First Epistle of John
Based on Wikipedia: First Epistle of John
A Letter That Doesn't Look Like a Letter
Here's a mystery that has puzzled scholars for centuries: someone wrote a letter to early Christians, addressing them tenderly as "little children," urging them to love one another and to reject false teachers. But this letter has no greeting. No signature. No "Dear friends in Ephesus" at the beginning, no "Grace be with you" at the end. It simply starts, and then it stops.
This is the First Epistle of John, one of the most unusual documents in the New Testament.
The word "epistle" just means letter—from the Greek "epistolē." But if you've ever read the letters of Paul, with their formal openings and elaborate closings, you'll notice immediately that First John breaks every convention of ancient letter-writing. Some scholars have suggested it reads more like a sermon, or perhaps a theological essay meant to be circulated among several communities.
Who Wrote It?
We don't actually know.
Tradition attributes the letter to John the Evangelist, the same person credited with writing the Gospel of John. For a long time, this seemed obvious. The language is remarkably similar. Both texts love to contrast light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate. Both use distinctive phrases and share a certain contemplative rhythm.
In the late nineteenth century, scholar Ernest DeWitt Burton wrote confidently that there could be "no reasonable doubt" that the same person wrote both the gospel and this letter. The vocabulary matches. The themes align. The voice feels the same.
Then the twentieth century happened.
Critical scholars began noticing subtle differences. The author of First John has particular writing habits—for instance, he likes to start sentences with a demonstrative pronoun (words like "this" or "that"), then add an explanation at the end. The gospel writer doesn't do this. The epistle writer also uses conditional sentences in rhetorical patterns that never appear in the gospel.
These might seem like minor details. But to linguists, they're fingerprints.
Today, most scholars believe that John's Gospel and First John were written by different people—though probably people from the same community. Scholars call this the "Johannine Community," a network of early Christians who shared a distinctive theological vocabulary and worldview. Think of it as a school of thought, with multiple writers working within the same tradition.
As for John the Apostle—the fisherman who left his nets to follow Jesus—most critical scholars now believe he wrote none of these works. The traditional attribution came later, as the early church tried to trace its sacred texts back to eyewitnesses.
When and Where
The letter was probably written in Ephesus, a major city on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus was a hub of early Christianity—Paul had spent years there, and according to tradition, it became John the Evangelist's home in his later years.
The date is harder to pin down. Scholars generally place it between 95 and 110 of the Common Era, making it one of the later New Testament documents. By this time, Christianity had been developing for two or three generations. The original eyewitnesses were dying. And the community was starting to fracture.
A Community Coming Apart
This is the context that makes First John so urgent. The letter wasn't written during peaceful times. It was written during a crisis.
The Johannine community was splitting. A group of members—the author calls them "secessionists"—had broken away. They held different beliefs about Jesus, particularly about whether he had truly been human.
This might sound like an abstract theological dispute. It wasn't. It went to the heart of what Christianity meant.
The secessionists appear to have been what scholars call "docetists"—from the Greek word "dokein," meaning "to seem." Docetists believed that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body. His flesh was an illusion, a kind of divine hologram. The spiritual Christ inhabited what appeared to be a human form, but it wasn't really flesh and blood.
Why would anyone believe this? In the ancient world, matter was often seen as corrupt, impure, inferior to spirit. Many Greek-influenced thinkers couldn't imagine the divine truly inhabiting a decaying, sweating, bleeding human body. It seemed undignified. Surely God would merely appear to take on flesh while remaining purely spiritual.
The author of First John was furious about this.
"Jesus Christ Has Come in the Flesh"
The letter's most passionate passages attack docetism head-on. The author insists that Jesus was real. Physical. Tangible.
Listen to how the letter opens: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life."
Heard. Seen. Touched. The author is emphasizing sensory experience, the evidence of physical reality. This is not a spirit or a phantom. This is someone you could shake hands with.
Chapter four makes it explicit: "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God." Anyone who denies this is not just wrong—they're operating under a different spirit entirely.
The author even calls the secessionists "antichrists." This word appears for the first time in the New Testament right here, in First John. It doesn't mean what later apocalyptic literature would make of it—some end-times supervillain. It simply means "opponents of Christ," people whose teachings undermine the truth about who Jesus was.
And for this author, the truth about Jesus is inextricably physical. If Jesus didn't really bleed, his death was meaningless. If his body was an illusion, there was no genuine sacrifice. The incarnation—God becoming human flesh—is not optional. It's everything.
Tests of True Faith
But First John isn't only about correct doctrine. It's equally concerned with correct behavior.
The letter offers what scholars have called "tests of life"—practical ways to determine whether someone's faith is genuine. There are three main tests woven throughout the letter.
First, ethical conduct. Do they live righteously? Do they follow the commandments? Someone who claims to know God but habitually sins is fooling themselves.
Second, correct belief about Jesus. As we've seen, this means affirming that Christ came in the flesh—not as a spirit, not as an illusion, but as a real human being.
Third, and most emphasized of all: love.
Love as the Central Theme
No other book of the New Testament hammers on love quite like First John. The word appears dozens of times in just five short chapters.
"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God."
"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."
"If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."
The author isn't being sentimental. He's making an argument. Love is the test of everything. You can claim to have faith. You can claim to know God. You can have all the right doctrines. But if you don't love your brothers and sisters in the community, you're walking in darkness.
There's a polemical edge here. The secessionists who broke away—did they show love? Or did they divide and abandon? The author seems to suggest that their schism was itself a failure of love, evidence that they never truly belonged.
This is harsh. But it reflects a community in trauma, trying to make sense of a painful split.
A Circular Style
Reading First John can be disorienting at first. The argument doesn't proceed in a straight line the way Paul's letters do. Instead, it circles.
The author introduces a theme—say, walking in the light—then moves to another topic, then returns to the first theme from a slightly different angle. Love leads to obedience leads to truth leads back to love. It's less like a logical proof and more like a meditation, or a piece of music with recurring motifs.
Scholar Ernest DeWitt Burton observed that John's thought "moves in circles," forming a slowly advancing sequence. Each pass adds something new while reinforcing what came before.
This style has parallels in Hebrew poetry, where the second line of a couplet often restates the first in different words. It also makes the letter particularly suited for oral reading—which is how most ancient Christians would have experienced it. The repetition helps listeners follow along and remember the key points.
"Little Children"
One of the most distinctive features of First John is its tone of intimate affection. The author repeatedly addresses his audience as "little children"—in Greek, "teknia," a tender diminutive.
This phrase appears seven times in the letter. It's not condescending. It's pastoral, even parental. The author positions himself as an elder speaking to those he has spiritually nurtured.
The same phrase appears in the Gospel of John, in chapter thirteen, when Jesus addresses his disciples at the Last Supper. And Paul uses similar language when writing to the Galatians, calling them "my little children." But nowhere else in the New Testament is this affectionate address used so consistently.
It tells us something about the community. These weren't strangers. They were family.
The World and the Children of God
First John draws a sharp line between two groups: the children of God and the world.
The "world" here doesn't mean the physical planet or even all of humanity. It's a technical term for the system of values and powers that opposes God. The world, in this usage, is "full of evil and under the dominion of Satan."
The children of God are set apart. They've been born again, spiritually regenerated. They live by different rules. And the world hates them for it.
"Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you," the letter warns.
This dualism—light versus darkness, truth versus lies, love versus hate, God versus the world—runs through every chapter. It can feel absolute, almost uncomfortably so. There's no middle ground. You're either in the light or in darkness. You either love or you hate. You belong to God or to the devil.
For a community experiencing betrayal and schism, this black-and-white worldview made sense. It provided clarity. The ones who left were not just mistaken—they were showing their true allegiance. They belonged to the world.
The Johannine Comma: A Medieval Addition
Here's a fascinating textual mystery. If you pick up a King James Bible and turn to First John chapter five, verses seven and eight, you'll find one of the clearest statements of the Trinity anywhere in Scripture:
"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood: and these three agree in one."
The only problem? The first half of that passage wasn't in the original letter.
Scholars call this the "Johannine Comma"—"comma" here meaning a short clause, not the punctuation mark. It appears in Latin translations starting in the fourth century, probably as a marginal note that eventually got copied into the main text. No Greek manuscript before the fifteenth century includes it.
How did it end up in the King James Version? Because Erasmus, the Renaissance scholar who produced the Greek text that translators used, added it to his later editions starting in 1522. He was pressured by church authorities who wanted this Trinitarian proof-text preserved.
Modern translations based on earlier and more reliable manuscripts either omit the Comma entirely or relegate it to a footnote. It's a reminder that the biblical texts we read today are the product of centuries of copying, editing, and scholarly reconstruction.
The Earliest Manuscripts
The original handwritten copy of First John—the actual papyrus or parchment that the author inscribed—is long lost. All ancient texts survive only as copies of copies of copies.
The earliest surviving manuscripts of First John include some of the most important biblical codices (ancient books) we have:
- Codex Vaticanus, dating to around 300-325 CE, kept in the Vatican Library
- Codex Sinaiticus, from 330-360 CE, discovered at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai
- Codex Alexandrinus, from the 400s, now in the British Library
There's also Papyrus 9, a fragmentary manuscript from the third century that preserves parts of chapter four. And intriguingly, the Muratorian fragment—a damaged list of New Testament books dating to around 170 CE—quotes from chapter one, showing that the letter was already being treated as authoritative Scripture within a century of its composition.
The Purpose of the Letter
Why was First John written? The author gives several reasons throughout the text.
"I write this to you so that you may not sin."
"I write these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray."
"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."
So that your joy may be complete. So that you won't be deceived. So that you'll have assurance of salvation.
Notice the pastoral urgency. This isn't abstract theology. The author is worried about real people facing real dangers—false teachers who sound persuasive, doubts that undermine confidence, behaviors that betray belief.
Interestingly, while the Gospel of John seems aimed at unbelievers—trying to convince them that Jesus is the Christ—First John is written to people already inside the faith. It's not evangelism. It's spiritual formation and community preservation.
To the Parthians?
Around 415 CE, Augustine of Hippo wrote a commentary on First John with an unusual title: "On the Epistle of John to the Parthians."
The Parthians lived in what is now Iran and Iraq. Was the letter really addressed to Christians there? Some scholars have speculated that it might refer to Jewish converts in the Babylonian diaspora.
But this is almost certainly a mistake. The "Parthian" label appears only in Latin sources and probably results from a misreading or misunderstanding. The letter was most likely written for communities in and around Ephesus.
It's a reminder of how traditions get attached to texts, sometimes erroneously, and persist for centuries before being questioned.
The Letter's Legacy
First John has had an enormous influence on Christian theology and spirituality. Its definition of God—"God is love"—is one of the most quoted verses in all of Scripture. Its emphasis on the incarnation shaped centuries of Christological debate. Its tests of genuine faith have been used by everyone from medieval mystics to modern evangelists.
The letter also appears in unexpected places. The American indie rock band The Mountain Goats released an album in 2009 called "The Life of the World to Come," with every song titled after a Bible verse. One track is simply called "1 John 4:16"—the verse that declares "God is love."
For a letter written nearly two thousand years ago to a community in crisis, First John has proven remarkably durable. Its themes—authentic faith tested by love, the reality of the incarnation, the bright line between light and darkness—continue to resonate.
And its mystery endures. We still don't know exactly who wrote it, or why they chose this strange format that doesn't look like a letter at all. Perhaps that anonymity is fitting. The author wanted attention focused not on themselves but on the message: that Jesus came in the flesh, that God is love, and that those who love are born of God.