The Epistles of John

By I. Howard Marshall

Marshall's study on the Epistles of John constitute a single volume in The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Prepared by some of the world's leading scholars, the series provides an exposition of the New Testament books that is thorough and fully abreast of modern scholarship yet faithful to the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jul 14, 1978
• ISBN: 9781467422321

I. Howard Marshall

 I. Howard Marshall (1934–2015) was professor emeritus of New Testament exegesis and honorary research professor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His many books include New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel and Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology.

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The Epistles of

JOHN

---

I. HOWARD MARSHALL

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

© 1978 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

www.eerdmans.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marshall, I. Howard

The Epistles of John.

(The New International Commentary on the New Testament)

Includes indexes.

1. Bible. N.T. Epistles of John—Commentaries. I. Title.

BS2805.3.M37   227′.94′07   77-28118

eISBN 978-1-4674-2232-1

ISBN 978-0-8028-2518-6

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

Contents

Editor’s Preface

Author’s Preface

Abbreviations

Commentaries and Other Works

INVITATION

INTRODUCTION

1. The Situation and Character of 2 and 3 John

2. The Situation of 1 John

3. The Structure of 1 John

4. Theories of Rearrangement and Redaction

5. Relationships Between the Johannine Writings

6. The Authorship of the Epistles

7. The Early History of the Epistles in the Church

8. The Thought of the Epistles

THE SECOND EPISTLE OF JOHN

Address and Greeting (1–3)

Living in Truth and Love (4–6)

Beware of False Teaching (7–11)

Final Words and Greetings (12–13)

THE THIRD EPISTLE OF JOHN

Address and Greeting (1–4)

The Writer Praises Gaius (5–8)

The Writer Denounces Diotrephes (9–10)

The Writer Praises Demetrius (11–12)

Final Words and Greetings (13–15)

THE FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN

Prologue—The Word of Life (1:1–4)

Walking in the Light (1:5–2:2)

Keeping His Commands (2:3–11)

The New Status of Believers and Their Relation to the World (2:12–17)

A Warning against Antichrists (2:18–27)

The Hope of God’s Children (2:28–3:3)

The Sinlessness of God’s Children (3:4–10)

Brotherly Love as the Mark of the Christian (3:11–18)

Assurance and Obedience (3:19–24)

The Spirit of Truth and Falsehood (4:1–6)

God’s Love and Our Love (4:7–12)

Assurance and Christian Love (4:13–5:4)

The True Faith Confirmed (5:5–12)

Christian Certainties (5:13–21)

NOTES

INDEXES

1. Subjects

2. Authors

3. Biblical References

4. Extra and Nonbiblical Literature

Editor’s Preface

When it was decided to replace Dr. Alexander Ross’s commentary on the Epistles of James and John by two separate volumes, it was necessary to secure two commentators. Happily, hard on Dr. James Adamson’s acceptance of the invitation to write the commentary on the Epistle of James came Dr. I. Howard Marshall’s consent to undertake the companion work on the Epistles of John.

Dr. Marshall is a graduate of the Universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge; he also spent a period of study under Professor Joachim Jeremias at Göttingen. For over twelve years he has been a member of the teaching staff of the Department of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen, where he now holds the status of Reader.

He gave evidence of his interest in Johannine literature when, as a youthful scholar, he contributed the articles on the Gospel and Epistles of John to the New Bible Dictionary (1962). Since then he has proved his worth as a New Testament exegete and theologian in a succession of scholarly publications—some of a specialist nature and some more popular. In criticism and exegesis he has specialized thus far in Lukan studies, with his Luke: Historian and Theologian (1970) and The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (1978). He has written popular Scripture Union commentaries on Mark (1963) and Kings and Chronicles (1967). An important symposium on New Testament Interpretation appeared under his editorship in 1977. In New Testament theology his major work is a study of the doctrine of perseverance, Kept by the Power of God (1969). He is also author of Christian Beliefs (1963), The Work of Christ (1969), The Origins of New Testament Christology (1976), and I Believe in the Historical Jesus (1977). These works, together with a number of articles in learned periodicals, have placed him in the front rank of British New Testament scholars, and the New International Commentary on the New Testament is to be congratulated on enlisting him among its contributors.

A fresh feature of this volume is the inclusion of an Invitation to the general reader as well as an Introduction for the specialist. Another fresh feature is a rearrangement of the traditional order of the three letters: 2 John and 3 John are studied before 1 John. This means that the two shorter letters are not relegated to the position of appendices but are treated as important documents of early Christianity in their own right.

Since writers of replacement volumes in the New International Commentary are left free to compose or select their own translations, Dr. Marshall has chosen to base his exposition on the New International Version.

With these prefatory words, the editor leaves Dr. Marshall to engage his readers’ attention and appreciation by what he has to say in the following pages.

F. F. BRUCE

Author’s Preface

There are already so many commentaries on the various books of the New Testament that anybody who adds to their number should be obliged to give some defense of himself. The immediate occasion for the present work was a request by the editor of the New International Commentary on the New Testament that I should prepare a fresh volume on the Epistles of John. The original volume in the series by Dr. Alexander Ross also included the Epistle of James. The decision to publish a new, considerably fuller commentary on James in an individual volume meant that the treatment of the Johannine Epistles by Dr. Ross must also be replaced by a new volume at greater length.

It was my privilege to get to know Dr. Ross through his visits to the Aberdeen University Evangelical Union where he was a much-appreciated speaker. Both as a teacher in the Free Church of Scotland College and then during his active retirement as minister of the Free Church in Burghead, he exercised a gracious and scholarly ministry, and he was held in high esteem both inside and outside his own denomination. His commentary on these Epistles was one of the first books that I ever reviewed, and I am glad now to have this opportunity of paying respect to his memory.

Unfortunately Dr. Ross’s commentary on the Johannine Epistles was limited in length and consequently in the amount of detailed exegesis of the text which it could provide. It was also written before the development of recent study of the Epistles. Writing in 1958, Dr. William Barclay could comment, with some exaggeration, that there were not many outstanding commentaries on these Epistles, although he then went on to list the works of B. F. Westcott, A. E. Brooke, and C. H. Dodd as the best, particularly the last mentioned. The situation has now changed. A year earlier than Ross’s work there was published the first volume in a new German series. Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament is a Roman Catholic production, intended to be on the scholarly level of the International Critical Commentary but with particular stress on theological exposition. This first volume was by R. Schnackenburg on the Epistles of John, and it remains unrivalled as a comprehensive and well-informed study of the Epistles; it is the fundamental work for the serious student. It was followed in 1957 by a full-length monograph by W. Nauck, Die Tradition und der Charakter des ersten Johannesbriefes, which opened up new view-points in the light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The commentary by R. Bultmann which followed shortly after (1967) and would otherwise have been important in its own right had little that was fresh to offer in comparison with Schnackenburg’s work; curiously it is Bultmann’s work which has been translated into English rather than Schnackenburg’s.

Among English works particular importance attaches to J. R. W. Stott’s work in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, which is fuller than many of the other volumes in that series and remains the best general commentary on the Epistles, well based on sound scholarship but clear and practical. Nor can I fail to mention the work of my former teacher, J. N. S. Alexander, in the Torch Bible Commentaries, and the more recent work of J. L. Houlden in Black’s New Testament Commentaries. But perhaps the most outstanding of the post-Schnackenburg era of commentaries is that by M. de Jonge; it is written in Dutch, which limits its availability, but its basic insights have been incorporated in the handbook on the Letters of John in the United Bible Societies’ Helps for Translators series: this is an extremely valuable book, useful to all students and not merely to Bible translators.

Other works could be mentioned, but these I have found to be the most useful. The justification of the present commentary lies in its attempt to mediate to English readers the results of recent study, especially on the Continent, and to do so in such a way that the ordinary reader will not be distracted by the apparatus of scholarship. I have, therefore, attempted to separate off the technicalities from the exposition by rigidly confining the latter to the footnotes and also by writing a separate Invitation to the general reader and Introduction for the student. It is also arguable that too few commentaries attempt to expound the New Testament for the modern reader, and I have made some attempt to indicate how I think the Epistles should be interpreted and applied in the contemporary situation. One further feature of the commentary is that it deliberately treats 2 and 3 John before 1 John, in the hope that readers will move from the easier books to the more difficult.

The English translation on which the commentary is based is that of the New International Version, and I am grateful to the New York Bible Society for the opportunity to use it here. It is an ideal translation for the present purpose, being sufficiently literal to form a good basis for exegesis and at the same time clear and modern in expression. Only in a few places have I wanted to question its renderings, and these did not seem sufficient in number to justify me in producing yet another translation of my own.

Martin Luther wrote of 1 John: I have never read a book written in simpler words than this one, and yet the words are inexpressible (WA 28, 183). I pray that something of the simplicity and the depth of these Epistles may emerge in this commentary. It is a not uncommon experience that the writing of a commentary opens up the mind and heart to new truth or fresh appreciation of the old; I trust that what I personally have experienced in writing this commentary may convey itself to the readers.

I. HOWARD MARSHALL

Abbreviations

AG [Walter Bauer’s] Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. and adapted by W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, Chicago/Cambridge, 1957

AH Against Heresies (Irenaeus)

AV Authorized (King James) Version

BD Blass, F., and Debrunner, A., A Greek Grammar of the New Testament (trans. by R. W. Funk), Chicago/Cambridge, 1961

Bib Biblica

BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

BZ Biblische Zeitschrift

CD Book of the Covenant of Damascus (= Zadokite Work)

CH Corpus Hermeticum

Diglot The General Letters: A Greek-English Diglot for the Use of Translators, London, 1961 (incorporates the projected 3rd edition of the British and Foreign Bible Society text of the Greek New Testament prepared by G. D. Kilpatrick)

EQ The Evangelical Quarterly

EvT Evangelische Theologie

ExpT Expository Times

HE Historia ecclesiastica (Eusebius)

HTR Harvard Theological Review

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JTS Journal of Theological Studies

Knox Knox, R. A., The New Testament, Mission, KS/London, 1948

Metzger Metzger, B. M., A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, London, 1971

Moffatt Moffatt, J., The New Testament: A New Translation, London, 1935

Moule Moule, C. F. D., An Idiom-Book of New Testament Greek, New York/Cambridge, 1953

MH Moulton, J. H., Howard, W. F., and Turner, N., Grammar of New Testament Greek, Naperville/Edinburgh, I, 1906; II, 1929; III, 1963; IV, 1976

MM Moulton, J. H., and Milligan, G., The Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament, Grand Rapids/London, 1914–29

NEB New English Bible

NIDNTT Brown, C. (ed.), The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Grand Rapids/Exeter, 1975–77

NIV New International Version

NovT Novum Testamentum

NTA New Testament Abstracts

NTS New Testament Studies

RAC Klausner, T. (ed.), Reallexikon für die Antike und Christentum, Stuttgart, 1941–

RB Revue Biblique

RGG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart

RHPR Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses

RSV Revised Standard Version

RV Revised Version

S Codex Sinaiticus

SB Strack, H. L., und Billerbeck, P., Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, München, 1956³

T.Dan, etc. Testament of Dan, etc. (from Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs)

TDNT Kittel, G., and Friedrich, G. (ed.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (trans. by G. W. Bromiley), Grand Rapids, 1964–77

TEV Good News Bible: Today’s English Version

THAT Jenni, E., und Westermann, C. (ed.), Theologisches Handwörterbuch zum Alten Testament, München, 1971–76

ThR Theologische Rundschau

TLZ Theologische Literaturzeitung

TNT Translator’s New Testament

TU Texte und Untersuchungen

TZ Theologische Zeitschrift

UBS The Greek New Testament (3rd edition, United Bible Societies, London, 1975)

WA Luthers Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe)

ZNW Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft

ZTK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

Commentaries and Other Works

The books listed in this bibliography are referred to in the commentary simply by the author’s name.

Invitation

This is an invitation to you to read the Epistles of John. It is not an advertisement for the commentary which appears in this book. The task of the commentator is to serve the text and to help to make it comprehensible to the reader; no commentary was ever meant to be read for its own sake but only as a means to an end, the understanding of the text. John wrote his Epistles in Greek, a language not universally understood; the commentator must either use a translation in the language of his readers or produce a fresh one. The author and his readers lived in the past; the commentator must re-create the situation in which the Epistles were composed so that the modern reader can appreciate them in their original setting. The Epistles contain things which are hard to understand or ambiguous in meaning; the commentator must strive to establish the meaning and express it with all clarity. Finally, the Epistles form a part of Holy Scripture, the Word of God written; it is the commentator’s supreme task to present their message to the modern reader, showing how they form part of God’s Word to his people today. The commentator’s duty is thus to be the servant of the text and its readers, so that the text may once again speak and be the vehicle of God’s Word to a new generation.

Anybody, therefore, who wishes to hear the Word of God is invited to read the Epistles of John. They form an excellent starting place for the student who wants an introduction to the theology of the New Testament. In the New English Bible the First Epistle is given the heading Recall to Fundamentals. It is an apt title, for this Epistle, and indeed all three, are concerned with the very fundamentals of Christian belief and life. The reader who grasps the message of these letters will have a sound basis in Christian doctrine, ready to be filled out by further study elsewhere in the New Testament. In particular, he will have a good starting point for study of the Gospel of John; although the Gospel was probably written before the Epistles and forms the foundation for what they teach, it is probably easier in some ways for the reader to grasp John’s message by beginning with the Epistles.

Again, these writings are among the shorter ones in the New Testament. In fact, 2 and 3 John are the shortest books in the New Testament. As a result, they have often been thought to be insignificant and unimportant alongside the other Johannine writings. Their position in the canon after 1 John has put them in its shadow, and readers who begin with 1 John may well conclude that there is nothing fresh to be found in them. But both 2 and 3 John do contain their own individual contributions to Christian thinking, and they can profitably be read as introductions to 1 John. I propose, therefore, to rescue them from their comparative obscurity by inviting the reader to look at them first, before turning to 1 John, and I believe that by reading the Epistles in this order students will come to a better appreciation of their intrinsic value. The New Testament order was probably arrived at simply on grounds of length; there is nothing sacrosanct about it. We shall do well to abandon that order in the interests of rehabilitating these valuable writings.

The student of the Greek New Testament is also well advised to begin his reading with these Epistles. Their Greek is the easiest to read in the whole of the New Testament. The total vocabulary of the New Testament is 5437 words; the number of different words used in 1–3 John is merely 303, and the majority of these are common words. To read a text with such a small vocabulary is a light undertaking. The general style and syntax of the Epistles is also simple and straightforward, and there are not many tricky passages to retard the beginner. Students who have not yet worked their way fully through an elementary Greek grammar can cut their teeth on these Epistles, and will have the rewarding experience of finding that they can actually read the New Testament itself without too much difficulty. It will pay any reader who has even a little knowledge of Greek to have his Greek Testament open in front of him as he proceeds through the commentary; while references to Greek words have been strenuously avoided in the text to make it as widely useful as possible, the footnotes will provide some help on problems met by the Greek student.

The Epistles of John are concerned with the fundamentals of Christian theology; they are brief in compass and simple to comprehend: what are they about? At the time of writing them their author, a man whom we know as John (although he does not in fact name himself), was apparently an old man. He had some kind of pastoral charge over a number of churches, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of Ephesus. Old people nowadays find rural travel difficult if they cannot drive. It must have been all the more difficult in the first century when there wasn’t even a bus service to complain about. In order to keep in touch with his churches John had to rely on his pen and entrust his messages to younger men who could travel about more easily. Although, therefore, John could occasionally visit the churches under his care (2 Jn. 12; 3 Jn. 14), there were times when he felt that he must send them personal letters.

The writing of 2 John was occasioned by a couple of factors. John was worried by the fact that some of the traveling teachers who exercised an itinerant preaching ministry among the churches were putting forward doctrines which he felt to be out of harmony with genuine Christianity as he himself had accepted and taught it. Specifically they were denying that Jesus was the Christ and the Son of God. John feared that the members of one church in particular might be led astray by what was being presented as advanced Christian teaching. Fortunately just at this critical point some of the members of the church happened to visit John. Indeed, it may have been their reports which informed John about the danger affecting their church. So John seized the opportunity to send them back with a brief letter in which he warned his friends not to be taken in by this false teaching and not to assist its proponents by giving them hospitality for their mission. At the same time he was able to commend the church for the practical grasp of Christian truth and its expression in love which he found exemplified in the lives of its members. All this is said in a few lines of writing, but it presents us with a cameo of John’s chief concerns: on the one hand, the importance of adherence to the truth, especially believing the truth about Jesus as the Son of God, and of living in Christian love, and, on the other hand, the dangerous threat posed by heresy. Truth and love constitute the two main positive features of John’s Christianity.

The situation in 3 John is somewhat different. Here we have a letter addressed to a particular individual called Gaius. John expresses his good wishes for his health, and it may be that Gaius had been ill and was unable to attend the church some miles away. Gaius is commended for his faithfulness to the truth and for his love, shown in the way in which he opened his house to traveling preachers. These preachers were colleagues of John, unlike the false teachers in 2 John. But there was a problem in the church. A man called Diotrephes was attempting to be leader in the church and rejected John’s authority over it. He had suppressed a letter from John to the church, and he also refused to allow traveling teachers to minister in the church. John now wrote to Gaius, hoping that through him a message might get through to the church and his authority might be re-established, and he sent it by the hand of Demetrius, a traveling preacher whom he warmly commended to Gaius. The way in which John tells Gaius about the situation as though he was ignorant of it suggests that he lived some distance from the church and was not able to visit it very often, or that he belonged to a neighboring church. There is no suggestion in this letter that Diotrephes or the members of his church held any heretical views, but once again we find that John’s characteristic stress on truth and love comes out in what he writes.

The same issues emerge, but much more broadly, in 1 John. This letter gives a full-scale expression of the kind of things that John wanted to say in 2 John. It is composed more like a sermon than a letter, but is obviously meant for a particular group (or groups) of Christians. From it we gain the impression that the heretical teaching which John opposed had become a more coherent system of thought, and that its adherents had set up their own rival church. Having themselves withdrawn from the church with which John had fellowship, they were now trying to persuade the rest of the church to follow them. This situation clearly produced considerable debate and uncertainty in the church. Here were the people who had left the church claiming that it was not necessary to accept Jesus as the Son of God in order to have knowledge of God. Indeed, they held that it was possible to live without sin on this basis, and that they had no need of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness through the death of Jesus. They based their view of Christianity on spiritual revelations for which they claimed divine authority. They may not specifically have denied the importance of love as a Christian virtue, but they certainly did not emphasize it in their teaching. They offered Christianity without tears. It was bound to prove an attractive proposition to the congregation. No doubt some of them were tempted to accept it and join the seceders. The general effect, however, was to produce uncertainty in the minds of the congregation, even among those who remained loyal to John’s teaching. If this simplified version of Christianity offered knowledge of God and sinlessness, what need was there for John’s teaching? What did one have to believe and do in order to be a true Christian? What did it really mean to be a Christian?

These were the questions in the minds of John’s readers, and in the light of them we can now understand the purpose of his letter: I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life (1 Jn. 5:13). John addressed himself to his friends who were disturbed by the teaching of the seceders in order to reassure them that they really were true Christians since they accepted Jesus as the Son of God. John’s purpose has sometimes been expressed as giving his readers The Tests of Life. He lists the characteristics by which a person may know whether he has life and bids his readers test themselves accordingly. But in fact John’s purpose is somewhat more positive. He is not so much encouraging his readers to test themselves and see whether they qualify for eternal life as assuring them that in fact they do qualify for eternal life.

But obviously we must fill this out in order to grasp the message of the letter as a whole. John has not written it according to any neat plan; attempts to get a tidy, three-point sermon out of 1 John are misguided. He conducts a tour through his subject, pausing at the points that interest him, returning to areas of interest, seeing familiar objects from different angles, and yet all the time progressing toward a conclusion. His starting place is firm and solid: it is the Word of life, the revelation of God in Jesus (1:1–4). His goal is clear: it is the possibility of fellowship between men and God through Jesus Christ, his Son. He begins from the nature of God as revealed by Jesus, a God who is light and who cannot therefore tolerate sin. No man is free from sin, and therefore the path to fellowship with God can only be opened up by cleansing from sin brought about through the death of Jesus. But freedom from sin is not merely negative. Positively there must be obedience to the commands of God, specifically to his command to love one another. All claims to knowledge of God by people who fail to love their brothers are false and deceitful. With these statements John is already implicitly attacking the false teachers. They did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God who died for the sins of the world, nor (in John’s opinion) did they show love for their brothers. Such people were in fact still in the darkness, rather than in the light of God. They belonged to the sinful, rebellious world rather than to God. John in fact described them as antichrists, people who were opposed to Christ and who had therefore cut themselves off from God. The readers must not be led astray by them. Indeed, there was no need for them to be led astray because they had received the true teaching confirmed by the witness of the Spirit. Let them remain in that teaching and practice true holiness, and in due time they will see God.

Thus it emerges that one of the decisive differences between the true Christian and the false is that the former is free from sin, while the latter shows by his sin that he belongs to the devil. A further difference is that the true Christian loves his brothers—with real, sacrificial love, such as was shown by Jesus himself. Those who show these qualities really do have eternal life. But if the readers feel uncertain about this—and faced by such high ideals they could well feel uncertain—they are not to be worried. God is greater than their own feelings and accepts them. They can have confidence to come into his presence and pray with the assurance of being heard.

Those who have eternal life have received the Spirit of God. Yet it is necessary to remember that there are evil spirits as well as good. The seceders also claim spiritual inspiration. How can the two be distinguished? John’s answer is that it depends on whether the person possessed by the spirit holds the true faith about Jesus.

Once again John returns to the theme of love and repeats his point that love is the mark of the Christian, since love is the characteristic of God himself. Not only so, but love is the sign that God lives in us, even though we cannot see him. This experience is confirmed by the gift of the Spirit, and it depends upon our acceptance of Jesus as the Son of God. It leads to confidence in prayer and takes away any slavish fear of God.

So Christian confidence depends upon our faith and love. It is through our faith that we can fulfil the commandment to love and all that this entails. But it must be emphasized that this is real Christian faith which is meant. It is faith that Jesus really was the Son of God, not merely (as the seceders taught) that a divine power came upon Jesus at his baptism and left him again before his crucifixion: the Son of God truly became incarnate in Jesus and died on the cross. This understanding of Jesus has been testified to by God through the Spirit, and to disbelieve it is to regard God as a liar.

Thus it is those who believe in Jesus who have eternal life. They can have confidence in praying to God. And therefore they should pray for any of their brothers whom they see committing sins which might deprive them of their confidence and assurance. There are sins of another kind, which lead to death, and here John has nothing to say about the value of praying for those who commit them. He concludes by reiterating the certainties which have become apparent in the course of the letter: the sinlessness of God’s children, the assurance that the readers are God’s children, and the fact that Jesus Christ is the way to God.

From this quick summary of the letter we can see that John sums up the characteristics of the true Christian as right belief, righteousness, and love. These are the factors which he believes to be absent from the lives of the seceders. The true Christian has eternal life; he is in close fellowship with God and has received the gift of the Spirit. Real Christianity is based on the incarnation and sacrificial death of the Son of God. In such terms we can pinpoint the essential themes of Johannine Christianity.

All this is worth studying for its own sake, as a picture of an important area of first-century Christianity. But it also has relevance for our situation today. Although we must beware of the temptation to suggest that our circumstances today are just the same as in the first century, it is still true that we have some problems which are like those John faced. Today there is a variety of types of Christianity in existence, and we are bound to ask which of them is right, and what basis we have for discriminating among them. We are confronted by denial of the incarnation and atonement in various forms: has John anything to say that is relevant to these modern doctrines? Does it matter what one believes? Can one know God apart from his revelation in Jesus? Questions like these make John’s message very relevant.

At the same time John’s teaching has created problems for the Christian church. He says that Christians do not sin and holds out the prospect of sinlessness. He speaks about the possibility of God’s love being made complete or perfect in us. Are these things really possible? Can a Christian live a life that is free from sin and full of love? Or again: John says that everyone who loves has been born of God: does this mean that all you need to be a Christian is love? Or again: John talks about a kind of sin which leads to death; does he mean that it is possible for a Christian to sin beyond hope of forgiveness? These are some of the problems which are raised by this Epistle. The answers to them will, we hope, appear in the course of the commentary, and we do not propose to short-circuit the process of reading through the Epistles with the assistance of the commentary by offering quick answers at this point. What we hope is that the reader’s attention will have been sufficiently stimulated to encourage him to proceed now to read the Epistles.

At this point, therefore, the ordinary reader may go straight on to the commentary. The Introduction, which follows at this point, is more technical and is intended to provide the kind of fuller information needed by students and scholars.

Introduction

1. The Situation and Character of 2 and 3 John

Unlike 1 John, 2 and 3 John fall into the category of personal letters. Each of them is the length of an ordinary private letter of the time which could be written on a standard-sized piece of papyrus (about 25 cm. by 20 cm.), and each of them has the typical form of a letter with a more or less stereotyped introduction and conclusion.¹ The form of 3 John in particular can be closely paralleled from that of the following letter, dating from the second or third century AD and discovered in Egypt:

Irenaeus to Apollinarius his dearest brother many greetings. I pray continually for your health, and I myself am well. I wish you to know that I reached land on the sixth of the month Epeiph and we unloaded our cargo on the eighteenth of the same month.… Many salutations to your wife and to Serenus and to all who love you, each by name. Goodbye. Mesore 9.

(Addressed) to Apollinarius from his brother Irenaeus.²

There is no doubt that 3 John is a real letter from the elder to his friend Gaius, fitting in with the pattern of ancient letter-writing, but transformed by Christian usage. 2 John follows the same general pattern; it has been suggested that it is more formal and artificial in style, and hence that it is not really a letter but a literary fiction, based on the pattern of 3 John.³ This is a most improbable suggestion, since the letter can be well understood as what it claims to be, namely a real letter written to a concrete situation.

The situation in which 2 John was written can best be explained in a fuller discussion of the problems confronting the author of 1 John. All that needs to be said here is that 2 John appears to have been written to the same Christian community as 1 John but at an earlier date (since the false teachers evidently still had access to the church in 2 John, but had seceded from it in 1 Jn. 2:19), or else it was written to a different church.

Although 2 John is apparently written to an individual, the chosen lady (2 Jn. 1), it is probable that this is in fact a way of personifying a community. By contrast 3 John is written to a specific person, Gaius, and it deals with ecclesiastical rather than theological problems. Its background appears to lie in the growth of a new type of church organization.⁴ At first the various churches were to a considerable extent under the guidance and leadership of apostles and evangelists (like Paul, Timothy, and Titus) who traveled from place to place and maintained a general supervision over the churches placed under their care. In this type of situation the role and authority of the local leaders whom they appointed was correspondingly restricted. But as time passed and churches increased in number, a new situation began to arise.

Reviews for The Epistles of John

[christel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book. well researched on the Epistles of John. Marshall explains everything in details and this book gives you the opportunity to dig into the past and enrich your knowledge. I highly recommend this book for students studying Theology.