Who wrote the epistle known as 1 John, and why did that person write it?1 These questions are essential ones to answer if we are to write any new history of the Epistles. And yet, they are ones that earlier studies are not well poised to help us answer. Over the past half-century, most studies of the text have assumed that 1 John was written by the same narrow “community” or “school” that also supposedly produced the Gospel of John, 2 John, and 3 John. Working from that premise, those studies have supposed that the epistle is mostly consonant with the other Johannine works in thought. They have also forced the epistle into a complex, reconstructed history developed from all four texts: the imagined history of a group of Jews who came to confess Jesus, were expelled from the synagogues, and experienced a later schism.2 When we understand 1 John as a pseudo-historical work written by a distinct author, however, we have reason to question all these premises. We are also free to imagine different external contexts for the epistle and entertain other motivations for its production.
In this chapter, I dislodge 1 John from older reconstructions and develop a new reading of the epistle. As I will demonstrate here, the tendency to harmonize 1 John with the other Johannine works has caused scholars to miss critical clues about its purpose and context. When we study the epistle in its own frame, however, its distinct perspective, intervention, and occasion shine through. The text was written to supplement the Gospel’s teaching on an issue debated among many first- and second-century Christians: the problem of post-believing sin.
Across the first century CE, many individuals who had joined early Christ-believing groups, who had been baptized and even exhibited charismatic gifts such as prophecy, fell into public sin. At a certain extreme, some even disassociated from the movement, abandoning it altogether. These encounters with scandal and apostasy disoriented many Christians and raised a number of vexing questions. How could sin coexist with a profession of faith or other ostensible signs of a Spirit-filled life? And how should one address sin among believers? Competing responses to these questions are found across a broad segment of first- and second-century Christian texts.3 As I will demonstrate here, 1 John represents an intervention in these debates – one that developed a new and surprising approach to these issues. Resourcing the Gospel’s ideas and language, the epistle argues in favor of a strong doctrine of sinless perfection.4
The Gospel of John indicates that some humans attain the state of being “born” of God (1:13) – a state in which they “abide/dwell” in God and even now possess “eternal life.” And yet, the Gospel does not indicate how one can know whether they have attained this state, nor does it clarify whether those in that state can or will sin. First John co-opts the voice of the Gospel’s narrator to address these points. The epistle assumes that one is not “born of God” through an external act or ritual (e.g., baptism, initiation) but that the change is inner and unseen (3:2).5 Some professing believers have acquired this state; others have not. In turn, the text teaches how one may be sure they have attained this state. It teaches that the one who has been “born of God” “does not sin” and “cannot sin” – that is, that the new birth transforms their nature into one that is sinless and impeccable. In this case, anyone who sins – even if they profess Christ – proves by their behavior that they have not yet attained the unseen new birth and indwelling promised in the Gospel. The epistle urges Christians to intercede for such persons so that they might finally attain the experience of being “born of God” and the divine indwelling. In this state, free from the grip and pull of sin, such persons can finally “know” that they “have eternal life” (5:13).6
5.1 Interpreting 1 John
First John is, somewhat deceptively, one of the most challenging New Testament works to interpret. At first glance, the epistle seems quite hospitable to the novice reader; it is a relatively brief text, and its vocabulary is among the simplest in the New Testament.7 Nevertheless, the Greek of 1 John is especially treacherous, riddled as it is with syntactical problems, ambiguities, non-sequiturs, and variant readings.8 Some of these issues reflect the author’s limitations as a writer; others seem to reflect the confusing edits of scribes struggling to make sense of the author’s thoughts. Still less helpful is the fact that the author, in his attempts to imitate the style of the Gospel of John’s cryptic discourses, laid out his claims in a convoluted style heavily reliant on a strategy of restatement and amplification.9 The author eschews topical organization for a “spiral” pattern – one in which he raises points “again and again” and often “returns to a point where it has been before, and yet by bringing in a new element moves on a step further.”10 And within this spiral, he often slides abruptly between individual trains of thought, leaving certain arguments suspended partway and the logical connections between his arguments unclear. Indeed, Raymond Brown, perhaps the foremost interpreter of the letter in the late twentieth century, remarked that he found the “obscurity” of 1 John “infuriating.”11
Pressed with these challenges, contemporary scholars tend to step back from this spiral and instead focus on a few small passages that seem to gesture towards the broader social-historical context of the epistle: two that condemn a set of opponents pejoratively called “antichrists” and “liars” (1 John 2:18–27; 4:1–6) and one other that arguably concerns the same group (5:6–8).12 For these scholars, the only way to unlock the sometimes confusing message of 1 John is to recover the external circumstances that motivated its production. Negatively, the interpretation of the entire epistle becomes subordinated to a few lines of the work. This approach also leans heavily on evidence taken from the epistle’s in-text world – a world I have argued is at least partly fictionalized and of dubious value in historical reconstruction.
In what follows, I will suggest a different approach. I will argue that we must rely heavily on the epistle’s own scaffolds and signposts to guide our interpretation of the work – the structures through which the author introduces, frames, and shapes his exhortation. These scaffolds include an introductory preface, a summary of the epistle’s “message,” and a closing set of assertions summarizing its intervention. Second, we must be prepared to ride the text’s sometimes treacherous spiral down, paying close attention to the repeated emphases throughout the work and coordinating the Epistle’s interconnected network of statements and restatements.
When we take this approach, we will find that the author, for all his limitations, has a clear and coherent project in mind. He designed his text to answer interrelated questions about sin and the new birth – among them, “How can one know that they are born of God and have eternal life?” “Can those born of God sin?” and “What constitutes sin?” To appreciate this argument, it is best to read the epistle from beginning to end, exploring how it raises and resolves each of these questions.
5.2 How Can One Know That They Possess “Eternal Life?”
The opening lines of 1 John are the natural starting point for interpreting the purpose of the work since it is here that the author states what he intends to “proclaim” (1:3), and it is here that he summarizes his “message” (1:5). When we examine this section closely, the principal thrust of the epistle becomes clear. First John is a work that explains to its readers how they can “know” that they now possess the “eternal life” promised in the Gospel of John. According to the author, the evidence that one has attained the new birth, divine indwelling, and gift of eternal life is precisely the absence of sin in one’s life.
5.2.1 Where “Eternal Life” is Found
In its opening lines, 1 John coopts the identity of the Gospel’s implied author. But those lines also fulfill a second, often-overlooked, function: they position “eternal life” as a central and controlling theme of the entire epistle. As the text’s disguised author presents himself as an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, he subtly but consistently refers to Jesus in ways that associate him as the source, even the personification, of “eternal life.” In verse 1, the voice claims to have seen, heard, and touched “the Word of life.” In the next verse, he states, “the life was made manifest, and we saw it and testify to it” (1:2a). And last, the voice of the epistle sets out his task as one of proclaiming this “life”: “we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifest to us; that which we have seen and heard we also proclaim to you” (1:2b). The centrality of “life” in these lines is not an accident. Crucially, another critical signpost of the epistle, a statement of purpose nestled near the end of the text, has the author explicitly cast his epistle as a text concerned with the question of who can claim to possess “eternal life”: “I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (5:13). In the preface, the author begins to develop this theme.
The preface does more than merely introduce this theme, however. It also affirms the disguised author’s authority to speak on this question. By presenting himself as one who has heard from and touched this life, the author grounds his credentials as someone with the firsthand experience to know where or in whom “eternal life” is found, one who can “proclaim” to others how they may come to share in this “eternal life.” That life is found in Jesus Christ, with whom the author also claims to have “fellowship” (1:3). The author also frames his work as a means of guiding his readers into “fellowship,” into unity, with that life, writing, “that which we have seen and heard we also proclaim to you, so that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1:3). In what follows, he will outline what that fellowship entails for human beings; it entails sinlessness.
5.2.2 Fellowship with God Entails Sinlessness
In the preface, the author says that he intends to “proclaim” what he has “seen and heard” from Jesus, the source of eternal life (1:3). After concluding his preface, the author immediately discloses what he “has heard,” distilling that proclamation into a single line: “and this is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1:5).13 By calling this statement his “message” (that is, the message of the epistle) and by setting this statement in so prominent a position (as the first words of the body of the letter), the author casts these words as the essential thesis of his work, its main idea. Any attempt to understand the epistle must flow from this line.14
On its surface, the statement is a set of complementary propositions about God, each of which should be understood in light of other statements of the text that align “light” with righteousness (2:10) and “darkness” with sin and evil (1:6–8; 2:9). The first proposition, “God is light,” anticipates the author’s later claim that God and/or Christ “is pure” (3:3, 5) and “righteous” (2:29; 3:7).15 The second, emphatic phrase, “and in [God] is no darkness at all” (ἐν αὐτῷ οὐκ ἔστιν οὐδεμία), anticipates later claims that “in him is no sin” (3:5).
This text is more than merely an affirmation of God’s sinlessness, however. By insisting that God has no “darkness” “in him,” the author implies an even more radical thesis, one he will also work out throughout the text. He implies that nothing or no one evil – that is, no one who sins and is “in darkness” – can be “in” God, that is, dwell “in” God. The phrase “in him” evokes the idea, first communicated in John and repeated in 1 John, that some persons can be “in” God, “dwelling in” him (4:15; cf. 3:16; 4:9).16 Read in this way, “the message” connotes two ideas united in a later verse in 1 John, consistent with the epistle’s strategy of restatement and elaboration: “in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins” (3:5–6). In other words, the “message” the author has learned from the source of “eternal life” – the key to “eternal life” – is not merely a proclamation of the radical sinlessness and purity of God. It is also an affirmation of the necessary, absolute sinlessness of all who dwell “in him.”17
5.2.2.1 “Walking in the Light” and “Walking in the Darkness”
The idea that the text’s initial “message” is a statement about human behavior and sinlessness finds support in the next lines. After affirming that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” the text immediately pivots to a contrast of two human beings: those who “walk in the light” and those who “walk in the darkness.”18 The close linguistic ties between verse 5 and verses 6–7 – the continued use of “light” and “darkness” language and the continued use of the preposition “in” – suggest that the author is extending and still parsing out the implications of his initial “message.” In these verses and those that follow, the author insists that the only ones who can claim unity with a God who is “light” are those who are themselves “walking in the light.”
Background
The binary of “walking in the light/day” and “walking in the darkness/night” is lifted from John, where the two phrases distinguish two classes of individuals (8:12; 12:35; cf. 11:9–10). In the Gospel, those who “walk in the light” “believe in the light” (12:36; cf. 8:12) and “become children of light” – that is, they experience the birth “from above” (3:3) that makes them “children of God” (1:12). Accordingly, the same individuals also experience the divine indwelling; Jesus says that such persons “have the light of life” – that is, they possess the “light” within them – and with it eternal life (8:12; 11:10). And by being in the light, they reveal “that their deeds were done in God” (3:21). By contrast, those who “walk in the darkness/night” do not “believe” (12:36), and they commit evil deeds (3:19). They also do not enjoy the divine indwelling; as the Gospel says, “the light is not in them” (11:10; cf. 8:12; 12:35).
The author of 1 John lifts these phrases from the Gospel with many of these connotations intact, especially foregrounding the idea of behavior – a usage consistent with other uses of the verb “walking” in Jewish and Christian literature, where the verb stands for “pursuing a way of life and action” (as in Mark 7:5; Rom. 14:15; Eph. 5:2, 8).19 Later in the epistle, the author casts Jesus as one who “walked” a certain way (2:6), specifically, in righteousness and sinlessness (2:1; 3:5). He then states, “whoever says, ‘I dwell in him,’ ought to walk in the same way as he walked” (2:6), that is, in righteousness as well. Ergo, the author juxtaposes this verse with calls to not disobey “his commandments” (2:4–5). Those who “walk in darkness,” by contrast, are mired in unbelief and sin.
“Walking,” Forgiveness, and the Indwelling
As ways of describing sinless/righteous and sinful behavior, the phrases “walking in the light” and “walking in the darkness” frame the author’s next point, one he will sustain through the epistle. According to the author, only those who “walk in the light” – those who live righteously – can claim forgiveness of sins, divine fellowship, and the divine indwelling promised in the Gospel. Those who “walk in the darkness,” who sin, do not. The author works out this intervention in a series of parallel “if … but if” statements, contrasting two opposing postures in alternation.
The first conditional statements in each set of the series are negative, laying out a set of positions or postures the author characterizes as lies:
A If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness,
we lie
and do not live according to the truth … (1:6)
we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us … (1:8)
C If we say we have not sinned,
we make him a liar,
and his word is not in us. (1:10)
Although many scholars interpret these statements as the “boasts” of an actual set of opponents, these statements are better understood as rhetorical devices through which the author develops an idea by raising and excluding various hypotheticals.20 In this view, the “we” is equivalent to “anyone” (cf. 2:2; 4:20).21 As Terry Griffith notes, this style of argumentation is found in other classical texts, even in non-polemical contexts, for example:
If we say, “every human being is a living creature,” we speak the truth. But conversely, if we say, “every living creature is a human being,” we lie.
But if we say that the capacity to laugh is human, we speak the truth.
In 1 John, the author sets out similarly hypothetical “if” statements to represent the attitudes of a single constructed group: those who “walk in the darkness.” We will consider these statements in closer detail later in this chapter, but we should grasp one critical point of these lines now. In the first line, the author insists that those who “walk in darkness” may purport to have a “fellowship with” God, but they do not; they are alienated from God (1:6). In turn, the author indicates that such persons also do not have the divine indwelling discussed in the Gospel by saying that “the truth is not in” them (1:8) and that “his word is not in” them (1:10). The epistle elsewhere refers to Jesus as the “word” and the Spirit as the “truth” (1:1; 5:7).24 The epistle will reaffirm this essential relationship between right “walking” and the possibility of “dwelling” in the “light” – that is, dwelling in the God who is “light” (1:5) – later in the epistle: “whoever loves a brother dwells in the light … but whoever hates a brother is in the darkness, walks in the darkness” (2:10–11).25 Finally, by saying such persons “lie” (1:6; cf. 4:20), the passage implicitly casts such persons as “the children of the devil,” whose nature it is to “lie” (John 8:44).26
Intermingled with these statements, however, are others that represent a different path – the path of those who “walk in the light”:27
A2 If we walk in the light, as he is in the light,
According to the author, individuals following this path possess the “fellowship” eluding the first group – that is, “fellowship with one another” (1:7) and, implicitly, “fellowship with” God (cf. 1:4, 6). This group also finds cleansing and forgiveness for their sins (1:7, 9; 2:2).
5.3 Can Those “Born of God” Sin?
Up to this point in the epistle, the author has contrasted two classes of humans: those who “walk in the light” and those who “walk in the darkness.” The former deny their sins; the latter find forgiveness for them. In this initial discussion, however, the author leaves one point ambiguous: for which sins do those “in the light” receive forgiveness? Are they sins committed before they were “born of God?” Or do they also include sins committed after they were “born of God?”
In general, interpreters of 1 John assume that both are in view in 1:6–2:2. As they see it, even those who are “born of God” sin from time to time, so they regularly need forgiveness.28 The problem with this view is that the epistle repeatedly insists that those “born of God” do not sin. One cannot understand the epistle correctly without grasping this point, and every misunderstanding of the epistle flows from a failure to interpret the entire work in line with this thesis.
5.3.1 Human Sinlessness
First John could not be more direct and emphatic on the question of whether those who are “born of God” and “dwell in God” sin. The author insists not once but multiple times that those who are “born of God” do not sin (that is, that they are sinless). He also goes further; he states in the most explicit terms possible that a person who is “born of God” and experiences the divine indwelling “cannot sin” (that is, that person is impeccable):29
You know that he appeared to take away sins, and there is no sin in him. No one who dwells in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.
No one born of God sins, for God’s seed/sperma (σπέρμα) dwells in that one, and that one cannot sin (οὐ δύναται ἁμαρτάνειν)30 because that one is born of God.
We know that anyone born of God does not sin, but the one who was born of God keeps that one, and the evil one does not touch that one.
One might be tempted to read these verses as “hyperbolic language” or rhetorical exaggeration.31 And yet, these verses are more than mere rhetoric since each also suggests specific, rational mechanisms that can prevent those “born of God” and dwelling “in” God from sinning. Interestingly, these mechanisms build upon or orbit the epistle’s opening affirmation that God is sinless (1:5), as if carrying through the implications of this idea. In the first text, 3:5–6, the author grounds human sinlessness in Jesus’ sinlessness, the latter of which is not a mere instance of hyperbolic language or rhetorical exaggeration. In the logic of the text, if there is no sin “in” Jesus, then those who find themselves “in” Jesus, who dwell in him, also cannot sin.32 In the second text, 3:9, the author grounds human sinlessness in the fact that those “born of God” have the sinless “God’s sperma” (that is, seed or generative principle) in them. The author does not clarify what or who this “seed” is, but the metaphor suggests that humans have an implantation of the deity/divine nature – a deity/divine nature that cannot sin – within them (cf. 1:5).33 Since that nature cannot sin, they cannot sin. Finally, in the third example, the author expressly states that a person “who has been born of God” is “kept” from sin and the touch of “the evil one” by “the one who was born of God” (likely, Jesus).34 Here, the author seems to be evoking John 17, in which Jesus tells the Father that he has guarded his disciples so that “none of them is lost” (17:12) and in which he asks the Father to “keep” those who believe “from the evil one” (17:15). The author of 1 John seems to expand the meaning of these verses, understanding them as indications that those who are “born of God” are outside the possibility of any sort of sin, return to darkness, and loss of their new state.35 Perhaps not coincidentally, the Synoptics seem to relate freedom from sin with protection from the evil one: “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Mt. 6:13).
If the author means what he says – that those who are truly “born of God” do not sin – how, then, should one evaluate those who do sin? The author is unambiguous on this point as well. He states that anyone who sins has simply never “known” God in the first place: “no one who dwells in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him” (3:6). Evidently, the author did not believe that all who professed faith in Jesus and were initiated into Christian communities through baptism were necessarily “born of God” and experiencing the divine indwelling.36 For the author, the presence of sin in a human person proved that they were “still in the darkness” and that they had never truly passed from it (2:9). In his view, such persons were not (yet) “born of God.”
This view might strike contemporary readers as reductionistic – a rationalization that does not grapple with the complexity of human attitudes and behavior. But even today, many Christians question the commitments of those who sin or who abandon their former religious views in very similar terms, insinuating that such persons were never actually “true” believers or that they never had a “genuine” conversion. Explanations such as these are one of the many strategies that religious adherents use to contain and resolve their cognitive dissonance in the face of scandals. Our author seems to have responded to similar events in an analogous fashion, systematizing that response into a well-defined theological proposition.
However the author came to this view, he carries it through the epistle with the utmost clarity. He argues that one can easily distinguish those who were “born of God” and “dwell in God” from those who have never tasted these experiences by the absence of sin in their lives. In his view, signs of sin are the litmus test of conversion, the external basis for discriminating the internal state of human beings:
Little children, let no one deceive you. The one who does right is righteous, as he is righteous. The one who sins is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning … By this it may be seen who are the children of God and who are children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.
As we will see, over a dozen other verses in 1 John press the same basic teaching – a significant number in an epistle only 105 verses long. The message of human sinlessness is not peripheral to the epistle’s project; it is the epistle’s central and sustained thesis.
5.3.2 Sinlessness in Jewish and Early Christian Thought
This message of human sinlessness may be surprising for readers conditioned to interpret the letter through the lens of (Proto-Catholic) Christian theology – a theology that has historically assumed the possibility, even inevitability, of post-baptismal sin and reconciliation. It may also be foreign for Christians shaped by Western-Christian pessimisms about human nature.37 As foreign as the idea of sinlessness may be to us, however, the idea might not have struck many potential readers of 1 John as altogether unusual.38 On the contrary, to quote Ruth Edwards, “in Judaism it was widely thought that in the end-time there would be no more sin among the Elect.”39 Multiple ancient Jewish texts envision humans receiving new, sinless natures:40
And he made for all his works a new and righteous nature so that they might not sin in all their nature forever, and so that they might all be righteous, each in his kind, always.
And then wisdom shall be given to the elect. And they shall all live and not return again to sin, either by being wicked or through pride; but those who have wisdom shall be humble and not return again to sin.
Then God will refine, with his truth, all man’s deeds, and will purify for himself the structure of man, ripping out all spirit of injustice from the innermost part of his flesh, and cleansing him with the spirit of holiness from every wicked deed. He will sprinkle over him the spirit of truth like lustral water (in order to cleanse him) from all the abhorrences of deceit and (from) the defilement of the unclean spirit, in order to instruct the upright ones with knowledge of the Most High, and to make understand the wisdom of the sons of heaven to those of perfect behavior.
Notably, many of the above texts correlate this transformation with the very events John and 1 John situate in the realized present: the appearance of the Messiah, an outpouring of God’s Spirit, an adoption as the “children of God,” and the initiation of humans into eternal life. In this case, the author of 1 John might have understood the implantation of a sinless nature in humans as a corollary of other segments of his realized eschatology, an eschatology he developed in dialogue with the thought of Paul and the Gospel of John. Our author might have posited that, with the coming of the Spirit, certain humans were already experiencing the transformation of human nature anticipated in apocalyptic texts of the period, one that neutered their inclination and capacity to sin.46 This implantation would represent one facet of a larger cosmological transformation summed up in the statement, “the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining” (2:8).47
5.3.3 The Consistency of 1 John
Scholars have long recognized that certain verses in 1 John suggest human sinlessness and impeccability, and yet, most would frame the thought of 1 John in different terms than I have here. As they see it, the epistle is caught between tensive, even contradictory, propositions. Although the epistle insists on the sinlessness and impeccability of those “born of God” in certain verses, many scholars believe that it suggests the possibility of both sin and forgiveness for those “born of God” in other verses. The challenge of interpreting 1 John, then, becomes one of reconciling these tensive and even flatly contradictory statements – a task George Parsenios appraises as “very difficult – impossible, actually.”48 Scholars have proposed various ways of resolving this tension, but always by downplaying the force of those verses that suggest sinlessness. None of these readings is convincing, however.49 A common view today posits that 1 John may be comfortable stating its ideas in dialectical, paradoxical, or exaggerated terms for rhetorical effect – a counsel of despair.50
There is, however, a way through these rough waters. The trick is to not row against the current flowing through these texts – to deny that the epistle teaches human sinlessness – but to row with the current. First John explicitly and repeatedly states that those born of God and dwelling in God “do not sin” and “cannot sin” – that they are supernaturally prevented from sinning. We must read all verses of the epistle in a manner consistent with these premises. What does this mean for those verses that seem to address sin? It means that they do not concern those “born of God.” When we take this approach, it is easy to arrive at a coherent reading of the epistle.51
5.3.3.1 Re-reading 5:16–17
One text thought to teach that those “born of God” sin is 5:16–17. There, the narrator encourages his readers to intercede for “a brother” committing “a sin that is not deadly,” confident that he can be given “life”:
If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a sin unto death, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not unto death. There is sin which is unto death; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not unto death.
In a common interpretation of these verses, the “brother” is a person who has been “born of God” but has fallen into some sin, albeit a minor one from which they can be restored.52 And yet, nothing says that the “brother” who commits a (minor, non-deadly) “sin” is already “born of God.” On the contrary, in the very next verse, virtually in the same breath, the author reiterates that “anyone born of God does not sin” (5:18). The author seems keen to carve out a distinction or distance between this “brother” and one who is authentically “born of God.” So who is the “brother” who commits these (minor, non-deadly) sins? The brother is anyone – perhaps especially anyone configured into a Christ-believing association or group – who, in the author’s mind, has not yet been “born of God.” Note that the epistle never restricts the term “brother” to those who have been “born of God.” On the contrary, the epistle seems comfortable using the term “brother” in looser ways that transcend that category (3:12, 15; 4:20). Elsewhere, the term “brothers” is used for all participants in Christian gatherings (1 Cor. 8:13; 1 Thess. 5:27; 2 Thess. 3:6; Heb. 3:12).
In the epistle, the author assumes that individuals who are not, or not yet, “born of God” often find themselves in the circles of those who are “born of God” – in Christian associations or groups – as “brothers.” Some will at last abandon these groups of believers, carried away by “sins unto death,” an expression that probably stands in for the sin of apostasy. We know of Christians from this period who considered apostasy an irredeemable transgression; the author of Hebrews, for one, claims that “it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the Holy Spirit … and then have fallen away” (cf. Heb. 6:4–6; cf. 10:26–27). Other persons in the same category, however – that is, other persons who have not yet been “born of God” – may be mired in sins of various, lesser kinds, albeit none so heinous that leave them beyond the reach of “life.” The author seems to presume that such persons may outwardly confess Jesus, even though their behavior suggests they have not yet attained the state of being “in” God (1:6). These are the sinning “brothers” of 5:16–17, who have not reached perfection in love (2:5; 4:12, 17–18). The author encourages his readers to pray for such individuals, precisely so that God will grant them “life” (5:16), that is, so that these individuals may also have a share in the experience of being “born of God,” which ensures that one has “passed from death to life” (3:14–15).53 Read in this way, the author’s aim is not to undermine the idea of sinlessness; rather, he urges prayers with the hopes that others may also attain the state of sinlessness he sets forth in the epistle.
The author seems to assume that both kinds of individuals are represented among his real readers: those who have attained the state of being “born of God” and those still on the margins of that experience, the latter of which mingle among the former class but have not yet been perfected. Accordingly, he constructs the text’s implied readers – the audience it projects – as a group composed of individuals from both groups, and he fluidly moves between remarks appropriate for one or the other. In his preface, the author claims that he is “writing” with the intent that all his readers “may have fellowship” with God (1:3), language that suggests that (at least some of) his readers have not yet attained this “fellowship.” In other passages, however, he speaks to his readers as if they have already achieved that state (2:12–14, 20; 4:4; 5:15). These latter verses may be statements directed at those already “born of God,” or they may speak proleptically to those who have not attained this “fellowship” but will respond to the author’s appeal.54
5.3.3.2 Re-reading 1:8
When we understand that the author envisions an audience composed at least partly of professed believers who have not yet attained the state of being “born of God,” we can make good sense of another misunderstood verse of the epistle, one we mentioned before but that should explore in greater detail. In 1:8, the author writes: “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Many interpreters read this verse as an affirmation that all persons – even those who received the new birth and the Spirit – “have sin,” as if the “the author clearly seems to be condemning perfectionism.”55
This reading, however, does violence to the unity of the epistle. If we read the epistle as a coherent whole – and we should – then the author cannot be saying that those “born of God” will persistently “have sin” in their lives. This would be antithetical to his later claim that Jesus “takes away sins” (3:5). The author also cannot mean that those “born of God” will continue to commit new sins, an idea antithetical to his claim that “no one born of God commits sin” and that such persons “cannot sin” (3:9). If 1:8 is not directed towards those “born of God,” then, whom does it indict? It indicts those who have not yet experienced this new birth, the author’s still untransformed readers. (As I noted above, the “we” language in 1:6–10 helps its readers think through different scenarios or hypotheticals. The question we must ask ourselves is who fits each hypothetical.56)
Recall again that the broader passage, 1:6–10, contrasts two types of persons the author imagines are present in the many Christian gatherings of his day: those who “walk in darkness” (those who sin) and those who “walk in the light” (those who possess the new birth and divine indwelling, and who now live righteously). Recall, too, that the author also imagines that persons in the former camp might cross over to the “light” (2:9), but that those in the “light” are prevented from falling into darkness again (3:9; 5:18). When we understand these points, we can successfully interpret the lines that follow.
In the first line of the passage, 1:6, the author condemns those who are “walking in darkness” – those who sin – for a particular falsehood they might utter: “if we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true.” The author’s point here, consistent with what he says elsewhere, is that no one who sins can claim fellowship with God. They are like those persons mentioned later in 2:9, who flatter themselves by saying, “I am in the light,” while proving by their sin that they are “still in the darkness.” Critically, the author does not imagine that such persons have lost fellowship with God. Instead, he imagines that such persons have simply never possessed fellowship with God; as he says in 3:6, they have neither “seen [God] or known him.” They are still in need of attaining to that “fellowship.”
In the lines that follow, then, the author turns his attention to other falsehoods that those who “walk in darkness” might say. In the verse of interest to us, verse 8, the author indicts those who “say” they “have no sin.” Since the author says these persons “deceive” themselves, it is clear that the persons in question do sin. They “walk in darkness” (as in v. 6). In 1:8, then, the author seems to be exposing the self-deception of individuals who sin and do not recognize their sinfulness. This is a deeper delusion than merely claiming that one has fellowship with God despite one’s sin. It is the failure to see one’s own sin.
The delusion the author attacks here would have been a familiar one to any reader of the Gospel of John. In that text, characters who are in the grip of sin – characters who very much qualify as ones who “walk in darkness” – regularly deny their sinfulness. And John’s Jesus exposes these characters as liars, just as our author does (see John 8:33–34, 55; 9:40–41). Presumably, the author drew inspiration from these verses in John when composing 1:8.57
Note, however, that the Gospel of John never depicts a single character who denies their sinfulness as someone who has attained the new birth and divine indwelling. Neither does the author of 1 John. In fact, the author is clear that such persons do not possess the signature attribute of those “born of God”: the indwelling presence of God (3:9). Recall that towards the end of 1:8, the author insists that those who “say they have no sin” do not have “the truth” “in” them. In the epistle, “the truth” is a metonym for the Spirit (5:7). Similarly, in 1:10, he will say that those who deny that they “have sinned” also do not have “his word in” them. Tellingly, the “word” is a metonym for Christ elsewhere in the epistle (1:1).58 The author’s message in both verses is the same one he makes in other places: those who sin have not received the divine indwelling (2:6; 3:6; 3:14; 3:24).
In short, then, 1:8 does not rule out sinless perfection for those who have received the new birth and divine indwelling. Rather, it attacks the self-delusion of those who have not yet attained this state: those who sin and yet fail to recognize their sinfulness. More than that, the verse highlights this self-delusion as a concrete sign that one has not yet been transformed. If one – implicitly, one who sins – cannot recognize that they “have sin,” then they do not possess the divine indwelling. But the one who has confessed their past sins and now lives sinlessly has nothing to fear; they know they are forgiven (2:12). Their righteous actions also reveal their true state (3:19–20). And thus, the author has no problem asserting that he and others have attained a sinless life, at least in so many other words. On the contrary, he confidently places himself among those who possess “fellowship with God” and are “born of God”/“children of God” in other texts (e.g., 1:3; 5:18–20; cf. 2:12–14).59
Perhaps the clearest indication that the author does not rule out sinlessness for those “born of God” is that he addresses – and closes off – this very misunderstanding in the same passage. After developing the above arguments, the author interrupts himself with the words: “little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin” (2:1).60 Here, the author affirms that it is possible to live without sin. But how is this possible? As the author will clarify later in the epistle, sinlessness is granted by being “born of God” and experiencing the divine indwelling.
5.3.3.3 Re-reading 2:1–2
Before moving on, we should explore one other potentially confusing verse, located at the end of the same passage we have been discussing. Immediately after saying, “Little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin,” the author continues, “but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atonement for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (2:1–2). In a common misreading of these verses, the author supposedly holds out the hope that his readers will not sin, but he concedes that all humans – even those who have been “born of God” – will continue to sin from time to time.61
As popular as this reading is, however, it also contradicts what the author argues elsewhere about the experience of those “born of God.” Fortunately, there is another way to make sense of these lines. We can read 2:1–2 within the author’s broader argument and recognize that the group in view here – those who sin – cannot be those “born of God,” but those who have yet attained this state. If we recognize that fact, we avoid the Gordian knot so many other interpreters needlessly tie for themselves.62
In 2:1a, the author holds out the prospect that one can live without sin. This is the experience of those who have been “born of God” (as 3:5–6, 3:9, and 5:18 teach). Nevertheless, the author recognizes the fact that many of his readers, despite their profession of Jesus, do sin. Such persons have not attained the state of sinlessness. In 2:1b–2:2, then, he directs “anyone [who] sins” – that is, anyone who has not yet attained this state of being “born of God” – to the solution to sin Jesus provides. In Jesus, humans can receive forgiveness for their past sins (2:2). And, as the author will later clarify, such persons also receive the divine sperma that makes it so that they “cannot sin” (3:9). In short, the author’s words in 2:1–2 can be understood within a vision of human sinlessness, assuming one puts in the work of coordinating statements. When interpreters do not coordinate these statements, they undermine the unity of the epistle and wrest verses out of their thought world and argumentative context.
What makes this reading of 2:1–2 particularly compelling is that it seems to be confirmed in the next lines of the argument – lines that also communicate the idea that those who “know” God and who are “in” him do not sin. Having suggested that those who have “fellowship with” God and who have “the truth” “in” them find forgiveness for their sins (1:7, 9), the author immediately explains to his readers how they can be sure that they have attained this state. The presence or absence of sin in their lives is the litmus test to tell whether “the truth” is “in” them:
And by this we may be sure that we know him: if we keep his commandments. The one who says “I know him” but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in them; but whoever keeps his word, in them truly love for God is perfected. By this we may be sure that we are in him: the one who says he dwells in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
For the author, walking according to the pattern of the sinless Jesus – that is, keeping his commandments – is the sign of the divine indwelling. And in his view, this is an attainable state. As he makes clear later in the epistle: “his commandments are not burdensome,” that is, not too difficult to observe in full (5:3).
Accordingly, the author’s vision throughout 1:6–2:2 is perfectly consistent with his teachings elsewhere. Sin is the distinguishing sign of those who are (still) in darkness and who do not (yet) dwell in God. By contrast, those who are “in the light” and are forgiven of their past sins can be recognized by the fact that they now “keep his commandments.” Obedience to the “commandments” is the sure sign that they are “in him” and the basis of their “confidence before God” (3:18–22). As the author will say again later in the epistle: “in this … we may have confidence for the day of judgment: because as [God] is so are we in this world” (4:17).63
5.3.4 Sin in Other Early Christian Writings
Admittedly, no other early Christian work contains an identical treatment of sin and sinlessness to that found in 1 John; its system of thought is idiosyncratic. Then again, other early Christian works engaging similar questions contain idiosyncratic views. More importantly, the ideas contained in these works share at least some commonalities with those in the epistle, revealing that the distinctive views of 1 John fit within the range of what an early Christian author could have thought about sin.
Perhaps the first point of comparison for 1 John’s ideas is the realized eschatology of Paul. According to Matthew Novenson, Paul believed that God imparts to humans an inner life as spirit/pneuma – a life that imbues humans with “a natural, internal compulsion by righteousness,” and that makes it so “that humans, once they have God’s pneuma, are demigods who can fulfill the dikaioma [righteousness] of the law perfectly, effortlessly, and forever.”64 This is, of course, the same basic framework 1 John assumes. For Paul, however, the inner spirit was locked in a lingering, and sometimes losing, struggle with the sinful inclinations of the outer flesh humans still possess (Rom. 8:1–17), at least until that flesh is transformed into spirit on the day of judgment (1 Cor. 15:35–57).65 Paul uses this idea of struggle to explain the presence of sin among his converts, but in so doing, he introduces conceptual problems, even contradictions, into his thought. For example, if the spirit makes obedience “effortless,” why would humans experience any struggle controlling their flesh? And if spirit reorients the human will to righteousness, why would believers elect sin at all?
Evidently, our author decided to close off the tensions he perceived in Paul’s thought, as so many second-century interpreters of Paul were wont to do. Taking Paul’s thought forward and imposing a greater consistency on it, the author of 1 John doubled down on the idea that the Spirit transforms the nature of humans. He believed, in a more intense manner than Paul did, that the Spirit transforms humans into “beings who neither sin nor die.”66
Another comparand for 1 John are early Christian texts with a “rigorist” hue. Consider, for example, Hebrews. As Harold Attridge observes, one verse in that epistle may “exclude repentance for any willful, post-baptismal sin,” specifically, 10:26: “if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries.”67 On its face, this is the sort of high moral standard the author of 1 John could have endorsed. Nevertheless, Hebrews and 1 John are dissimilar in other ways. For one, Hebrews has a high view of baptized Christians; it assumes that all such persons are “enlightened” and “become partakers of the Holy Spirit.” By contrast, 1 John suggests that many professing Christ-believers, even baptized ones, have not (yet) have received the new birth and indwelling/Spirit. Those exhibiting post-baptismal charismatic signs such as prophecy may be under the influence of a different “spirit” – a fact that occasions the need to “test the spirits” (4:1). Second, though Hebrews teaches a doctrine of sinlessness, it does not teach a doctrine of impeccability. Unlike 1 John, Hebrews assumes that even a person who has partaken of the Spirit can “fall away” from that state (6:4–6).68
A similar web of similarities and dissimilarities connects 1 John to the Shepherd of Hermas. On the one hand, the two texts insist on sinlessness, with the Shepherd affirming that “one who has received forgiveness of sins should never have been sinning again, but should remain in purity.”69 On the other hand, like Hebrews, the Shepherd does not question the status of baptized Christians; it too assumes that those who have “descended into the water” receive “forgiveness of … previous sins.”70 The text also has no notion of impeccability; it admits that even Christians are vulnerable to “human weakness and the shrewdness of the devil.”71 Here again, we are far removed from the thought of 1 John, which posits that the “evil one” cannot “touch” those “born of God.” But whereas the Shepherd seems to teach “no other conversion … than the one when we descended into the water and received forgiveness of our previous sins,” it also seems to carve out a special, second “chance for conversion” for those “called before these days” – that is, those already baptized before the visions given to Hermas.72 In this way, the Shepherd finds an “intermediate” path between stark rigorism and accusations of laxity.
A final text, the Gospel of Philip, offers a stronger analog for the kind of perfectionism espoused by 1 John. Although the work reflects later and markedly different systems of thought from the one represented in 1 John, one especially tantalizing passage claims that the one who obtains “knowledge of the truth” “does not sin”:
The one who has knowledge of the truth is free, but the free person does not sin. For “the one who sins is the slave to sin.” The mother is the truth, but knowledge is the <Father>. Those who do not allow themselves to sin, the world calls them “free.” Those who do not allow themselves to sin, knowledge of the truth “puffs up,” which is what “it makes them free” (means).73
According to Michel Desjardins, the above text seems to evince a belief in some second-century Valentinian circles that “with the Son’s descent and the sacraments … a perfect, sinless existence becomes possible, resulting in access to the Father’s realm.”74 Interestingly, the same quote also utilizes a particular saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John: “Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed’” (John 8:34–36). Here, the Gospel of Philip shows us how some readers could have read the Gospel of John in ways that would support the idea that the humans who “know the truth” and possess the “truth” do “not sin” (cf. 1 John 2:4, 20–21). We can easily imagine the author of 1 John reading John along similar lines.
5.4 What is Sin?
In the second chapter of his epistle, the author of 1 John insists that keeping God’s “commandments” is the sure sign that one “dwells in” God. This raises an obvious question: what commandments does the author have in mind? Conversely, what sorts of behavior violate those commandments? That is, what constitutes “sin?”
5.4.1 The “Commandment”
The author begins defining the “commandments” whose violation is “sin” in chapter 2. After insisting on the necessity of observing the “commandments” of God, he writes, “I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard” (2:7). Although the author does not gloss the content of this “commandment” here, he references the commandment again later in the text, finally articulating it in full: “and this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us” (3:23).
In context, the narrator’s initial claim, “I am writing no new commandment, but an old commandment,” is a way of insisting that the obligations he outlines are not novel. They are ones his readers have already “heard” – specifically, in the Gospel of John. And indeed, as glossed, “the commandment” at the center of 1 John collapses the two central exhortations of Jesus in John. The first is the obligation to “believe” (cf. John 12:44–50); the second is the Gospel’s “new commandment” to love (13:34). Because the author’s “commandment” encompasses multiple obligations, he uses the singular “commandment” interchangeably with the plural “commandments” in the next verse.
5.4.1.1 The Necessity of the “Commandment”
After glossing the new commandment, the author affirms that only those who keep the “commandment” can claim the divine indwelling. In the author’s words, “all who keep his commandments dwell/abide in him, and he in them” (3:24). Here again, however, the author would have a firm basis to claim that his message is not novel. First, the Gospel consistently presents belief as the basis for being born of God and receiving eternal life (3:16; 12:36; 20:31). Second, in the same discourse as the one in which Jesus introduces the “new commandment” to “love” in John, Jesus makes it clear that it is precisely those who keep his “commandments” who experience the divine indwelling that communicates eternal life:
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another advocate … the Spirit of Truth …”
“… because I live, you will live also. On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. The one who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me, and the one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love that one and manifest myself to them.”
In this turn of argument, we see why the author intervenes in the Johannine tradition in the first place. The author was an early Christian perfectionist who believed that Jesus offered forgiveness for past sins but also moral sinlessness after the reception of the Spirit. He was also convinced that the Gospel supported his view in the ways it links keeping the commandments, the indwelling of the Spirit, and eternal life (14:15–21; 15:10). Not all readers of John held this view, however (most today do not, of course). And so, he assumes the voice of the Gospel’s narrator – the figure most suited to “clarify” its theology on this point – to articulate his supposed vision of moral perfection in language consistent with the Gospel. His aim was to establish a discursive authority over the Gospel, seizing control of its interpretation.
The author’s aim, however, was not merely to stress the importance of the so-called commandments related in John. It was also to work out their significance or obligations in various spheres of life – to show what these commands entail. The Gospel of John is clear on what is required for belief, and it articulates a general command to “love.” Nevertheless, it offers little in the way of direct moral or ethical instruction, certainly in contrast to the writings of Paul or the Synoptic Gospels.75 In the next several segments of his epistle, the author of 1 John steers into this gap, supplying a more concrete, if still generalized, ethic for his readers in the chapters that follow.
5.4.2 What Does “Believing” Entail?
When the author glosses “the commandment” all those who would find eternal life must follow, he glosses it, first, as a requirement to “believe”: “and this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ …” (3:23). In his view, belief was a moral obligation and an example of righteous behavior, a critical facet of the experience of “walking in the light.” He would have found a firm basis for this view in John; there, those “who do not believe” are guilty of “sin” (16:9).
But what does belief entail? What precisely must a person believe? In the epistle, the author singles out two propositions as essential for all persons to confess, namely, “that Jesus is the Christ” and “that Jesus is the Son of God.” Unless one confesses Jesus under these titles, the author contends, they cannot claim to have ever been “of God” or “of us” and to possess eternal life.
5.4.2.1 Believing “that Jesus is the Christ”
At the original conclusion of the Fourth Gospel, the voice of the Johannine eyewitness tells his readers, “these things are written that you may believe … and that by believing, you may have life in his name” (20:31). In the same verse, he also clarifies what precisely they are to believe; they are to believe “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (20:31). Not coincidentally, other stories in the text spotlight characters choosing either to “confess” or “deny” that Jesus is “the Christ,” underscoring the importance of this specific belief (1:41; 9:22).
As a careful reader of the Gospel, the author of 1 John accepted the necessity of believing and confessing Jesus for the experience of being born of God. He tells his readers that it is precisely the one “who believes that Jesus is the Christ” who can claim to be “a child of God” (5:1). In the course of laying out the significance of believing in Jesus as Christ, however, the author indicts some who do not seem to believe, individuals the author labels “antichrists” (2:18–23; 4:1–6). Although scholars have long centered these figures in their analyses of 1 John, the “antichrists” are subordinate to the author’s stress on the importance of belief.
The Riddle of the Antichrists
No feature of 1 John has attracted more scholarly attention than the epistle’s references to the “antichrists.” These obscure figures first appear in chapter 2. There, the author claims that his readers “have heard” of the coming of an “antichrist.” He then insists that speculations of the antichrist’s coming have been fulfilled not (or not yet) in the coming of one such figure but in the coming of “many antichrists”:
Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us … Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. The one who confesses the Son has the Father also.
A second mention of these “antichrists” appears in chapter 4, where the author calls them “false prophets”:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.
But who are these “antichrists” and “false prophets?” The author provides some clues. First, he casts the “antichrists” as defectors from the circles of the narrator (or probably better, the narrator and his readers): “they went out from us, but they were not of us” (2:19).76 Second, he outlines the essential beliefs of the antichrists, identifying them as individuals who “deny” a set of propositional truths. Specifically, the antichrists deny “that Jesus is the Christ” (2:22), a posture he equates to “denying the Son” or failing to “confess the Son” (2:23; cf. 4:15; 5:5). In the second mention of these individuals, the author casts them as ones who do “not confess Jesus” (4:3). He also counterposes them to those “confessing Jesus Christ having come in the flesh” (4:2).
The Search for the Antichrists
Some scholars speculate that the text’s polemics against the “antichrists” respond to an anxiety over certain Christians who converted (or perhaps reverted) to Judaism.77 This is possible, but as Toan Do observes, it is difficult to extract anything like an obvious and sustained polemic against Judaism from 1 John.78 Although the Gospel of John is rich in references to Jews, Jewish ritual practices, and Jewish feasts, 1 John is silent on all these.79 The text is far removed from the polemic of texts such as Hebrews or the Epistle of Barnabas. Additionally, the closing verse of the letter – the summary exhortation, “little children, keep yourselves from idols” (5:21) – feels less at home in an appeal to avoid Judaism.80
Another line of interpretation suggests that the author could have charged even other Christian groups with a denial “that Jesus is the Christ” if those terms are understood in a particular sense. Irenaeus casts one early Christian teacher, Cerinthus, as the teacher of a spirit-possession Christology that seems to have distinguished the human person, “Jesus,” from a divine, spiritual “Christ.”81 Building on this, some scholars entertain the possibility that 1 John means to indict precisely Cerinthus’ theology here.82 The problem is that our patristic descriptions of Cerinthus are vague and inconsistent. They may not be reliable for constructing his views.83 The author of 1 John also does not indict other points of Cerinthus’ theology reported by ancient authors.84
Many more scholars, then, look to a wider field of possible targets than merely Cerinthus and speculate that 1 John may be indicting a broader and vaguer set of “unorthodox” Christologies under the rubric of “docetism.”85 In scholarly usage, “docetism” is an umbrella term encompassing various systems of thought that denied that Christ was ever (fully) human. In these systems, Christ only “seemed” to have human flesh but did not (“docetism” is derived from the Greek word δοκέω [“to seem, appear”]). Classically, this would include the idea that Christ only existed as a spirit, albeit a spirit that could manipulate its form to appear material – to be seen and touched (phantasmal Christologies).86 Others would extend the term to include possessionist or separationist Christologies, in which Christ was a spirit but one that temporarily possessed a real human body before departing from it again.87 For many scholars, some trace of debates over Jesus’ flesh seems to surface in 1 John 4:2–3: “by this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist …” In this verse, the author seems to be concerned with the confession of Jesus as one who “has come in the flesh”; hence, many interpreters infer that the antichrists did not confess Jesus in those terms.
On the other hand, to quote Ruth Edwards, “if our author is seeking to refute Docetism, he seems to be doing it very obscurely.”88 Other second-century works – for example, the letters of Ignatius, 3 Corinthians, and the Epistula Apostolorum – engage in more direct and sustained polemics against so-called docetic ideas, asserting the fleshly reality of Jesus’ birth, crucifixion, or resurrection.89 In 1 John, by contrast, the polemic that supposedly motivates the entire epistle would largely hang on a single phrase in a single verse.90 For that matter, the verse does not technically say the “antichrists” deny that Jesus came in the flesh; whereas the spirits from God confess “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh,” the “spirit of antichrist” “does not confess Jesus” (4:2–3).91 Along the same lines, the first passage to mention the “antichrists” defines an “antichrist” in equally loose terms as one who “denies the Son” (4:23).92 In this case, even if our author is making a passing point about the proper confession of Jesus as one “come in the flesh,” we cannot and should not reduce his polemic against the “antichrists” to that point. At least as he describes them, the “antichrists” seem to encompass anyone who has defected from a belief – a proper belief or any belief at all – in Jesus.
A Different Approach
In the end, it is difficult to find an exact and obvious coordinate for the epistle’s discussion of “antichrists.” But perhaps there is no need to identify this group with a specific Christian movement or current. When we dismiss the common assumption that 1 John is a genuine work, we can more freely entertain the idea that its “antichrists” are as artificial and constructed as its implied author. Its audience is certainly artificial, populated by such nameless, two-dimensional constructs as “little children,” “children,” “young men,” and “fathers.” The “antichrists” are no different; they are a schematic group – a rhetorical construct – which, like so many others in the text, is assembled from elements of the Gospel.93
Convinced that 1 John is a genuine text, scholars assume that external circumstances drive its descriptions of the “antichrists.” What they fail to see is how far the characterization of the antichrists is instead articulated around the language of the Gospel. The Gospel claims that it was written so that its readers might “believe that Jesus is the Christ” and thereby have “eternal life” (20:31; cf. 11:27). It is telling, then, that when 1 John characterizes these “antichrists,” it characterizes them as ones who fall short of this very goal: the “antichrists” deny “that Jesus is the Christ” (2:22). In this case, it would seem that the Gospel inspires and shapes the characterization of these figures more than the details of any single, external situation. The “antichrists” are persons who fail to sustain belief as the Gospel defines it.
When we understand the “antichrists” as a literary construct, we can also make good sense of why 1 John uses the term “antichrist” in the first place. The term does not appear in any text predating 1 John, and yet, the author assumes that his readers are familiar with the concept it represents, writing, “you have heard that antichrist is coming” (2:18; 4:3). Elsewhere in the epistle, the formula “you have heard” refers to teachings transmitted from Jesus (1:3, 5; 2:7). But what teachings of Jesus does the author have in mind? The answer to this riddle probably lies not in John but in the Synoptics. The constellation of terms appearing in these sections of 1 John – “antichrists” (ἀντίχριστοι), “false prophets” (ψευδοπροφῆται), and “those who would deceive” (πλανώντων) – evoke a particular prediction contained in the Synoptics that before the end of the world, “false Christs [ψευδόχριστοι] and false prophets [ψευδοπροφῆται] will arise … to deceive [πλανήσουσιν]”:
And then if anyone says to you, “Look, here is the Christ!” or “Look, there he is!” do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to deceive, if possible, the elect. But take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.
Against this parallel, it would seem that the term “antichrist” is essentially equivalent to “false Christ.”95 (Note that the Greek prefix “anti-” can mean both “against” and “in place of,” denoting a [false] substitute.)96
The fact that the author speaks of both “many antichrists” and a singular “antichrist” also suits early Christian speculations about false Christs. While some Christian texts anticipate multiple “false Christs” (e.g., Mark and Matthew), others, shaped by rampant speculations about the emperor Nero, anticipate a single, false Christ or opponent of Christ par excellence (e.g., 2 Thess. 2:3–10; Rev. 13:1–10).97 As if reconciling these competing views, the author says that his readers “have heard that antichrist [singular] is coming” but locates the (at least partial, if not complete) fulfillment of this prediction in the coming of a single “spirit of antichrist,” manifest and active in “many antichrists” (2:18; 4:2–3).98
In this instance, the author takes up an older tradition – apocalyptic speculations that foretell the rise of a “false Christ” par excellence and many “false Christs” – and applies these speculations in a new way, broadening who can be indicted under the label. The author reasons, plausibly, that the essential claim of any false Messiah/Christ is that Jesus is not the Christ. For the author, then, anyone who once confessed “that Jesus is the Christ” but who now denies it – any apostate – has made the essential claim that defines a false Christ. Such persons participate in the spirit of “antichrist” and can be called an “antichrist.”99
Obviously, such denials and defections occurred from time to time in the first and second centuries CE, and Christians of the period expected more. By the turn of the second century CE, a central theme of Christian eschatological speculations was that the final days would see a mass “falling away” or “leading astray” of believers. Predictions of such events appear in a broad panoply of texts, always connected, as in 1 John, to the emergence of “false Christs” and “false prophets” (Mark 13:22; Matt. 24:5, 24; cf. 2 Thess. 2:3), “deceitful spirits” (1 Tim. 4:1), and false teachers (2 Peter 2:1–3; Jude 4, 16–19; 2 Tim. 4:3–4; Acts 20:29–30). Other general warnings against defections appear in different texts (e.g., Heb. 3:12; 6:4–6; cf. 10:26–29), and even the Gospel of John has Jesus warn his followers against falling away (16:1; cf. 15:6). In this case, it would hardly take a single, specific event to inspire condemnations of those who go “out from us” and who “deny Christ,” let alone to read their defections as a sign that “this is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). This network of ideas was fully consolidated in the contemporary imagination of Christians.
This is not to say that the author did not know of specific individuals who associated for a time with other believers in Jesus before pursuing other religious options; he probably did. These persons might have taken any of the trajectories scholars propose: reversion to Judaism, reversion to paganism, or adherence to a Jesus-centered movement confessing what the author viewed as a defective Christology. But the fact that the author does not single out any of these specific trajectories suggests that his polemic was not aimed at any single one of these. He indicts all defections from right belief.
In sum, then, we should agree with Judith Lieu that “the evidence is not provided by 1 John to identify the opponents’ position with … more articulated systems, and it is probable that they did not represent a ‘system’ as such.”100 The “antichrists” are better understood as a way of rhetorically typecasting many possible forms of defection from the core Christological confession espoused in John and 1 John, that is, the confession of Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world” (John 11:27). Put another way, the “antichrists” represent apostates in general, and the warning against the “antichrists” is a warning against the sin of unbelief, which precludes any union with God.
The Antichrists within the Argumentation of 1 John
Because of the intense scholarly interest in the “antichrists,” many interpreters overestimate their importance in 1 John, casting the entire epistle as a work developed to combat the rise of these figures. In effect, they read the epistle inside out, subordinating all other parts of 1 John – its preface, opening lines, sustained argumentation, and conclusion – to the two passages of the letter that describe these figures (2:18–23; 4:1–6). In this way, these scholars miss, marginalize, or contort the salient themes of these sections.101 In actuality, the polemic against the “antichrists” and “false prophets” is only one piece of a larger argument traced across the text, before and after these passages. That argument, as we have seen, is that no one who sins possesses the new birth, the divine indwelling, and eternal life.
In context, the author uses the antichrists to press his central point, namely, that sins prove that one has not been “born of God.” The author constructs the “antichrists” as individuals who once moved in Christian circles. He then uses their repudiation of Jesus and break from other believers to demonstrate that they were never in true fellowship with God and his children (cf. 1:3): “they went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have dwelled/remained with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us” (2:19). In this way, the “antichrists” illustrate a rhetorical point made in other ways across the epistle. They represent the idea that one can move among believers and yet not be “of” the circle that enjoys “fellowship with the Father and the Son” (1:3), that is, not be “of God” or “in God.”102
But the “antichrists” represent something more; they represent an extreme case given their one-time connection to other believers. As we saw earlier, the author’s “commandment” stresses the need to “believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ” (3:23). The “antichrists,” however, have failed at this first point in the most dramatic way: openly disavowing that name after full knowledge of it. For the author, this was probably an extreme kind of sin. Since he never instructs his readers to pray for the “antichrists,” and since he is unrelentingly hostile towards them, it is probable that he regarded them as having committed a “sin unto death,” one for which no repentance was possible (5:16–17).103 For him, these figures embodied the worst fate to which his readers could succumb.
In this regard, however, the “antichrists” are also critical foils to individuals at the other extreme: those who have received the “new birth.” And so, in the verses that follow his condemnations of the “antichrists,” the author draws sharp distinctions between them and his readers, whom he constructs in that other extreme. He insists that his hearers are not like the “liars” who deny Jesus, objectively or proleptically (2:22). They “know” “the truth” (2:20–21), and they possess what they “have heard from the beginning” – that is, the commandment – within themselves (2:24; cf. 2:7). In turn, by doing “what is right,” they prove that they have “been born of him”: “if you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him” (2:29). They also possess the “anointing” – likely, the Spirit (cf. Acts 10:38) – and they therefore “dwell in the Son and the Father” (2:24). And since they possess the promise of “eternal life” (2:25), they will be “confident and unashamed” at the coming of Jesus (2:28). With each successive claim, the author reinforces his thesis of sinlessness.
For the author, then, the “antichrists” are a rhetorical means to an end – one consistent with the broader themes of the epistle. Fittingly, then, the author’s first discussion of the “antichrists” in chapter 2 culminates in a reiteration of the necessity of doing “what is right”: “if you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who does right is born of him” (2:29). The author then develops this idea with an extended metaphor. Just as children resemble their parents, so too, those “born of [God],” who are counted among the “children of God” (3:1), will “be like him” “when he appears” (3:2). They will have purified themselves to be like the God who is pure (3:3). Throughout the “antichrist” passages, then, the author insists on the necessity of doing what is right during the “last hour” in preparation for the judgment (2:18).
5.4.2.2 Believing “that Jesus is the Son of God”
In the “antichrist” passages, the author of the epistle stresses that doing “right” entails, at least in part, confessing that “Jesus is the Christ.” But later in the epistle, the author also stresses the importance of confessing Jesus as the “Son of God” as well – an important, even climactic, theme in the Gospel of John (20:31).104 For the author, only those who embrace Jesus as the Son of God can claim to be “in God” and to be “born of God”:
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwells in that one, and that one in God.
For whatever is born of God overcomes the world … Who is it that overcomes the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
Tellingly, the latter verse also reaffirms the link between being “born of God” and sinlessness. The phrase “overcome the world” condenses the ideas of being free from the power of the “evil one” who controls the world (4:3–6; 5:19; cf. 2:13) and of being free of the many lusts and desires of the world (2:15–17) – the deceptions that enslave one to sin and lead to death. For the author, confessing Jesus as the “Son of God” is essential to attaining the state of sinlessness.
Following this verse, the author continues elaborating on the necessity of confessing Jesus as the “Son of God.” This section, however, has long proven a crux interpretum in the study of 1 John, and it is misread in ways that obscure the epistle’s true purpose. To understand the author’s discussion of Jesus as the “Son of God” and to eliminate yet another difficulty in the interpretation of 1 John, it is necessary to give this section close attention.
“Eternal Life” in the Son
After insisting that the person who “overcomes the world” is “the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God,” the author pivots to a seemingly unrelated point:
This is the one who came by water and by blood: Jesus Christ. [He came] not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the witness because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three agree.
Scholars have struggled to make sense of these verses, and commentaries on the passage offer different interpretations of them.105 Most, however, read the claim “not with the water only but with the water and the blood” in line with the idea that 1 John is an anti-docetic text. In this reading, the claim that Jesus came “not with the water only but with the water and the blood” is an affirmation that Jesus both possessed blood and spilled blood, that is, that he experienced a fully human life and death.106 As popular as this reading is, however, it fails to understand the passage’s logic and argumentation. Jesus’ fleshly nature is not at stake in the passage. Instead, the passage extends the point made in the opening statement – namely, that one must confess “that Jesus is the Son of God” to possess eternal life (5:5).107
Although many scholars believe that the formula “not with the by water only but with the water and blood” must reflect and resist a competing view, held by the author’s opponents, this is not necessarily the case. In other verses where a “not only … but” formula appears in 1 John and the Gospel, it is merely used to augment a point, for example:
And he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God.
… he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather the children of God scattered abroad into one.
I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word …
In this case, we can presume that the expression “not only X … but Y” serves a similar purpose here. The author uses the formula not to exclude another view but for rhetorical effect, to augment a point. Specifically, the formula allows the author to expand and underscore the number of “witnesses” he is presenting to build his next line of argument. He stresses to his readers that “not only” one but “three witnesses” exist that defend his next point: “water,” “blood,” and “Spirit” (5:8).108
In turn, to understand why the author singles out these three witnesses, one must understand what the testimony of these witnesses is. Fortunately, the author provides this answer in the lines that follow. He indicates that the “testimony of God” to Jesus (5:9–10) – the testimony borne by the three witnesses of “water,” “blood,” and “Spirit” (5:8) – is precisely the propositional truth that humans can attain eternal life through the Son: “and this is the testimony: that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son” (5:11). In this case, it is obvious why the author produces the water, the blood, and the Spirit as his three “witnesses”; in the Gospel, each of these verifies that Jesus is the source of the “life” God grants humanity. In John, Jesus links the interior possession of “water” (4:14), of “blood” (6:53), and of “the Spirit” (6:63) to “eternal life.” It is, then, hardly a coincidence that John depicts Jesus emitting all three from the cross in the Gospel (19:30, 34). In the thought of the Gospel, the presence and manifestation of each at Jesus’ crucifixion confirms that he has eternal life within himself. As a careful reader of John, our author was able to grasp this idea and leverage it in his argument.
The author of 1 John had his own agenda to pursue, however. For him, the “testimony” given by God and the three witnesses underscored the importance of obedience to “the commandment” to believe. If eternal “life” is “in [God’s] Son” (5:11), then there is no way to share in this “life” unless one recognizes and receives Jesus as “the Son.” The passage culminates in this very point:
The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself … The one who has the Son has life; the one who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know you have eternal life.
The passage, then, does not revolve around the question of whether Jesus had material blood. Instead, the passage appeals to images in the Gospel’s passion narrative to support the epistle’s central and sustained theme: only those who obey “the commandment” – a commandment that obligates belief in Jesus as the “Son of God” – can claim that they possess “eternal life.” By contrast, those who sin, in this case by unbelief, do not have eternal life.109 These individuals have “made [God] a liar” since they have “not believed in the testimony that God has borne to his Son” (5:10), a testimony found in water, blood, and spirit.
5.4.3 What Does “Love” Entail?
The first injunction of the dual “commandment” outlines the obligation of “belief.” The second, however, pivots on a different action: “love.” This emphasis on “love” stems from the Gospel, in which Jesus models “love” for his followers (3:16; 15:13) and urges them to “love” (13:34). In 1 John, however, the concept acquires a new centrality, becoming the fundamental antithesis of sin.
5.4.3.1 “Love” as Universal Rubric
From even a cursory read, it is clear that 1 John positions “love” as its central moral and ethical principle. According to the author, “God” – the example of a pure and sinless life – is “love” (4:8, 16). For the author, then, “love” permeates a life emulating God’s own, and it is a rubric for all dimensions of Christian behavior. Whatever the author deems is right is love; whatever is not love is sin.
Love is certainly a basis for social morality and interpersonal relations. As the author sees it, the commandment to love definitively excludes “murder” (3:15b). It excludes even lesser manifestations of “hate” since “anyone who hates his brother is a murderer” at heart (3:15a). The author also reads love as obligating persons to care for one another, especially those “in need,” through hospitality and charity (3:17).
Critically, however, the author also sees love as an essential rubric for morality in one’s internal sphere – the domain of, for example, personal comportment and sexual ethics. For the author, love is incompatible with what “the world” values, a world “under the power of the evil one” (5:19) and defined by its posture of hate (3:13). Accordingly, love excludes “all that is in the world: the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride of life” (2:15–16). These categories seem to encompass wide and non-exclusive ranges of sins. Although the expression “desires of the flesh” does not appear in earlier Jewish literature, it finds parallels in the Pauline Epistles (Gal 5:16, 19–21, 24; cf. Rom. 13:14) and pseudonymous works orbiting Paul’s letters (Eph. 2:1–3; 1 Peter 4:2–3; 2 Peter 2:10).110 In those works, the expression indexes a broad set of offenses:
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh … Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like … And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
The phrase “desire of the eyes” also encompasses many sins. In earlier Jewish texts, eyes are turned on objects in greed (Eccl. 4:8; Sir. 14:9), in sexual lust (cf. Sir. 23:4–6; 1QS 1:6; 2 Peter 2:14), and even idolatry (Ezek. 6:9). Last, the phrase “pride of livelihood [βίου]” may contain the idea of hoarding wealth (cited in 3:17).
5.4.3.2 “Love” and “Belief”
As the epistle moves into its later stages, the author constructs “love” as encompassing one more surprising dimension of Christian behavior, specifically, one’s vertical relationship to God, including the obligation of belief. Towards the end of chapter 4, the author claims that no one can “love God” – a notion he implicitly links to belief in God (5:1, 3) – if they “hate a brother or sister”: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother” (4:20–21). Conversely, the author affirms that one cannot truly love their neighbor who does not love God. He tells his readers, “by this we know that we love the children of God: when we love God and obey his commandments” (5:2).
Viewed in this light, the double “commandment,” which the author sometimes refers to in the plural (“commandments”), is a single “commandment.” For the author, the two parts of the commandment are entangled. “Belief” is the ground and summit of “love”; “belief” is even a form of “love.” The author collapses the obligations of belief and love together, stressing the reciprocity – even equivalency – of the two.
5.4.3.3 “Perfect Love” and “Eternal Life”
What stands out from the above survey is the creativity of the mind behind 1 John. The author of the epistle had deeply imbibed the Gospel, understanding many nuances of its thought. He was also capable of elaborating that thought, extending and synthesizing the Gospel’s teachings into new formations. In his discussions of “love,” he lifts the “new commandment” from its original matrix, transforming it and applying it to new ends.
As in all other instances, however, the author’s creative reworking of the Gospel is oriented toward a single theme: the idea that personal sins reveal that one has not (yet) been “born of God.” Having proclaimed that “God is love,” the author makes the complete and totalizing application of the ethic of love in one’s life – that is, “perfect love” (4:18), moral perfection, or sinlessness – the essential evidence that one has been “born of God” and “dwells in God.” The one who demonstrates “love” in all dimensions and applications proves that they “dwell in” the God who is love, while the one who fails to demonstrate “love” proves that they do not “dwell in” God, points which the author reiterates regularly, even relentlessly, across his epistle:
The one who says they are in the light and hates their brother is still in the darkness. The one who loves their brother abides in the light, and in it, there is no cause for stumbling.
By this it may be seen who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor is the one who does not love their brother.
We know that we have passed from death to life because we love each other. Anyone who does not love dwells in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life dwelling in them.
If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?
Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and truth. By this, we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our hearts before him …
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and the one who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
God is love, and the one who dwells in love dwells in God, and God dwells in that one.
These lines state in more specific applications what the author has already indicated in general terms elsewhere: “no one who dwells in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him” (3:6). In their sheer number, these verses show how pervasive and consistent the author’s message of sinlessness is – how he twists and twists his spiral back to the same repeated thesis. Verses suggesting the sinlessness of those “born of God” are not an anomaly in the epistle; they are the epistle.112
For those who need assurance that they now possess “eternal life,” then, there is no greater evidence than their manifestation of “love” in different spheres. The author assumes a readership in which some do not feel confident before God, weighed down by their past and present sins. These are people who still must be “perfected” since “fear has to do with punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (4:18b). But the author tells his readers that there is a way to “know that we are of the truth and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us” with the memory of sin – a way to find “confidence before God.” That way is to “keep his commandments and do what pleases him” (3:19–22). As he says, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (4:18a).
5.5 The Climax
In this chapter, I have argued that any understanding of the motivations of the author of 1 John must flow from the signposts he places in his work. Read individually and collectively, those signposts indicate that the author wrote his epistle to advance a vision of human sinlessness – one in which sin is the essential evidence that one had not (yet) been “born of God.” It is only fitting, then, that at the close of this chapter, we consider how the author chose to close his epistle – the final signposts he left for his readers.
In that concluding section, verses 18–20, the author sets out three climactic assertions, repeating the introductory formula “we know.” Unsurprisingly, those assertions are entirely consistent with the vision we have traced in this chapter. In them, the author insists that those who are “born of God,” who “know him,” who are “in him,” and who are “children of God” “do not sin”; they are beyond the touch of “the evil one.” By contrast, all others remain in “the power of the evil one”:
We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them, and the evil one does not touch them.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
With these lines, the author reiterates one final time the central and persistent theses of the work – the theological vision he introduced in its opening lines and which he now condenses at its end.113 When humans come to “know” God – a being who has no sin, countenances no sin, and who prevents sin – then they will know “eternal life.”
As the author draws his epistle to a close, however, he not only reaffirms his views but also urges belief in them. First John, after all, is not merely a theological argument; it is also an exhortation, an appeal, meant to inspire readers to attain the knowledge, the rebirth, and the state of sinlessness it envisions. And so, building on his penultimate claim that the one “who is true” “is the true God,” the author issues one final plea to his readers, condensing his entire epistle into a single warning: “little children, keep yourselves from idols” (5:21).
This final appeal is surprising in an epistle that has never once foregrounded idolatry, let alone mentioned it. Amusingly, even the final verse of the text tortures contemporary interpreters.114 This final line, however, locks tightly beside the affirmation in the line before that only those who are “born of God” and “do not sin” can “know him who is true” – that is, “the true God.” By this logic, those who have not yet achieved this state – those who are still in the grip of “the evil one” – cannot “know” God (cf. John 8:19). By extension, they cannot truly believe in God, even if they profess otherwise. One cannot “believe” in one they do not “know.”115 Above all, such persons cannot truly worship God either; since they do not “know” the true God, they invariably exchange the false for the true and serve the evil one (cf. John 8:42, 54–55).116 For the author, then, idolatry is implicit in every other transgression; it is the essential sin of all “who walk in darkness.” Accordingly, the author closes his call to avoid all sin with the same message, cloaked in another form, a final form: “keep yourselves from idols.”
5.6 Conclusion
From beginning to end, 1 John advances a particular view of sin and sinlessness – one we can characterize as a radical perfectionist position. With this insight in place, we can begin to flesh out a tentative portrait of the work’s author. We can also speculate about the (social, intellectual) context that shaped him.
Admittedly, most details about that author will remain elusive. We will probably never know this author’s real name. We will also never know where he lived.117 What we can say is that he was clearly a devoted student and sophisticated reader of the Gospel of John – a text written around the turn of the second century. Our author might well have been one of the earliest readers of that text. Since 1 John was known to Papias, the epistle probably cannot date later than the 120s.
As an early reader of John, our author was no doubt connected to other readers of the Gospel. But this does not mean he was embedded in an incipit or established group of “Johannine Christians,” as scholars have assumed. Although we have firm evidence for the existence of many other second-century Christian movements and networks (e.g., so-called Ebionites, Simonians, Cerinthians, etc.), we have no evidence, no external attestation, of anything we could define as a “Johannine Christianity.” Instead, we know that many Christian groups across a broad geographic and intellectual spectrum consumed the Gospel of John, often alongside other gospels. In all likelihood, our author was shaped within one of these diverse John-reading movements and networks, but one that also consumed the Synoptics (which seem to inform our author’s understanding of the “antichrists”/“false prophets”) and perhaps Pauline and post-Pauline materials (as seen in the author’s vocabulary of “atonement/expiation” and “blood” that “cleanses”). These influences were consistent with those of an ethnically gentile author in this period. Additionally, since none of the individual threads listed above appears in the Gospel, it seems appropriate to position our author within a somewhat distinct (if still connecting) intellectual context from the one shaping the author of the Gospel.
What truly distinguished the author of 1 John, however, was his distinctive belief that those genuinely “born of God” were sinless and impeccable – that they possessed a new, spiritual nature that resisted every sin. This belief led our author to imagine an invisible, two-tier, mixed membership in early Christian groups. In any congregation, our author could point to professed believers who seemed to live moral lives as well as others who were still mired in (graver or lesser, more or fewer) sins. For our author, only those with no evidence of sin could validly claim to have ever possessed the Spirit, new birth, and divine indwelling. Those still mired in sins did not possess these gifts. Thus, within the visible circle of all professing Christians, he imagined a smaller, invisible circle of those genuinely “born of God.” This sort of invisible distinction may be foreign to many contemporary Christians, but it is reminscent of the invisible distinction between spirituals and the animate in Valentinian thought and between those who have experienced the first and second works of grace (“entire sanctification” or sinless “perfection”) in Wesleyan traditions.
We have no way of knowing how our author developed this view. As I noted, his theology does not fully align with the outlook of any other known early Christian work, though it is evocative of the tendencies of some other second-century Christian thinkers.118 We also cannot know how many persons in the author’s circles shared his views. Some might have, either in his local context or in other cities (that is, persons with whom he was linked by reading or correspondence). Then again, our author might also have been an idiosyncratic reader and thinker, perhaps even one at odds with some of his closest conversation partners. What we can say for certain is that our author felt he could defend and articulate his views through the distinctive language of the new Gospel of John now in circulation, even though the specifics of his theology moved beyond the Gospel’s explicit teachings.
At some point, our author saw his command of the Gospel of John as a potential tool to transmit his teachings. He probably imagined how much more persuasive a text written by the eyewitness author of the Gospel would be in propagating his vision of sinlessness – a lost work that could make explicit what the author believed to be implicit in John. Our author knew that it would only take a modest effort to fabricate such a work himself; John’s style is highly distinctive and relatively easy to imitate.119 He also knew of at least one or two ways to successfully disseminate such a text, perhaps sending it to an unsuspecting but receptive reader with the means to produce multiple copies of it or planting it in an existing book collection.120 At some point, our author convinced himself to put pen to papyrus and begin drafting such a document.
Perhaps the best way to conceptualize 1 John is as a supplement to the Gospel. It is, in certain respects, a Gospel-adjacent or Gospel-like record, one that relates additional fragments of Jesus’ teachings that are not contained in John but might have found a place in it (what we might consider explicit or implicit agrapha of Jesus, paralleling those in such Pauline texts as 1 Cor. 7:10–11; 9:14). One such fragment appears as a direct quotation. At the beginning of his work, the co-opted voice of the eyewitness relates an additional, critical “message” he claims to “have heard from” Jesus, one which carries the weight of his distinctive theology: “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1:5). Tellingly, this formula is used elsewhere in the epistle to introduce sayings of Jesus found in the Gospel (3:11; cf. John 13:34). In turn, by framing the entire work as the testimony of one who “proclaims” what he has “heard” from Jesus, the author implies that the entirety of his work may be a paraphrase of several lost teachings of Jesus and, by extension, a guide to interpreting other teachings of Jesus related in the Gospel.121 In this respect, 1 John fits neatly beside other ancient pseudepigrapha that “update, interpret and develop the content of” earlier texts “in a way that one claims to be an authentic expression” of them.122
We have no way of knowing who the initial intended reader(s) of 1 John were. Like other literary works, ancient pseudepigrapha did not always surface in the same location as the author; sometimes, they were “published” as they were sent by couriers to other cities.123 More importantly, a text’s initial readers were not always identical to a text’s (full or ultimate) intended readers. In certain cases, we know that authors sent out falsely authored works to a particular initial reader in the hopes that the reader would make copies of them and pass them along to many other parties.124 In this case, we can imagine the author of 1 John planting his text in a particular setting while still hoping that his text would achieve a broad circulation, one as broad as the Gospel he hoped to supplement.125
It is possible that the author’s sense that he was merely supplementing the Gospel – stating in explicit terms what was supposedly implicit within it – assuaged his conscience and gave him all the ethical validation necessary to compose and release his epistle. But we can also imagine other, even more ingenious, ways in which the author might have justified his actions.126 Whatever our author’s mindset, his pen was ultimately undeterred.
Admittedly, that pen had its limitations. Our author was not as clear a communicator as the Gospel’s author. Scholars such as Dodd can admit that individual sentences in his work are “not good Greek.”127 And at times, the author of 1 John allows his chosen medium – interlocking, cryptic speech – to overwhelm and obfuscate his argumentation. His attempt to mirror the convoluted speech of Jesus in the Gospel – a style riddled with non-sequiturs – causes him to leave critical trains of thought underdeveloped or ambiguous. The result is a text that retains just enough ambiguity to permit different, even unintended, readings of many critical lines.
That ambiguity, however, was crucial to securing a lasting future for 1 John. Many ancient readers would have been predisposed against the author’s radical thesis, which challenged several ingrained assumptions widely shared across different Christian groups (e.g., that water baptism and associated rites are the means by which one receives the Spirit [Acts 2:38; 19:5–6], that even those who possess the Spirit can sin [Heb. 6:4–6], etc.). As long as the text was vulnerable to other interpretations, either by accident or by harmonizing effort, it would escape these objections, gradually cementing a readership beside the Gospel.128 It survived precisely as it was integrated, even locked, into the developing Proto-Catholic synthesis – a synthesis that would, ironically, eclipse its core message. Other New Testament works gained footholds as they too were misread, outliving their original purposes (consider, for example, the positive reception of the anti-Pauline epistle of James beside the letters of Paul in Proto-Catholic Christianity).129
For all the limitations of the author of 1 John, however, he was every bit the Gospel author’s equal in two critical ways that should cement his reputation among early Christian writers. First, he was an original thinker, developing novel interpretations of John. Some of his interpretations would prove enduring, among them, his inspiring image of God as “love” (4:16). Some would prove abortive, if no less remarkable, most significantly, his distinctive doctrine of sinlessness. Either way, we can admire his creative mind. Second, and perhaps most importantly, our author was a literary innovator, pioneering the practice of writing short works, epistles, in the voice of the Johannine eyewitness. As we will see, it is here that his influence would prove most profound. Through this one simple move, our author set a new literary tradition in motion. In due time, and following his lead, other writers would take up their pens to write similar letters, incrementally expanding the library of the invented disciple.
