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

BAKER EXEGETICAL COMMENTARY

ON THE NEW TESTAMENT

ROBERT W. YARBROUGH

and JOSHUA W. JIPP, EDITORS

Volumes now available:

Matthew   David L. Turner

Mark   Robert H. Stein

Luke   Darrell L. Bock

Acts   Darrell L. Bock

Romans, 2nd ed.   Thomas R. Schreiner

1 Corinthians   David E. Garland

2 Corinthians   George H. Guthrie

Galatians   Douglas J. Moo

Ephesians   Frank Thielman

Philippians   Moisés Silva

Colossians and Philemon   G. K. Beale

1–2 Thessalonians   Jeffrey A. D. Weima

James   Dan G. McCartney

1 Peter   Karen H. Jobes

1–3 John   Robert W. Yarbrough

Jude and 2 Peter   Gene L. Green

Revelation   Grant R. Osborne

***

Robert W. Yarbrough (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has authored, coauthored, or translated numerous books.

© 2008 by Robert W. Yarbrough

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2013

Ebook corrections 06.06.2018, 03.22.2022

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ISBN 978-1-4412-1059-3

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Contents

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Series Preface

Author’s Preface

Abbreviations

Transliteration

Map

1 John

Introduction to the Johannine Letters

I. Central Burden: God Is Light (1:1–2:6)

A. Announcement of Authority and Purpose (1:1–4)

B. Main Burden of the Epistle: The Character of God (1:5)

C. Implications of God’s Character for the Christian Life (1:6–10)

D. Appeal to Readers in the Light of God’s Character (2:1–6)

II. Primary Commandment: Embody the Age-Old Message (2:7–17)

A. The Nature and Implications of the Message (2:7–11)

B. Pastoral Appeal in View of the Message (2:12–17)

III. Key Counsel: Abide in His Anointing (Truth) and Receive Eternal Life (2:18–3:8)

A. Three Considerations Informing the Counsel to Abide (2:18–21)

B. The Truth That Abides (2:22–26)

C. The Imperative to Abide (2:27–29)

D. The Glory of Abiding (3:1–8)

IV. Core Teaching: Love, Works, Trust (3:9–4:6)

A. Summons to Love (3:9–18)

B. Confirmation of Love (3:19–24)

C. Summons to Choose (4:1–3)

D. Confirmation of Choice (4:4–6)

V. Foundational Imperative: God’s Love (4:7–14)

A. First Exhortation to Love (4:7–10)

B. Second Exhortation to Love (4:11–14)

VI. Illustrative Appeal: Renewed and Expanded Invitation to Love (4:15–5:15)

A. Declarative Invitation with Supporting Warrant (4:15–16)

B. Commendation of Love (4:17–21)

C. Commendation of Faith as Fides Qua Creditur (5:1–5)

D. Commendation of Faith as Fides Quae Creditur (5:6–12)

E. Commendation of the Full Assurance of Eternal Life: Confident Prayer (5:13–15)

VII. Concluding Admonition: Pastoral Counsel, Assurance, and Warning (5:16–21)

A. Counsel regarding Sinners and Sin (5:16–17)

B. The Tie That Binds: Shared Certainties (5:18–20)

C. Final Pastoral Appeal (5:21)

2 John

 Introduction to 2 John and 3 John

  I. Greeting: John’s Love in Truth (1–3)

 II. John’s Joy yet Concern (4–8)

III. John’s Warning (9–11)

  Excursus: The Warning against ὁ Προάγων

IV. John’s Farewell (12–13)

3 John

  Introduction to 3 John

  I. Greeting to Gaius (1–4)

 II. Commendation of Gaius (5–8)

III. Dealing with Diotrephes (9–10)

IV. Concluding Counsel and Commendation (11–12)

 V. Farewell (13–15 [13–14b NIV])

Works Cited

Index of Subjects

Index of Authors

Index of Greek Words

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings

Notes

Back Cover

Series Preface

The chief concern of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (BECNT) is to provide, within the framework of informed evangelical thought, commentaries that blend scholarly depth with readability, exegetical detail with sensitivity to the whole, and attention to critical problems with theological awareness. We hope thereby to attract the interest of a fairly wide audience, from the scholar who is looking for a thoughtful and independent examination of the text to the motivated lay Christian who craves a solid but accessible exposition.

Nevertheless, a major purpose is to address the needs of pastors and others involved in the preaching and exposition of the Scriptures as the uniquely inspired Word of God. This consideration directly affects the parameters of the series. For example, serious biblical expositors cannot afford to depend on a superficial treatment that avoids the difficult questions, but neither are they interested in encyclopedic commentaries that seek to cover every conceivable issue that may arise. Our aim therefore is to focus on problems that have a direct bearing on the meaning of the text (although selected technical details are treated in the additional notes).

Similarly, a special effort is made to avoid treating exegetical questions for their own sake, that is, in relative isolation from the thrust of the argument as a whole. This effort may involve (at the discretion of the individual contributors) abandoning the verse-by-verse approach in favor of an exposition that focuses on the paragraph as the main unit of thought. In all cases, however, the commentaries will stress the development of the argument and explicitly relate each passage to what precedes and follows it so as to identify its function in context as clearly as possible.

We believe, moreover, that a responsible exegetical commentary must take fully into account the latest scholarly research, regardless of its source. The attempt to do this in the context of a conservative theological tradition presents certain challenges, and in the past the results have not always been commendable. In some cases, evangelicals appear to make use of critical scholarship not for the purpose of genuine interaction but only to dismiss it. In other cases, the interaction glides over into assimilation, theological distinctives are ignored or suppressed, and the end product cannot be differentiated from works that arise from a fundamentally different starting point.

The contributors to this series attempt to avoid these pitfalls. On the one hand, they do not consider traditional opinions to be sacrosanct, and they are certainly committed to doing justice to the biblical text whether or not it supports such opinions. On the other hand, they will not quickly abandon a long-standing view, if there is persuasive evidence in its favor, for the sake of fashionable theories. What is more important, the contributors share a belief in the trustworthiness and essential unity of Scripture. They also consider that the historic formulations of Christian doctrine, such as the ecumenical creeds and many of the documents originating in the sixteenth-century Reformation, arose from a legitimate reading of Scripture, thus providing a proper framework for its further interpretation. No doubt, the use of such a starting point sometimes results in the imposition of a foreign construct on the text, but we deny that it must necessarily do so or that the writers who claim to approach the text without prejudices are invulnerable to the same danger.

Accordingly, we do not consider theological assumptions—from which, in any case, no commentator is free—to be obstacles to biblical interpretation. On the contrary, an exegete who hopes to understand the apostle Paul in a theological vacuum might just as easily try to interpret Aristotle without regard for the philosophical framework of his whole work or without having recourse to the subsequent philosophical categories that make possible a meaningful contextualization of his thought. It must be emphasized, however, that the contributors to the present series come from a variety of theological traditions and that they do not all have identical views with regard to the proper implementation of these general principles. In the end, all that really matters is whether the series succeeds in representing the original text accurately, clearly, and meaningfully to the contemporary reader.

Shading has been used to assist the reader in locating salient sections of the treatment of each passage: introductory comments and concluding summaries. Textual variants in the Greek text are signaled in the author’s translation by means of half-brackets around the relevant word or phrase (e.g., ⌜Gerasenes⌝), thereby alerting the reader to turn to the additional notes at the end of each exegetical unit for a discussion of the textual problem. The documentation uses the author-date method, in which the basic reference consists of author’s surname + year + page number(s): Fitzmyer 1992: 58. The only exceptions to this system are well-known reference works (e.g., BDAG, LSJ, TDNT). Full publication data and a complete set of indexes can be found at the end of the volume.

Robert W. Yarbrough

Robert H. Stein

Author’s Preface

It is customary for commentary writers to muse aloud to try to justify yet another painstaking study of biblical books that have already been treated repeatedly. Nearly one hundred commentaries were written on the Johannine Epistles from patristic times to the early 1980s (for a listing see Schnackenburg 1992: 306–9); that number has grown by a dozen or more since. I offer no defense for this commentary if the requirement is earthshaking novelty, unprecedented profundity, or unrivaled comprehensiveness. Life is not long enough to do justice to even epistle-length snippets of Christian Scripture, and publishers are not going to wait a lifetime for the manuscript anyway (although Baker Academic has rivaled Job in waiting for this one). What I have written is limited in scope, incomplete in breadth, and restricted in insight. Nearing retirement Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938) took stock of his voluminous writings and pronounced them something of a crime scene (Neuer 1995: 126). Experts should prepare to encounter any number of limitations, serious even if not criminal, in the present work.

Since a commentary is supposed to be explication rather than creative or even historical fiction, its redeeming value, if any, will lie in communication of any truths observed and articulated. Here I may express more optimism, for even a modest witness to gospel verities carries divine promise. Oden (2003: 82–96; cf. Maier 1994: xiv) underscores this persuasively. Meteoric growth in what often looks like a fairly bibliocentric global Christian population echoes that notion (Jenkins 2002; 2006; for the continuing demise of popular support for the post-Christian ideologies that inform much Western biblical scholarship and church life, see Shiflett 2005). Like the exegetical labors of many interpreters through the ages, my work on the biblical text has grown out of a sense of conviction of sin, seizure by divine grace, and fascination with biblical wisdom as I sometimes think I understand it. I have yet to see Jesus with my eyes, but that was true of his followers long before the first century ended (cf. 1 Pet. 1:8), and they somehow managed a compelling affirmation of living faith in their benighted setting. Readers must judge whether here or there I have replicated their precedent in ours.

A few distinctive emphases in what follows are worth mentioning.

I have often related what John writes to aspects of Jesus’s work or teaching. In other words, I have treated the history of Jesus’s earthly ministry, as presented by the canonical Gospels and particularly the Fourth Gospel, as if it really happened and carried a force that might well have left a fairly direct imprint in the Johannine Letters decades later. More commonly these letters are viewed as extrusions of a Johannine theology or community with minimal rootage in any particular historical chain of events. This becomes clear, for example, precisely in a study of the theology of John’s Epistles that focuses on Jesus in tradition and faith.1 More convincing is the thesis that behind John’s Gospel and John’s Letters stands the voice of one or more eyewitnesses, a view that has recently received weighty and welcome support from Bauckham (2006).

I have used computer aids extensively to explore linguistic ties between John’s Epistles and the LXX. More could have been done, but this commentary makes more extensive and explicit reference to LXX parallels than was feasible until very recently.

In the additional notes, which appear at the end of each exegetical unit, this commentary offers remarks on every textual variant in John’s Epistles found in NA²⁷.2 There were several motivations for this: (a) To my knowledge it had never been done before. (b) Students often cut their exegetical teeth on 1 John, scratch their heads over the critical apparatus, and are urged by professors to pay attention to the variants, but there is seldom much help with this in commentaries except where major variants are concerned. And there is too little classroom time for variants to be explained systematically. This commentary hopes to confirm even beginning students in the value of an attention to detail that extends to the variants. (c) For some time my interest has been piqued by the claim seemingly gaining traction of late that widespread scribal corruption and cross-fertilization among textual groups makes the text of much of the NT (never mind its message) suspect. Having gone through every variant of John’s Letters, most of them (as it turns out) manifestly minor, I have found no reasonable grounds for suspicion of the soundness of our knowledge of what the author of these epistles wrote. Doubts cast on the integrity of the NT text and commended to undergraduates in a widely used NT introduction (Ehrman 1997: 414–21; 2004: 479–89) are, if 1–3 John are a fair indication, considerably overstated (see also Ehrman 2005 and the reply of Wallace 2006).

The last couple of decades have seen a burst of commentaries on John’s Letters that is numerically unparalleled in the history of commentary writing on this corpus. Some of these (Marshall 1978; R. Brown 1982; Schnackenburg 1992; Strecker 1996; Painter 2002; Witherington 2006) are truly distinguished in various ways; others have notable strengths (Smalley 1984; 2007;3 Stott 1988; Loader 1992; Sloyan 1995; Burge 1996; Rensberger 1997; 2001; Kruse 2002; 2003a; Akin 2001); and numerous others make contributions worthy of attention. I hope that by riding on the crest of this wave of sustained reflection I can pass on some of the learning that has recently emerged in astonishing quantity, though it was impossible to incorporate or even interact with it all within the guidelines of this particular commentary series. Nor was I able to incorporate as fully as I would have liked the epochal studies of Bauckham (2006) and Caragounis (2006), both of which became available only in the late stages of this commentary’s production.

While academic protocol moves perhaps most commentators to take their primary discussion partners from among current doyens of the discipline, I have (without ignoring our day’s intellects and critical industries) tried to draw on a range of thinkers from across temporal and cultural boundaries. In part with the help of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Bray 2000), but also from my own independent reading, I have drawn on various ante-Nicene fathers as well as Augustine (who has left us sermons on much of 1 John). Luther (1967) and Calvin (1988) have been close at hand as I wrote. I have pored over the classic liberal lines of Holtzmann (1908) and studied the contrasting exposition of Schlatter (1950). As a result, this commentary seeks to cash in not only on the wealth of newer scholarship (see previous point) but also on an admittedly eclectic selection of other commentaries and studies—like that of Neander (1852), born with the Jewish name of David Mendel but a convert to Christian faith, who wrote with power and insight in the crucible of a Germany wracked with division over the rise of the Tübingen School and other challenges to Christian thought and confession. For better or worse this may give my commentary a sense of addressing classic Christian concerns and not only current technical and postmodern ones. I confess that Ericson’s lines ring true: The more closely we correlate our theology with the currently popular views, the more quickly they will become irrelevant, especially with the accelerating rate of cultural and intellectual change (2003: 26). In my choice of discussion partners, I have sought to assure that the way I have approached John’s Letters and the things I have found in them are not unduly confined to my short lifetime’s frequently quirky agenda. To put it another way, to a modest extent this commentary is a step in the direction of attention to Wirkungsgeschichte, as this is being increasingly acknowledged to be fundamental to constructive biblical exposition (cf. Bockmuehl 2006).

Readers may detect something of a divided loyalty in this exposition. My primary frame of reference, as the footnotes will indicate, is the North American and British (i.e., Western) academy within which I received my university training beginning in the early 1970s and where I have plied my vocation since 1985. Yet for nearly two decades now I have learned from colleagues and students in places like Muslim Africa and Eastern Europe. In the North American setting, I have been privileged to study with international colleagues and students from dozens of other countries, particularly from Asia. An outcome of this is that in reading John’s Letters, I confess as much interest in how they look to followers of the prophet Muhammad or to citizens of a post-Marxist country trying to rebuild after decades of political assault on Christianity or to a pastor in Singapore, as to the direct heirs of Dodd and Bultmann. How should John’s counsel be regarded in a country dominated by an Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, neo-Marxist, Islamic, or Asian traditionalist hierarchy? What does John have to say to Christians who are dying for the faith they profess, in part because of the trust they have based in writings like the Johannine Epistles? These are questions typically untouched in the Western professional guilds where what used to be the study of divinity has become the pursuit of rarified biblical studies or even bloodless religions. To all of the above should be added that in recent years, despite my ordination in the Presbyterian Church in America, a confessional body with a high view of Scripture, I have been laboring pastorally in a church belonging to a mainline denomination that is selective about which parts of the Bible it thinks are still true. And so it is not only for global reasons but also for local ones that I have been forced to consider carefully the question of the enduring truth (if any) of John’s message and not devote myself primarily to testing and implementing theories about possible construals of historical documents (or are they rather literary? or theological? or none of the preceding?) based on various unprovable critical hypotheses.

The six distinctives listed above are at the same time deficiencies. To strike out in some directions is to leave others unexplored. I have been consoled by Schweizer’s statement (1989: 7) in another setting: The older I get, the clearer it becomes how much we do not know. That is, by the way, a liberating insight, one that has become evident in many discussions with my wife and continually recurs to me. He concludes: And so I become ever more thankful for those who do what I cannot, and I am learning also to accept peacefully the limits of my own gifts.

My thanks are due to student assistants who have aided me on this project at various stages over the years, among them John Vonder Bruegge, Jeff Dryden, Roy Christians, Jonathan Davis, Dong-Wong Han, Ling Luo, Mark Birkholz, Carl Park, and Andy Naselli. I am also grateful to Baker Academic, both former editor there Jim Weaver, who invited me to contribute to this series, and present editors Jim Kinney and Wells Turner, who held open the invitation. I am particularly grateful for Wells’s careful scrutiny of all aspects of the manuscript and his many suggestions for improvements. For the mistakes from which he spared me and the material improvement he has made to my formulations, I am in debt to Moisés Silva. I retain full responsibility for failures that the best efforts of many failed to root out.

Thanks are also in order to the administrations of Covenant Theological Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for their generous sabbatical provisions that made research for this study possible.

I dedicate this work to Walter A. Elwell and J. Julius Scott Jr., both emeritus professors at Wheaton College (Illinois), who, valiantly overlooking my blue-collar limitations, managed to move me forward decisively toward critical study of the NT writings about a quarter century ago. Their dedication (in the train of Merrill C. Tenney, whom I served as graduate assistant in autumn 1980) to teaching and scholarship and their exemplification of Christian graces in often costly fashion enriched the lives of a generation of Wheaton College Graduate School students. May something here and there in these pages serve to express my thanks.

Robert W. Yarbrough

February 2008

Abbreviations

Bibliographic and General

Hebrew Bible

Greek Testament

Josephus

Philo

Other Jewish and Christian Writings

Qumran / Dead Sea Scrolls

Transliteration

Greek

Notes on the Transliteration of Greek

Accents, lenis (smooth breathing), and iota subscript are not shown in transliteration.

The transliteration of asper (rough breathing) precedes a vowel or diphthong (e.g., ἁ = ha; αἱ = hai) and follows ρ (i.e., ῥ = rh).

Gamma is transliterated n only when it precedes γ, κ, ξ, or χ.

Upsilon is transliterated u only when it is part of a diphthong (i.e., αυ, ευ, ου, υι).

Hebrew

Notes on the Transliteration of Hebrew

Accents are not shown in transliteration.

Silent šĕwāʾ is not indicated in transliteration.

The spirant forms תפכדגב are usually not specially indicated in transliteration.

Dāgeš forte is indicated by doubling the consonant. Euphonic dāgeš and dāgeš lene are not indicated in transliteration.

Maqqēp is represented by a hyphen.

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 obeisance. This is in no way to detract from the hard empirical work (which I do not intend to recount or extend here) that scholars like Carson, Köstenberger, Keener, Blomberg, Hill, Bauckham, and others have done, from several important vantage points, to call the consensus into question and establish the plausibility of a more credible historical account. It is enough to provide a larger context for viewing some currently dominant opinions that leave no room for dissent and a different conclusion. The point is to provide soft justification (harder justification is found in the works of the scholars referred to above) for the starting point of this commentary’s reading of the texts before us.

John Son of Zebedee: Banished from the Canon

From early times and through most of the history of the church, 1 John, like the Gospel of John, was generally thought to have been written by the disciple of Jesus who bore that name (so also Witherington 2006: 394, 396). (Due probably to their brevity and limited horizon, 2 John and 3 John were much slower to receive widespread circulation and approbation in the early Christian centuries. To this day, most churches could function a whole lifetime without 2 John or 3 John in their Bibles and never miss their absence.) Rensberger (2001: 2) notes that early on, by the second century in fact, Christian tradition identified their author as John son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles.7 In the first Christian centuries, until Eusebius, there is scant record of anyone but this John being associated with the five books of the NT with which he is traditionally associated.8 Witherington’s peculiar claim (2006: 395n5) that from a very early date . . . there was doubt that the Fourth Gospel, at least in its final form, was written by the same person who wrote these Epistles is unconvincing and seems to be based solely on a statement by Isho‘dad of Merv (ninth century). Similarly, Perkins (2004: 19) makes it sound like the identification of the Gospel writer with the author of one or more Johannine Letters was a post-fourth-century development. But the historical evidence runs in the exact opposite direction. Behind this encroachment of misinformation in some circles lies a fascinating story.

At the time of the Enlightenment (eighteenth century), a revolutionary approach to biblical study began to establish itself, particularly in Germany, where Lutheran and Reformed scholars excelled in scholarly attention to the Bible. In nineteenth-century Germany the critical movement reached its peak (Grant and Tracy 1984: 5). It was revolutionary foremost in the success it met, not in its genius, for doubt, skepticism, and hostility toward the message and person of Jesus as his followers understood him were virulent already in Jesus’s lifetime. The treasured hallmarks of (post)modern Western intellectual belief—doubt, skepticism, and in the end indifference if not hostility toward the message of the cross—can be reconstructed in considerable detail from the NT and extra-NT sources.9 Hill (2004: 204–93) shows how second-century gnostics reacted to John and responded to his ideas in either an adversarial or supersessionary way. Biting skepticism of Christian claims can be studied in fairly full dress in the form of Celsus’s powerful intellectual attacks on Christians (and Jews) around 180 (Hoffman 1987). So in a fundamental sense the Enlightenment in biblical studies marks a political victory as much as an intellectual one,10 as it did not really arrive at new objections to Christian faith so much as it set in motion dynamics that gradually enshrined repristinated versions of ancient disbelief of historic Christianity in European Protestant universities that trained pastors. For example, when Adolf Schlatter enrolled in theological college in Switzerland in 1871, taking classes to prepare him for parish ministry, his philosophy professor was Friedrich Nietzsche. Two generations earlier, D. F. Strauss was taught NT by a professor (F. C. Baur) who rejected the historic Christianity he had embraced as a youth in favor of the Hegelian panentheism eventually immortalized as a central plank in the platform of the Tübingen School (Harris 1975). Handing over theological education to people with waning or no appetite for creedal Christian belief had the trickle-down effect of schooling generations of parishioners in post-Christian convictions, even though broadly speaking the gradually spreading consensus offered few critical insights that were not at least latent in ancient objections to Christian truth claims.

To sum up, at the Enlightenment the theological synthesis of historic Christianity (see Oden 2003) was rejected by influential individuals who were often not very sympathetic to it in the first place. To justify this, and to extend alternate syntheses like Continental rationalism (growing out of English Deism), Hegelian philosophy of religion, Ritschlian liberalism, and the dogmatics, as it were, of the so-called history of religions school, the foundational historical bases of Christian doctrine were increasingly assaulted.11 Within a few generations leading universities and theological schools were increasingly teaching the Christian Scriptures from the basis of post-Christian construals of them. Today, while attempts are continually made to argue that the effects of historical criticism (a convenient term for the hermeneutical approach that the Enlightenment championed and that is still dominant among many biblical scholars) are or by rights should be irrelevant for faith (e.g., Culpepper 1998: 37; Schnelle 1998: 14; Ehrman 2004: 14), this could be true only of a faith foreign to biblical writers. For they predicated their confessional claims on a God who created the world, superintended history, and revealed himself definitively and knowably within that material-temporal nexus through divinely appointed spokespersons and ultimately writers who bequeathed the Scriptures to God’s people and thereby to the world (cf. Grant and Tracy 1984: 3–4). First John speaks much of just such faith. It is inconceivable that the author would assent to the proposition that the historical basis of 1 John 1:1–3 is irrelevant to his subsequent expressions of and calls for faith in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Today, after over two centuries of development of what has by now become a fairly predictable, traditional, and professionally obligatory outlook12 in many centers of learning, it has become customary for scholars to disconnect the author John from the apostle John son of Zebedee (Schnelle 1998: 456; Ehrman 2004: 174; Witherington 2006: 395). Moreover, 1 John was not composed by the evangelist who wrote the Fourth Gospel (Perkins 2004: 21). Further, the Letters of John (which themselves may come from different hands, so Holladay 2005: 521) were produced by a community rather than an individual (Schnelle 1998: 436–38; Rensberger 2001: 3). For that matter, even the Fourth Gospel does not go back to a follower of Jesus; it was rather produced by a theologian of the later period who, on the basis of comprehensive traditions, rethought the meaning of Jesus’ life, and interpreted and presented it in his own way (Schnelle 1998: 474; cf. Lincoln 2002). This view tends to be presented as some daring and avant-garde find of cutting-edge scholarship, but a century ago Wrede (1907: 230) stated this outlook with admirable frankness:

If one views [John’s] chief intention as the transmission of actual history, many features of the narrative become practically grotesque and ridiculous. Historically speaking, the following features, and many others, are simply pure impossibilities: that Jesus interacted with the Jews regarding his execution or the Last Supper; that he discussed Johannine theology with the Roman procurator; that his simplest words met with the most massive misunderstanding; that in prayers to God he used dogmatic formulations or reflections on the working of prayer on those who listened to him. However, whoever recognizes that the author is led by intentions entirely different than historical ones, that it is his ideas and biases which reshape and idealize [beseelen] the received material [i.e., the oral tradition] and add numerous traditions to it—that person learns to understand why so much must strike us as strange and odd, so delusional and removed from reality.

As for the epistles, the verdict on 1 John is held as true for all three: Unquestionably 1 John, like the Qumrân literature and even [the Gospel of John], is a community document (Sloyan 1995: 44; cf. Callahan 2005: 1–5).

The upshot of this conviction is that between the earthly Jesus and the God he somehow embodied—whom the Johannine Letters call readers to trust, love, and heed—and the claims of the Johannine writings lies an impermeable barrier. We need to be delivered from supposing that the Johannine tradition (including John’s Gospel) tells us anything about Christianity (much less Jesus himself) in the first half of the first century (Callahan 2005: ix). Even though recent decades have witnessed a renewed quest for the historical Jesus, this has done little to rehabilitate the reputation of these writings as conveying the convictions of a personal acquaintance of Jesus and the disciple whom Jesus loved (John 13:23; 19:26; 21:7, 20). All of John’s writings are viewed as late, reflective at best of historical conditions several generations after Jesus’s death.

It is even possible to represent John’s writings as originating in the mid- or late second century. In the interest of such a thesis, Strecker (1996: xli–xlii n79) casts doubt on our knowledge of the textual tradition. Along this same line, Schmithals (1992: 290–91) explains how, in the wake of Marcion and his canon, various Christian subgroups responded with their own canons. These subgroups favored three-document collections due to Philo’s influence,13 for whom three was the number of perfection. And so were born, it is theorized, various mini-proto-Bibles in the form of (1) Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon; (2) 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus; (3) the short recensions of Ignatius to the Ephesians and the Romans along with Polycarp’s epistle; and (4) the Johannine Letters. Klauck (1998: 261) extends this charge of a sort of Christian gematria: for a while the writings of 1 Peter, 1 John, and James were widely accepted on their own. Then 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude were added, and the result was not accidentally the number seven. Added to a fourteen-letter Pauline corpus (with Hebrews being regarded as Pauline), the mysterious plotters of the NT canon arrived at 3 × 7 letters in the New Testament. Having attributed this transparent contrivance to second-century Christians, Klauck then condemns them for it: This only underscores the artificiality of the whole construction.

Works advancing anonymous, pseudonymous, or community authorship of John’s Letters, or some variation thereof, dominate the discussion today (e.g., R. Brown 1982: 30n71 [four authors at work in composition, though his views fluctuated over the years]; Schnackenburg 1992: 41; Sloyan 1995: 3; Strecker 1996: xxxv–xliv; Culpepper 1998: 29–37; C. Black 2000: 386n3; Ehrman 2004: 164–65). Witherington (2006: 403) thinks that the author may have been the Beloved Disciple and possibly Lazarus. Or the authorship question may be largely skirted (Griffith 2002; T. Brown 2003). Reflecting a postmodern hermeneutic in its prime, Callahan states, The ‘relationship among texts’ that we now call the Johannine Epistles . . . is not and cannot be a property of ‘Johannine authorship’ (2005: 2). There are only texts, and therefore at some point and in some manner writers. But there were no authors.

The doctrine of a nonapostolic, noneyewitness authorship of the Johannine writings and therefore letters may be regarded as firmly established. Ancient tradition and in fact Scripture itself (Rev. 1:9) says that John was banished from the mainland to the island of Patmos. Today he is banished from connection with all the writings that people once thought he composed.

His exile is of little concern if the gospel he upheld is not true and binding on today’s world and readers. If exegesis of 1–3 John is literally an academic exercise, then we can leave these authorless lines to whatever fate befalls them. Life goes on, however ir/religiously an interpreter cares to construe it. The paychecks, pensions, and (if one is lucky) royalties of tenured professors setting forth startling new ideas about discredited old traditions will continue.

The Vantage Point of This Commentary

Johannine studies has arrived at the place it is through the labors of generations of dedicated scholars. Even where the approach has been largely negative from the standpoint of John’s claims as I would understand them, there is typically much to learn from the exegesis of any trained and thoughtful reader of the NT text. For that reason, this commentary will interact freely with a full range of interpreters who have assayed to interpret the Johannine Letters. Having said that, I also feel it legitimate to invite John back off his island and welcome him into the apostolic circle, where historical sources place him.

It is likely that first-century Christians, taught by both Judaism and Jesus (Wenham 1994) to acknowledge in the Hebrew Scripture and its Greek counterpart (the LXX) oracles of God of priceless worth (cf. Rom. 3:1–2), quickly treasured the writings of their own spiritual leaders as God inspired (cf. Holladay 2005: 575). The magisterial tone of NT epistles assumes this; if we were to write thus to one another today, it would strike us as parody. The writers wrote and were evidently read as possessing a certain authority (challenged by many, as the writings make clear, as was the Jesus they served). Why would they not be so regarded when they cast out demons and healed the sick (John and other disciples in Mark 6:13), caused the lame to walk (John and Peter in Acts 3:1–10), and raised the dead (Peter in Acts 9:36–43)? There is formal indication of their authority from before the end of the first century (1 Tim. 5:18b [if Paul is citing a written source]; 2 Pet. 3:15–17; 1 Clem. 47.1–3; 53.1). The phenomenon of inspiration of both OT and NT writings is a primitive Christian belief (Westcott 1888: 417–56), rooted in Jewish belief preceding it: Jewish exegetes believed that every word of Scripture had been spoken by God. There could be no question of its inspiration or authenticity (Grant and Tracy 1984: 8). It would not be surprising if the writings of John son of Zebedee were regarded highly. And this is not merely the result of a theological conviction regarding inspired Scripture: it is also a historical conviction visible in the canonical Gospels, which explicitly acknowledged their sources in the eyewitnesses and the authority of the eyewitnesses for their reliability (Bauckham 2006: 292).

Moreover, Papias is said to have made use of 1 John (as well as 1 Peter; Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 3.39.17), and Papias can be regarded as active in the 95–110 era along with Ignatius and Polycarp (Yarbrough 1983). I am unaware of good reason to doubt the claim that Eusebius, as he perused Papias’s Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord, saw 1 John quoted or at least alluded to recognizably.14

It is worth noting that no ancient manuscripts of John’s Epistles do not bear his name. True, it is commonly stated that early manuscripts circulated without indication of their author (R. Brown 1982: 5; Heckel 2004: 433), but in the absence of proof and perhaps even compelling evidence, this is a theory to be treated with caution regarding John’s Letters. (For a similar argument regarding the four Gospels, see Bauckham 2006: 111, 302–4.) If for some considerable period of time no one knew, really, who wrote these letters as they circulated, and John represents a later guess, how likely is it that the hundreds of copies, or at least the numerous lines of manuscript transmission that are reflected in extant copies, all guessed the same person for just these three particular documents? Here the work of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research again deserves notice (B. Aland et al. 2003a: 263, 368), which lists (in Greek without accents or breathing marks) about fifty different titles given for 1 John (whether at the beginning as superscriptions or at the end as subscriptions). The following selection (from uncials, whose titles are picked up by minuscules) gives the flavor of ancient scribal convention:15

Of the 143 witnesses cited in B. Aland et al. 2003a (representing 180 total manuscripts), only two lack the name John in either the superscription or subscription. Minuscule 1751 contains the subscription τελος της πρωτης επιστολης ητις εγραφη απο εφεσου (End of the First Epistle, Which Was Written from Ephesus). Minuscules 607 and 1838 have the subscription εγραφη απο εφεσου (Written from Ephesus). These subscriptional clues, even without John’s name, were surely adequate to imply it for Byzantine copyists and users of the manuscripts they produced. (Since 1838 is from the eleventh century and contained all the Catholic Letters, the placement of 1 John after 2 Peter would have betrayed its identity to any Byzantine scribe.) The textual witness for John’s authorship of 1 John is uniform and pervasive. This does not prove that the name John was affixed to the very earliest copies (at which time it would perhaps not have needed to be: at the outset of the tradition process, it would be self-evident). But it is consonant with the theory that it may have been and the supposition that in any case these writings never circulated without being closely associated with John.

Finally, it is alleged that many NT writings owe their titles not to anonymity but to pseudonymity: the putative authorship was assigned by perhaps a community that knew full well that the named author was not the actual one. This theory has received recent careful scrutiny and can with good reason be viewed with skepticism (Wilder 2004; cf. Baum 2001; more broadly Carson and Moo 2005: 337–50). There is no compelling reason to doubt that the only known prominent John associated with the first-century church wrote John.17 This is attested too early to be otherwise; as Heckel (2005: 1323) in reviewing Hill states: The extant sources from Ignatius, Papias, Polycarp, and Justin to Irenaeus either explicitly presuppose John’s Gospel or show absolutely no inclination to shy away from related ideas that were with considerable probability drawn from John’s Gospel. If this has validity, it has implications for viewing the NT letters attributed to John as coming from his own hand.

What about John the Elder? No patristic writer prior to Eusebius (writing ca. 300) proposed the existence of such a person (for arguments that some second-century sources may support the theory of this person’s existence, see Bauckham 2006: 438–71). I argue elsewhere (1983) that Eusebius interpreted Papias tendentiously to tease out an Elder John who was separate from the apostle (Eccl. Hist. 3.39.2–9). He needed someone named John to whom he could attribute the book of Revelation, since Eusebius under Origen’s influence had embraced amillenarianism, whereas the ante-Nicene church generally and Eusebius in his younger years understood Revelation in millenarian terms (Grant 1980: 131). For polemical purposes,18 then, Eusebius saw fit to invent the nonapostolic Elder John and then impute Revelation to him. Chapman (1911: 33) noted long ago: It is certain that Eusebius was the first to discover two Johns in Papias, and he is proud of his discovery. It is telling that Eusebius elsewhere rejoins the consensus of his era, speaking of but one John and even linking him to the writing of the Apocalypse (Eccl. Hist. 3.18.1; 3.20.9; 3.23.1, 6). It is also significant that in his Chronicon (the framework for his history) Eusebius lists Papias, along with Ignatius and Polycarp, as hearers of the apostle John (Helm 1913: 193–94). To my mind this is a nagging weakness in Bauckham’s impressive arguments for the existence of an Elder John separate from the apostle (2006: 412–37): they force a highly contestable reading on Papias’s fragments, fragments carefully selected by Eusebius to furnish a basis for his unprecedented claim that there were two Johns.

But even these fragments can be understood to speak of only one John, the apostle and the son of Zebedee. It is significant that Eusebius himself admits that the word elder can for Papias designate an apostle: "Papias . . . confesses that he had received the words of the Apostles from their followers" (Eccl. Hist. 3.39.7 [Loeb translation, emphasis added]). In the quotation given by Eusebius from Papias’s writings, Papias never uses the word apostle. He speaks only of elders who were Jesus’s disciples: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or any other of the disciples of the Lord (3.39.4). Papias says that he had access to these elders as well as to others who had been their followers (such as Polycarp and Ignatius?). But Eusebius identifies those whom Papias terms elders as