1 John - Introduction

1 John

Introduction

The first letter of John is unusual in that, like Hebrews, it gives no direct indication of who the author is. So why is the letter attributed to John the apostle? The evidence is essentially in two parts. The first is the evidence of the early church. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Origen all attributed the letter to the apostle John. Moreover, there is no evidence of anyone else having been attributed with authorship of this letter, and the letter was widely accepted in the church as canonical.

Then there is the internal evidence. The style of the letter is similar to that of the gospel of John. The style of Greek is similar, and many phrases and expressions are common to both.

In the opening of the letter, the author claims to be an eyewitness to Jesus. Also, the author writes in a very authoritative manner. Commands and instructions are given in a very clear manner.

All in all, there seems no reason to doubt the Johannine authorship of this letter.

The letter was probably written sometime between AD 85 and 95.

Just as we have no direct indication of the author, neither do we have any direct indication of the recipients! Evidence from early Christian writers indicate that John was based in Ephesus during the latter part of the 1st century and it is most likely that the letter was written to churches in the Roman province of Asia (modern day Turkey).

The letter is countering false teaching, largely an early form of gnosticism. One of the key aspects of this false teaching was that matter, and therefore the human body, is evil. So this is to be contrasted with God who is spirit and wholly good. Salvation was achieved by knowledge, rather than faith. Most importantly, perhaps, it denied the full humanity of Christ. This came in two main versions. One was Docetism, which said that Jesus only seemed to be human.  The other, Cerinthianism, said that the divine joined the human Jesus at baptism. This is probably the form that John was dealing with. It is interesting that most early heresies tended to deny the full humanity of the Son, rather than, as now, denying the full deity of the Son.

Treating the body as evil in Gnosticism had two opposite outworkings. Some would treat the body harshly, ie they were ascetics and Colossians deals with this in the latter part of chapter 2. Others, went to the opposite extreme and said it didn’t matter what people did, so people could be very licentious. This latter form was probably the more popular for obvious reasons!

So John’s letter is aimed at countering the false teachings, note that he also exposes the false teachers. At the same time, there is much positive teaching in the letter as well.

As always, here are my primary sources of information:

The Epistle of John, John Stott, IVP

NIV Study Bible, Zonvervan