliest (if not always reliable) source of information about who wrote what in the New Testament, regularly refers to the author of the Fourth Gospel as John the Elder, and seems thereby to distinguish him from John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee. While it is true that he does apply ‘elders’ to the Twelve, in the same passage he refers to Aristion and John the elder, as sources of information still alive, as opposed to the Twelve, about whom he speaks in the past tense. It may thus be surmised that perhaps this John became known as simply ‘the elder’ as a way of distinguishing him from other well-known Johns, such as ‘the Baptist’ and ‘son of Zebedee’. Nick-names of this sort were common in the ancient world, in the absence of family names per se. (Just as an aside, Thomas means ‘the twin’ and was probably the nickname rather than the given name of the apostle. We shall return to this when we look at the Letter of Jude, which some think may have been written by Jude Thomas).
We saw how important the context in and background against which the Fourth Gospel was written was for interpreting it. The same is true of the Johannine Epistles. However, the issues being confronted appear to be significantly different than those that are to the fore in the Gospel. The issue is not so much whether or not Jesus is the Christ (although these words are used), but more specifically whether Jesus Christ came ‘in the flesh’. This could conceivably be at issue in John 1 and 6, which are sometimes thought to be additions to an earlier version of the Gospel, but even if this is the case, these themes are not the main concern of the Gospel. But what is meant by Jesus having ‘come in the flesh’? Presumably the opponents against whom the author of the letters is writing were docetists of some form. In other words, they said that although Jesus appeared to be human like us, he was really a divine being unencumbered by human frailty. This interpretation of the person of Jesus, as you hopefully know, was rejected as heretical by the mainstream Church, and as we see here, by the author of the Johannine Epistles as well.
There are further clues as to the nature of the teaching of the opponents of the author of the epistles. The importance of ‘water and blood’ is emphasized: it is stressed that Jesus came not only by water, but by water and blood, and then we are told that there are three witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the testimony of the three is completely at one. But what does this mean? Most commentators note the similarity with the teaching of the Cerinthians, who maintained that the heavenly Christ came upon Jesus at his baptism, but left prior to the crucifixion. If this is the teaching being opposed, then the author of 1 John does not deny that the baptism was the decisive event in the coming of the Christ, but maintains that the death of Jesus was experienced by the Word-become-flesh, whereas the Cerinthians claimed that the heavenly power left Jesus prior to the crucifixion since a divine being could not suffer.
Irenaeus tells us that a man named Cerinthus who lived in Asia taught the following (summarized in Kenneth Grayston, The Johannine Epistles, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984, p.15):
a) The world was not made by the first, supreme God but by a lower power who is widely separated and remote from the true and highest God;
b) This subordinate power did not know the God who is over all things;
c) Jesus was not born of a virgin but was the son of Joseph and Mary;
d) Jesus was far beyond the rest of humankind in justice, prudence and wisdom;
e) When Jesus was baptized, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove, sent by the power that is above all things;
f) Jesus then proclaimed the unknown Father and performed miracles;
g) At the end, Christ departed from Jesus prior to his death and resurrection, since Christ was impassible and spiritual and therefore could not undergo such experiences.
Certain of these tenets were common to all Gnostics. That Cerinthus or others like him could have broken away from the Johannine community seems quite plausible, although it seems more likely that between the secessionists mentioned in the Johannine Epistles and Cerinthus there is a longer process of development. Nonetheless, Church tradition recounts the story that once, in a public bath in Ephesus, John the Elder said “Quick, let us depart before the roof falls in upon us, for Cerinthus the enemy of truth has just entered”, thus making John and Cerinthus contemporaries. Also noteworthy is the fact that the Gospel of John was accepted reluctantly by the Church because it was so popular with the Gnostics, which may suggest that those who eventually developed the Gnostic system inherited the Fourth Gospel and took it with them. The Fourth Gospel also says nothing about the virgin birth, and this would explain why Cerinthus and others whose Gnostic systems might quite happily have had room for the virgin birth, nevertheless do not include it in their doctrinal systems. And the most important piece of evidence is of course that if the secessionists had views similar to those of Cerinthus, then we have a plausible background against which to make sense of the references in 1 John to water and blood. As we saw in our treatment of the prologue to John’s Gospel, it is entirely plausible that the Johannine Christians did not clearly distinguish between the Word becoming flesh and the Spirit coming upon and remaining on Jesus. In all Jewish literature prior to John, and in much early Christian literature, Word, Spirit, and Wisdom are not clearly distinguished. At any rate, while John maintains the reality of the incarnation, he emphasizes that the incarnation was not simply something temporary, but once the Word became flesh, the union was permanent, and thus included the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The author of 1 John is also concerned with ethical issues. Gnostics in general were either strongly ascetic or strongly antinomian in their approach to ethics. In contrast, 1 John emphasizes the priority of love, and teaches that those who are truly Christians have the Spirit and thus have, on the one hand, forgiveness of sins, while on the other hand they do not persist in sin any longer. It may be that there were two different schools of thought that the author was opposing: Some may have said that they were sinlessly perfect, while others believed that since the flesh did not matter they could do what they want. John rejects both extremes and does so emphatically.
At the end of the day, what we can know about the opponents who are in the view in the Johannine letters is what is mentioned in the letters themselves. Raymond Brown (Epistles of John, pp.762-3) compiles all the relevant texts, and by ‘mirror reading’ these it seems we can gain a pretty good picture of what the opponents believed and taught (mirror reading refers, as you probably know, to the process of reconstructing the things positively affirmed by opponents from the things that are emphatically denied and opposed in the writings we have).
2 John
9:
Anyone who is so ‘progressive’
that he does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have
God; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the
Son.
1 John
4:5-6:
They are of the world,
therefore what they say is of the world, and the world listens
to them. We are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and he
who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit
of truth and the spirit of error.
1 John
2:18-19: Children,
it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is
coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that
it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not
of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with
us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are
not of us.
1 John
5:5-6:
Who is it that overcomes
the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This
is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the
water only but with the water and the blood.
1 John 2:22-23: Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also.
2 John
7:
For many deceivers have
gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming
of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the
antichrist.
1 John
4:1-3:
Beloved, do not believe
every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of
God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By
this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses
that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit
which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit
of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now
it is in the world already.
1 John 2:15-16: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.
1 John 1:8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
1 John 1:10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
1 John 1:6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth
1 John 2:4 He who says "I know him" but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him;
1 John 2:6 he who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
1 John
3:3-12
And every one who thus
hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Every one who commits
sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that
he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No
one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him
or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. He who
does right is righteous, as he is righteous. He who commits sin
is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of
the devil. No one born of God commits sin; for God's nature abides
in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it
may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children
of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he
who does not love his brother. For this is the message which you
have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another,
and not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his
brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were
evil and his brother's righteous.
1 John 5:18 We know that any one born of God does not sin, but He who was born of God keeps him
1 John
3:14-15 He
who does not love abides in death. Any one who hates his brother
is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life
abiding in him.
1 John
3:17-18 But
if any one has the world's goods and sees his brother in need,
yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in
him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in
deed and in truth.
1 John
4:8-10
He who does not love does
not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made
manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world,
so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we
loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation
for our sins.
1 John
4:20
If any one says, "I
love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who
does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom
he has not seen.
1 John 2:9 He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.
Brown also provides a list of three passages that tell how the readers should relate to the adversaries. These are: 1 John 2:27; 5:16; and 2 John 10-11. In view of these texts, we can sum up what is clear: There was a group that broke away from the Johannine Christian group and the authority of the group’s leadership. They probably appealed to the teaching of the Spirit as the authority for at least some of what they said. They denied that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, by blood as well as water (whatever that means). They did not show love for their brothers, and some of them denied they have any sin, while others lived in a manner that was blatantly un-Christ-like. The author of the epistles tells his readers that they have an anointing (i.e. the Spirit) and so they will not be deceived but rather know the truth. They are to have nothing to do with the opponents. These points are clear from the letters, and this is quite a bit of information. Beyond these points it is possible to speculate further, and to attempt to relate the teachings of the opponents to later heresies. But most scholars rightly emphasize that these opponents were at best forerunners of the later docetists, Gnostics, and Cerinthians. They were among the first to head in the directions that eventually led those that came after them to the beliefs and practices associated with these names. But we should beware of reading back all the beliefs of later groups into the Johannine Epistles. But provided we are cautious, we can helpfully appeal to the evidence of such later groups to help illuminate what may perhaps have been meant by otherwise ambiguous phrases such as Christ coming ‘by water and blood’. [On these questions see further Brown, Epistles of John, pp.49-68]
In opposition to these views, the author of the Johannine Epistles emphasizes the preeminence of love above all things – although this is love for the brothers and does not extend to the secessionists, who are not to be welcomed under any circumstances. Christians avoid sin and do not persist in sin, but they do sin at times and need forgiveness, and this is provided through Christ’s blood (1 John 2:1-2).