All of the material in this post is taken directly from:
The New Testament in Its World
Copyright © N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird 2019
First published in Great Britain in 2019
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The three short letters of John are most probably by the same author as the gospel of John. They definitely seem to have emerged from the same community, or cluster of churches, that was involved in the production of the fourth gospel. This trio of letters offer a wonderful account of ‘truth’ and ‘love’, as well as drawing together the atonement, the holy spirit, and the church as a community made up of children of God, and all within a meditative style, quite different from the other letters in the New Testament, reflecting from many angles on the outpoured love of God in Jesus the Messiah.
It is all the more poignant, then, that these letters seem to have been written under adverse circumstances. The network of Christians associated with the author has experienced painful division with the local Jewish community over Jesus’ messiahship.
Yet, in the end, these letters are a reminder that the best response to heresy and haughtiness is the practice of love.
The first letter moves in widening circles around the main theme of the love of God, revealed in Jesus and his death and needing to be worked out in and through the life of the community. Those who belong to Jesus have a new identity which will be fully revealed when Jesus appears, committing them in the present to a life of purity as well as love. Many will try to deceive the church, even from among their own number, either denying that Jesus is the Messiah, or denying that he came in the flesh. The sign of true belonging, however, is a resolute turning from sin, embodying the self-sacrificial love of Jesus for others. The letter binds together a rich faith in Jesus with a robust call to the love which will make that faith known in the world.
The short second letter continues the same theme as the first, addressed by ‘the Elder’ to a particular church, seen as ‘the Chosen Lady’. The author is part of a sister church, whose members he refers to as ‘the children of your Chosen Sister’.4 The letter, with its warning of ‘deceivers’, provides a quick glimpse of an early church in which different teachers are moving to and fro from place to place, so that local communities need to know who is to be trusted. The gold standard remains the coming of Jesus the Messiah in the flesh: from early days in the church this extraordinary truth, celebrated in the dramatic opening of John’s gospel (‘the Word became flesh’, Jn. 1.14), was under attack. The central thesis of the letter is that anyone who abides in ‘the teaching’—the true teaching of the father and the son—is part of the fellowship of ‘truth and love’.
The third Johannine letter is about hospitality. As the church spread, with groups of a dozen or two believers in a town or village, and with increasing hostility from the surrounding culture, it was vital that Jesus-followers travelling from place to place as teachers, or on other business, should be able to trust one another.
In reading the Johannine letters, one cannot help but notice the strong pastoral language, and the warmth of the author. On the one hand, these letters offer necessary warnings against false teaching, but on the other hand they are deeply reassuring to those who do believe. The Johannine letters urge their readers to know the love of God in truth and full assurance.
Origins of the Johannine letters
The authorship of the Johannine letters, like that of the fourth gospel, is variously contested. First John is strictly anonymous, but 2 and 3 John are written by someone who calls himself ‘the elder’. There are enough similarities in language, theology, and texture for us to posit a very close relationship between the Johannine gospel and epistles, with the likelihood being that the same person wrote them all.5 So it is very likely that either John the son of Zebedee or perhaps (and more likely) John the elder is the author of these three letters.6They belong together: the problem of schism which prompted 1 John is summarized in 2 John, while 2 John and 3 John share the same designated author, letter form, and subject of mission-related hospitality.7 The letters were probably composed some time after the gospel of John, though this cannot easily be demonstrated (see text grid: ‘Examples of similarities between John’s gospel and letters’). It may well be that the letters reflect a time when some are contesting the legacy of the Johannine gospel in the churches of Asia.
First John was probably a circular letter, rooted in the author’s preaching. It was sent, we may suppose, to a number of churches in Asia Minor. Second and 3 John, by contrast, have specific audiences of ‘the elect lady and her children’9 (2 John) and ‘Gaius’ (3 John). A plausible scenario is that 1 John is a circular pastoral letter, reinforcing christological boundaries against the teaching of the secessionists. Second John was a covering letter to a specific but unknown church, where the elder writes on behalf of the ‘children of your elect sister’ to the ‘elect lady’ (probably metaphors for two sister-churches), urging them to watch out for, and to refuse hospitality to, certain deceivers and anti-Christs who were teaching Docetism (the belief that Jesus only seemedto have a physical body). Third John is a personal letter from the elder to Gaius, probably a leader and ally in the church that received the other two letters. The writer is warning Gaius about Diotrephes and the threat he poses.
DATE
First John was well known in the second century; there is less good early evidence for 2 John, and very limited evidence for 3 John. The first person to mention all three Johannine epistles is Origen in the third century.
The secessionists
Unlike in the fourth gospel there is no polemic against ‘the Judeans’ (Greek hoi Ioudaioi), but critical remarks are levelled against a group of secessionists, former members of the community who had left (see 1 Jn. 2.19). This group had attempted to move their part of the church in a trajectory towards a denial of Jesus’ messianic identity on the one hand and of his genuine humanity on the other—thus conflicting with two of the central claims of John’s gospel, that Jesus is the Word made flesh, and that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God.16 One possible scenario is that the secessionists regarded Jesus as a ‘revealer’ of esoteric truths, rather than the messianic agent of Israel’s renewal. Thus they jettisoned messianism as the relic of an inferior or repugnant prior dispensation.17 Concurrently, their denial that Jesus came in the flesh probably reflected a hellenistic influence which would be antipathetic towards physical matter and strongly in favour of divine immutability and/ or impassibility. In this view, a truly divine being could neither become genuinely human nor suffer in a physical body (see below on ‘Docetism 101’).18 This might have emerged from a Jewish view that denied the possibility of either incarnation or deification,19 combined with a desire to safeguard Jesus’ divine nature by rescuing him from the crucifixion, so that he only ‘appeared’ to suffer. That view (which might have paved the way for a more gnostic interpretation of Jesus’ person) was combated later on by Ignatius of Antioch.20 Anyway, after failing to win support for their recasting of christology, the rival teachers had left the Johannine network of churches. The writer points out that their lack of love goes exactly with their view of Jesus: the incarnate love of God is meant to work through into fresh incarnations of that love in the community. As Parsenios points out, ‘Their anemic Christology diminishes the profundity of the incarnation, and their act of separating themselves from the broader community diminishes the love expressed through the concord of the community.’21
A significant motif employed across these letters is the repetition of the phrase ‘from the beginning’. The letter is addressed to those who know the Johannine tradition from the beginning, including its eye-witnesses’ testimony to the ‘Word of life’, the community’s acknowledgement of the ‘truth’, and the practice of the love-commandment.
Can we speak, already at this early date, of ‘proto-orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ in relation to these letters? It does seem appropriate, given John the elder’s exhortation to ‘confess’ a particular faith (Greek homologeō) over and against the denial of the secessionists (Greek arneomai).29 Yet it would be wrong to regard the Johannine epistles as simply polemical tracts. The focus is not so much on the secessionists as on those who remain and abide in the truth. The author regards the recent division not as the occasion for vitriolic denunciation, but primarily as an opportunity to renew the community’s identity through a remembrance of the basic elements of the community’s own faith.
Excursus: Docetism 101
‘Docetism’ comes from the Greek word dokeō, which means ‘to seem’, ‘to appear’. The belief in question was that Jesus only ‘seemed’ or ‘appeared’ to be genuinely and embodiedly human, but that in reality he was an incorporeal being projecting an outward appearance. Our modern culture finds it hard to imagine why such a belief might be attractive, but in the ancient world it was a compelling option for those with a particular view of God, namely, that God was uninvolved in change, suffering, or (particularly) shame.31
The idea that Jesus was merely a phantasm, not truly physical, was held by a certain Saturninus. He held that Jesus was ‘without birth, without body, and without figure, but was, by supposition, a visible man’.32Similarly, in a gnostic document called Trimorphic Protennoia, ‘Jesus’ says: ‘I revealed myself to them in their tents as Word, and I revealed myself in the likeness of their shape.’33 This makes Jesus a shape-shifter who could morph into human-like appearance but without being actually human. Such a view might claim support from Paul’s statement that God sent Jesus ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Greek en homoiōmati sarkos hamartias), though careful study of Paul’s whole sentence would make it clear that he was not at all denying Jesus’ genuine humanness. Such wording, however, was claimed by some as supporting a form of Docetism.34
Some others accepted that Jesus did have a physical body, but claimed that ‘the Christ’ (here meaning his ‘divine’ self, not, as in its original meaning, his ‘messianic’ identity) departed from Jesus prior to the crucifixion. Another way to a similar conclusion was to claim that Jesus changed his form at the last minute, and that some other person was crucified in his place, thus safeguarding Jesus’s divinity from suffering. If, after all, divinity is impassible, then the divine Christ did not suffer, so the father must have rescued the heavenly Christ before he was crucified.
Such a belief is not without precedent. The Roman poet Ovid suggested that, just before the murder of Julius Caesar, the goddess Vesta ‘snatched him away and left a naked semblance; what died by the steel was Caesar’s shadow’. The real Julius Caesar ‘was raised to the heavens’, to the halls of Jupiter.35 Another way of saying this is to suggest that the gods were so impressed with Julius Caesar that they took his soul up to heaven, leaving only the vestiges of his shadowy self to be assassinated. One can see how this sort of view might be applied to Jesus by any who believed that he could not really have suffered the shameful death of the cross.
Similarly, a certain Basilides had a ‘trading places’ theory of the atonement. He is alleged to have taught that Simon of Cyrene was transformed into Jesus while Jesus transformed into Simon. According to Irenaeus, Basilides believed that
He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles. Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all. Those, then, who know these things have been freed from the principalities who formed the world; so that it is not incumbent on us to confess him who was crucified, but him who came in the form of a man, and was thought to be crucified, and was called Jesus, and was sent by the father, that by this dispensation he might destroy the works of the makers of the world.38
The same perspective is given a fuller description in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, a gnostic document originating in the second century:
For my death, which they think happened, happened to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death. For their Ennoias did not see me, for they were deaf and blind. But in doing these things, they condemn themselves. Yes, they saw me; they punished me. It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance. And I subjected all their powers. For as I came downward, no one saw me. For I was altering my shapes, changing from form to form.39
Also, and (to our minds) stranger still, we find the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, a third-century gnostic document. This work describes a vision of Peter, in which the ‘Saviour’ led Peter on a tour of the crucifixion scene featuring the ‘living Jesus’ laughing at the spectacle, while some other person, the ‘son of their glory’, was substituted for him and subjected to shame. (Note how exactly this reverses a major emphasis of the early gospel: someone else suffering shame and death in the place of Jesus!) The body on the cross was merely a demon-ridden shell, made by Elohim (the Old Testament God), while the living Jesus transcended the body and escaped pain and dishonour:
When he had said those things, I saw him seemingly being seized by them. And I said ‘What do I see, O Lord? That it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking?’
But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me.’
But I, when I had looked, said ‘Lord, no one is looking at you. Let us flee this place.’
But he said to me, ‘I have told you, “Leave the blind alone!” And you, see how they do not know what they are saying. For the son of their glory instead of my servant, they have put to shame.’
And I saw someone about to approach us resembling him, even him who was laughing on the tree. And he was filled with a Holy Spirit, and he is the Saviour. And there was a great, ineffable light around them, and the multitude of ineffable and invisible angels blessing them. And when I looked at him, the one who gives praise was revealed.
And he said to me, ‘Be strong, for you are the one to whom these mysteries have been given, to know them through revelation, that he whom they crucified is the first-born, and the home of demons, and the stony vessel in which they dwell, of Elohim, of the cross, which is under the Law. But he who stands near him is the living Saviour, the first in him, whom they seized and released, who stands joyfully looking at those who did him violence, while they are divided among themselves. Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception, knowing that they are born blind. So then the one susceptible to suffering shall come, since the body is the substitute. But what they released was my incorporeal body. But I am the intellectual Spirit filled with radiant light.’40
Even the Islamic tradition is docetic in its description of the cross, denying that Allah would allow Jesus to be killed or crucified. Jesus, seen in Islam as a great prophet, only appeared to die; in fact, Allah took Jesus up into heaven:
And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them; and lo! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But Allah took him up unto Himself. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise.41
Varieties of Docetism were prevalent on the edge of, and sometimes infiltrating right into, the early Christian communities. That is clear from the many denunciations, ranging from those of John the elder in Asia, to Ignatius of Antioch in Syria, and Tertullian in north Africa. The latter wrote:
Surely he is anti-Christ who denies that Christ has come in the flesh. By declaring that his flesh is simply and absolutely true, and taken in the plain sense of its own nature, the scripture aims a blow at all who make distinctions in it
“God is Love” on Newcastle Beach UK 6 August 2011
The Carpenter's Nail 
