To this point, we have seen that the internal worlds of 1, 2, and 3 John are at least partly fictionalized. Each epistle lays claim to an invented implied author: the supposed eyewitness author of John who, though anonymous, alternates “we”/“I” forms, speaks a distinctive idiolect, and “testifies” to Jesus. But how far does this pattern of invention extend? Could other elements of these texts also be fictionalized? As I will argue here, the answer is yes – an answer that impacts how we use these works in historical reconstruction.
On the assumption that the Johannine Epistles are authentic artifacts, most scholars today impose relatively few limits on their ability to mine these works for historical details. As a rule, they assume a one-to-one correspondence for many figures, groups, and events described in the texts and those in the real world, including the network of “churches” depicted in the letters. For these scholars, the texts are a window – perhaps not a transparent one, but at least a translucent one – into the first century CE. In turn, by gazing through this window, scholars reconstruct the contours of what they call the “Johannine Community.”
When we understand the Epistles as falsely authored works, however, this way of utilizing them becomes especially problematic. One can no longer presume that any detail in these works directly and transparently captures an external reality. As I will argue here, the many persons, churches, and situations projected in the Epistles – the basis for so many scholarly reconstructions of a Johannine Community – are at least partly or wholly invented. Only after we appreciate this point can we set out on a new, careful, and more restrained reconstruction of the origins of these works.
4.1 Audience and Situation in a Pseudepigraphal Letter
As Richard Bauckham insists, scholars operate “without sufficient appreciation of the fact that the pseudepigraphal letter is a genre with some special features of its own” and, by extension, special challenges.1 For one, letters – real or fictionalized – are acts of interpersonal communication. They configure senders/authors in relation to some (specified or unspecified) addresses and to a concrete situation occasioning the letter. Because of this, the implied author of an epistle or letter is not an isolated or fully detachable feature of the work, sealed off from the broader internal world of the letter. Rather, that implied author is deeply embedded in that world, and that world is partly articulated around the implied author. In the case of a pseudo-historical letter, then, it is especially difficult to disentangle a false authorial persona from other elements of the letter. Instead, as David Lincicum writes, “when pseudepigraphy is taken into consideration, arguably any appeal to the ostensive reference of text to world is complicated,” so that the entire “communicative triad of author, addressee and situation becomes opaque”:2
Pseudepigraphy is usually taken as troubling the first point of the triad (the author, per definitionem), sometimes the second (the addressees) but rarely the third (the situation). But arguably the complications introduced by pseudepigraphy have not penetrated study of the New Testament as they might have done … if we judge a text pseudepigraphal, to discern reality from appearance is severely problematized … since all the ostensive elements of epistolarity are fictionalized in a pseudepigraphal letter (or at least the burden of proof falls to the interpreter who wants to suggest that one element of the triad of author–recipient–situation is not fictionalized while the others are).3
I would argue that this is even more the case when the implied author in question is an invented or fictional character, as the implied author of 1, 2, and 3 John is. A strictly invented character does not have actual, flesh-and-blood associates (3 John 1, 12). He does not make personal visits (2 John 12; 3 John 14), write letters (2 John 12; 3 John 9, 13), or send emissaries (3 John 9) to them. For that matter, he does not live in a specific location and is not embedded in an real environment or circumstance. To craft a letter in the voice of an invented character, one must supply all these elements – audience and situation – where none exists. In the case of these texts, then, we have every reason to conclude, with Judith Lieu, that “pseudonymity of author most naturally carries with it pseudonymity of audience and hence of the situation implied.”4
Authors can, of course, utilize and adapt real historical elements toward this end. They can place the invented character in conversation with people known to have existed or in relation to events that really occurred. But even then, they would be partly fictionalizing those additional elements since those audiences did not have a real relationship or past experiences with the fictional character and since those situations did not actually incorporate them. To place the implied author in relation to these elements, one has to tailor, modify, or reconfigure the audiences and situations to accommodate their new ties to the fictional author, for example, by suggesting (implicit or explicit) personal histories for those audiences or new past experiences for them. Put another way, any attempt to insert a fictional author into a historical context will necessarily transform or displace parts of that context.
In the end, then, there is no way to construct a fictional implied author for a letter without constructing at least a partially fictionalized audience and situation inside the text. All of this, of course, introduces a profound challenge to the task of utilizing the Epistles of John in historical reconstruction. Historians might suppose that some elements of the Epistles may be modeled on historical persons and situations. But it is extremely difficult for the historian to determine where the fictionalization of these elements begins and ends. One can no longer take them at face value.
4.2 The Invented Community
The idea that the Epistles are partly fictionalized sources threatens any attempt to extract history from the letters. But it is especially problematic for the most popular use of the Epistles, specifically, the use of the Epistles to reconstruct the existence and shape of the Johannine Community. The reason, often overlooked by those who do not specialize in the Johannine literature, is that the scholarly construction of the Johannine Community is almost entirely dependent on the Epistles. If the Epistles are no longer appropriate sources for history, then scholars lose their firmest basis for reconstructing that community.
4.2.1 The Epistles and the Community
Today, many scholars understand, in the words of Chris Seglenieks, that “the Gospel [of John] alone cannot viably be used to reconstruct a community behind the text.”5 The Gospel offers no direct access to a Johannine Community, if one ever existed. It never directly references such a group, and it never directly represents its shape or internal constitution.6
Instead, as Christopher Porter writes, “the place where we are on firmer ground for such a community is not within the Gospel, but rather within … the Johannine Epistles.”7 Craig Blomberg agrees: “the clearest case for a specific initial community” lies in the Epistles, which are “clearly directed at a cluster of churches with an identifiable set of locally generated problems.”8 Only the Epistles speak of interrelated but distinct “churches” or “houses” (3 John 6, 9–10; 2 John 10), whose leaders maintain contact through letters, messengers, and personal visits (3 John 9–10). According to the Epistles, these churches “have heard” a common body of “teaching” – one consistent with the unique ideas of the Gospel of John, and thus “Johannine” in its orientation (2 John 5–6, 9–10; 1 John 2:7; 3:11; cf. John 13:34). Only the Epistles envision an ongoing life for these churches, including ruptures and interpersonal disputes resulting in rival factions (1 John 2:18–19; 2 John 7, 10; 3 John 9). And only the Epistles provide the names of individual parties in these disputes – “Gaius,” “Diotrephes,” and “Demetrius” (3 John 1, 9, 12). Given this rich data, Martinus de Boer concludes: “whatever one may say about the Gospel, the Epistles have for many provided a firm foundation for the conclusion that there was a Johannine community.”9 Even Adele Reinhartz – a critic of the hypothesis – concedes that “the letters of John seem to demand the existence of such a community.”10
Beneath these arguments, however, lies a crucial, if often unstated, assumption, namely, that the narrative, in-text world of these letters at least roughly approximates the external world in which they were produced. Working from this assumption, scholars assume a one-to-one correspondence between all elements in the text and all elements in the real world. The in-text network of house churches represents a real network of house churches, the in-text “Gaius” represents a real Gaius, the in-text “Diotrephes” stands in for a historical Diotrephes, and so forth. But as we have seen, the Epistles are the kind of texts for which this assumption is highly problematic: texts with suspect authorial claims. When we understand these works as partly fictionalized letters, we cannot rule out the possibility that the internal world of the Epistles, including the “community” and persons they seem to attest, may be a system of verisimilitudes – literary fictions that mimic the features of genuine correspondence to give letters a plausible feel.11 What makes this especially likely in the case of the Epistles is that the community they construct is fundamentally an extension of the text’s authorial fiction. It is hard to find any independent core or substance to that community.
4.2.2 An Extension of the Authorial Fiction
Even though the Johannine Epistles are a contaminated source for historical reconstruction, one might assume that one could still reconstruct a Johannine Community from them. After all, no source from Christian antiquity is entirely reliable or free of elements of curation, fictionalization, or exaggeration, and yet, historians can still conduct careful, nuanced historical reconstruction from such sources. The reason for this, of course, is that falsely authored works can incorporate real-world elements. For example, even if the New Testament letters of 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy are pseudonymous, a real Paul existed, as did a real Christ-believing group in Thessalonica, as did a real figure named Timothy. Ostensibly, we should be able to find similar real-world elements in the Epistles of John. We might imagine that, if we extracted the invented Johannine eyewitness from the literary world of the Epistles, we would still have enough of that world intact – enough there there – to ground a historical reconstruction.12
In the case of the Epistles, however, the matter is not so simple. The in-text world of 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John is not externally attested like, for example, the figure of Timothy or the church of Ephesus. It has no independent foundation. More importantly, that in-text world is far less substantial than the world of other pseudepigraphal texts; it is not specific, detailed, or concrete enough to sustain itself. (That is, there is not much there there.) If we remove the invented eyewitness at its core, we have little to nothing left to prop up the structure. It collapses on its own.
4.2.2.1 1 John
To illustrate this point, consider how vague the in-text world of 1 John is. As a written exhortation, the epistle situates its anonymous implied author within a specific situation and in relation to some audience. And yet, the audience is even more vaguely defined than the author himself. The work envisions a group of recipients, but it does not name them. To the extent that it refers to these recipients at all, it does so under generalized terms as “children,” “little children,” “young persons,” and “fathers” (2:12–14). At best, all that can be said is that the text is addressed, at least partly, to believers (or prospective believers) since it assumes that at least some of its readers do or will “believe in the name of the Son of God” (5:13), “have been forgiven” of their “sins” (2:12), and “know the Father” (2:13–14). But the letter does not yield any information about the shape or location of these believers. (Are the recipients a single household or family? Are they constituted as a house church? Are they diffused across several house churches? Do they represent another kind of association or network? Do they represent all the Christians in an entire region? Or is this a “catholic” epistle – a work addressed to all Christians – as its reception suggests?) The circle one could draw around these individuals could be as small as a single house or as large as the Mediterranean and Near East. This is not a firm basis for reconstructing any group. The search for a Johannine Community in 1 John ends before it even begins.
Why do scholars overlook this pervasive vagueness? They do so because they assume that the epistle is authentic. In that case, they can defer the question of who these elusive readers and opponents are, falling back on the assumption that, however mysterious, these groups really existed and their identities and shape were at least known to the real sender of the text. But we cannot have that sort of certainty. In a pseudepigraphal text, there is a real chance that the in-text world may be a strictly literary world, a thin projection of the author’s imagination. Just as the epistle supplies a false author, it can complement that author with a false, stock audience.
The possibility that the author’s audience may only be a projection grows when we recognize, with Richard Bauckham, that “in no indubitably pseudepigraphal letter … are the supposed addressees and the real readers identical.”13 This is clear enough in the case of falsely authored texts produced centuries after the situations they presuppose. For example, the late ancient Letter of Jesus to Agbar was not sent to the first-century Agbar.14 Nor was the late ancient pseudo-Pauline Epistle to the Laodiceans delivered to the first-century Christ-believers of Laodicea. (The text, in any case, was written in Latin.)15 The same is also true of texts written closer in time to their supposed historical contexts. For example, the deutero-Pauline letter to the Ephesians might have surfaced anywhere in the Mediterranean; certainly, it was never delivered to the Ephesian church of Paul’s time (ca. 50 CE). In all these cases and others, one presumes that “the real author of a pseudepigraphal letter” addresses “real readers indirectly, under cover of direct address to other people.”16 In this case, we have no reason to believe that 1 John’s implied recipients, however the author constructs them, correspond in any way with the real recipients of the letter, whoever they might have been. We must sharply distinguish the constructed in-text audience from the real external audience.
The idea that John’s in-text audience may be only a projection may explain why the letter constructs its audience in such vague terms. Contrast 1 John to the pseudo-Pauline letters. Built as they are on the memory of a historical figure, letters such as Ephesians and 3 Corinthians imagine Paul addressing real, named communities with which he had contact (1 Cor. 16:8; 2 Cor. 2:1; 13:2). Similarly, the Pastoral Epistles portray Paul corresponding with his known associates (1 Cor. 4:17; 16:8). The world of 1 John, however, is far less substantial – a possible sign of its artificiality and ad-hoc nature. It is a Potemkin village, a facade designed to be only so thick as to sustain the pretense of the epistolary occasion. When we subtract the author from that occasion, the Potemkin village folds in on itself.
The text, of course, gestures towards a set of opponents – the “antichrists,” who “went out from us” (2:19) – and it coordinates these opponents with a certain set of beliefs. Presumably, these individuals correspond, however loosely, to persons or groups known to the author in the external world of the text. But once again, the text hardly helps us draw a definable circle around these figures. The author could have a highly localized problem in mind, particular to local towns, or he could be addressing an issue affecting an entire region, an adjacent region, or a wider swath of the Mediterranean basin. The number of these figures is also unclear; they might represent a few problematic actors, a few dozen, or a few thousand. Still more problematically, the most definable feature of the group is their relationship to the partly fictionalized “us” that includes the (invented) author and the group he forms with his (vague) readers (“they went out from us”). In that case, the “antichrists” are at least partly fictionalized themselves.
In short, to produce anything like a coherent image of the Johannine Community from 1 John, scholars must assume the text’s authenticity. They must also supply some elements missing in 1 John’s depiction of this world from other sources. They must, for example, assume that 1 John represents a similar situation to the one presupposed in works such as 2 and 3 John. Only then can they introduce details from those texts into 1 John. In short, to recover a community from 1 John, scholars must produce it, filling in the pervasive lacunae in the epistle. In doing so, however, they can fail to recognize how little community is actually projected in the text. For that matter, these scholars can miss how far their image of a community is entangled with, and even dependent upon, the (invented) figure of the eyewitness. In the end, the most concrete fact about the audience of 1 John is that the audience is supposedly in contact with that eyewitness – hardly the basis for a confident reconstruction.
4.2.2.2 2 John
Many of the same problems come to the fore in any study of 2 John. Unlike the first epistle, that letter at least identifies its recipients, expressly addressing a single Christ-believing assembly under the cipher “the Elect Lady and her children” (v. 1). The text sets this group in a “house” (v. 10). Additionally, the letter concludes with greetings from “the children of your Elect Sister,” ostensibly another congregation. The Epistle, then, seems to project the existence of two congregations – an improvement over 1 John. But which two congregations? Where are they located? How far apart are they? Who is in them?
Again, we can defer these questions if the text is historical; we can always presume that the darkness of the letter hides a real group, known at least to the author. But a falsely authored letter affords us no such confidence. We could trust that the two congregations presupposed in the letter are real, and we could trust that the epistle’s portrayal of the challenges facing those congregations is historical. But to do so, we would have to place our trust in a source that may well have been composed decades after the circumstance it supposedly relates, that is constructed around an invented implied author, and whose details – including its descriptions of the challenges facing those churches – are largely patched together from language derived from 1 John. How could such a text possibly be a secure basis for reconstructing history?
For that matter, what sort of community could we reconstruct from the letter? All that we would have to show for the enormous faith we would have placed in this letter as an authentic artifact is the one-time existence of two unidentified sister “houses” tethered to no person, time, or space/geography.17 Of course, we could postulate two unidentified congregations for any corner of the Eastern Mediterranean without the epistle. Second John does not offer us a community; it offers us a mirage.
4.2.2.3 3 John
Finally, we have 3 John. At first glance, we might feel encouraged; though brief, the letter is populated with various characters, some named (“Gaius,” “Diotrephes,” and “Demetrius”; vv. 1, 9, 12) and some unnamed (“the brothers”; vv. 3, 5, 10). It also mentions a particular (albeit also unidentified) “church” (v. 9). We might imagine that these details provide us with some valuable data for reconstructing the world in which it and the earlier letters emerged. That assumption, however, begins to break down quickly.
Before we could utilize the text in historical reconstruction, we would have to reckon with its late emergence in the historical record, the evidence of its dependence on other works, and the intense doubts surrounding it in antiquity. If we wanted to use 3 John to supplement the witness of 2 John, for example – building a synthetic portrait of a community from these texts – we could not do so with confidence. We cannot know whether the author had any special access to the historical moment he recreates in this letter.18
Even if we overlook these problems, we still encounter difficulties. In many ways, the most distinctive trait of the letter – its intimate, personal character – is one of the most significant obstacles to its use in historical reconstruction. The reason is simple: the more a text is centered on a dubious figure, the more dubious every other feature of the letter becomes. The letter’s occasion is an interpersonal conflict between “the Elder” and Diotrephes (vv. 9–10). If, however, “the Elder” is fictional, then that conflict must be fictitious.19 In turn, other elements of the letter also orbit the fictional character – for example, the reports he has ostensibly received (vv. 3–4) and his intended visit (vv. 13–14).20
It is also difficult to draw any useful information about the characters mentioned in the text. It is possible that the author of 3 John knew of real ancient persons named “Gaius,” “Diotrephes,” and “Demetrius,” and that he retrieved them from the past, inserting them into the imagined scenario of the letter. But it is also possible that none of these figures existed; they might be literary inventions meant to stock the fictional scenario. Of course, even if we presume that these figures correspond to real persons from the past – albeit on no evidence at all – we would again have nothing to show for this blind faith. The text tells us nothing specific about these figures that is not articulated around the fictional sender of 3 John. It does not reveal where these figures lived or what their real significance might have been. The only things it predicates about these characters are their (invented) interactions with the text’s (invented) implied author. In short, these figures are suspended on webs of fantasy. All the specificity of 3 John is ultimately a tease, a dead end for serious historical reconstruction.
4.3 Beyond a Johannine Community, School, or Circle
The community projected in the Epistles is not only underdeveloped; it is also completely entangled with and almost entirely dependent on a dubious literary figure. When we understand this, we can understand why so many quests for the Johannine Community – so many attempts to locate and define the network of churches represented in the Epistles – have failed. The community is no more real and recoverable than the figure at its core. It is built around the invented Johannine eyewitness; he is the scaffolding, the skeleton, of the entire edifice. If the eyewitness is dubious, then the Johannine Community is dubious. And if the eyewitness collapses, the community will collapse with him.
There are, of course, real social matrices to recover behind the Epistles – real-life settings for each of these works. But we cannot use the in-text world of the Epistles as a direct, if translucent, window into those settings. We cannot lift elements of that world off the page and expect them to stand on their own. The scholarly practice of reconstructing history from the letters, at least as it has been pursued, is problematic.
If we cannot use the in-text worlds of the Epistles as a window into their origins, then where will find those origins? We will find them in a careful study of those entities we can posit for the Epistles with certainty. We have, after all, reconstructed three real authors behind the Epistles (and a fourth writer, the author of the Gospel of John). We can also posit real, initial audiences for all these works. As we begin to reconstruct these entities, however, we should be judicious and restrained in our conceptualizations of them. For one, we should avoid imposing terms such as “community,” “school,” or “circle” upon them. We should also avoid the unrestrained assumption that all these entities participated in what we would call a specifically “Johannine Christianity.”
4.3.1 Authors
There is no question that the Epistles have multiple real authors. Nevertheless, calling these authors a “community,” “school,” or “circle,” as so many scholars freely do, presses our limited evidence too far. Each of these terms suggests specific relationships between the Johannine authors that we simply cannot demonstrate from the works themselves. These terms are best avoided.
Consider, for example, the language of “community.” Although the term is notoriously vague, it typically connotes at least some social or institutional links, degrees of relationship, or interaction between parties (compare, by analogy, the Qumran Community, an early inspiration for the Johannine Community of twentieth-century scholarship). The problem is that we do not know the locations of or degrees of separation between the four canonical Johannine authors. We know that these authors read and imitated one another’s works, but since these works circulated quickly and traveled far, those authors could have done so from within different, distant locations and across many degrees of separation. The circle we might draw around these authors could be as narrow as a city or as large as the entire Christian Mediterranean and Near East. Scholars today agree that the authors of Matthew, Luke, and even John had read Mark, and yet, there is no push to configure all these writers into a single “community.” On the contrary, scholars historically identified each of these writers with a distinct “community.” On an even closer analogy to the Johannine Epistles, the authors of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and the Apocalypse of Peter all co-opt the voice of Peter, yet scholars do not configure their authors into a single “community” due to the differences between these works. So too, the subtle but real differences between the four Johannine works – differences I will continue to elaborate in later chapters – suggest the different extractions, locations, and influences of at least some of these authors.21
Calling these authors a “circle” is also problematic. Although that term is vague, the language of a “circle” connotes authors turning inward, facing one another – perhaps communicating face to face or by direct correspondence. The problem is that we do not know whether the authors of these works ever interfaced with one another. Most likely, they did not. Since disguised authorship required authors to obscure their identities, the practice was often executed in secret. It is possible, even probable, then, that these authors never met or never met as such. For that matter, the divergent reception histories of these works place these authors as far as a century and a half apart. No one would configure Paul and the author of the second-century 3 Corinthians into a single “circle.”
The term “school” is even more freighted and impossible to defend since it connotes even stronger institutional links, lineages, and/or authorizing agencies. The classic anglophone articulation of the “Johannine School” hypothesis, Alan Culpepper’s The Johannine School (1975), looked to ancient institutions such as the Academy and the Lyceum, or such lineages as the Pythagorean School, the Stoa, and the House of Hillel, as analogs for the Johannine authors. There is, however, no evidence that the Johannine authors were configured into similarly well-defined formations.22 For that matter, it is also not enough to claim that the ideological commonalities of these works configure their writers into a single “school” of thought (here more vaguely defined). For one, the ideological commonalities of these works can be overstated. As we have seen in earlier chapters, and as I will continue to demonstrate in the next chapter, the thought of 1 John has a distinctive profile vis-à-vis other Johannine works. More importantly, ideological commonalities do not necessarily configure authors into a single “school.” Many other Christian writers hailing from a wide spectrum of movements were familiar, and at least partly aligned, with the ideas expressed in the Gospel of John (e.g., Proto-Catholics, Valentinians, Sethians, and others). And writers within all these movements extensively harvested Johannine ideas and idioms in their own works, albeit within different syntheses. These reuses did not configure these groups into a single “school.”
In the end, what unites the Johannine authors is not a common extraction – which we have reason to doubt – but their common participation in a single literary practice: disguised authorship in the persona of the Johannine eyewitness. The four writers assumed a single authorial pretense, and they sustained that pretense through a common set of literary strategies, including imitation of style and verisimilitude. This is all that can be determined with certainty, and it is arguably the most critical fact about these authors that one can determine. Rather than impose unsubstantiated and overdetermined relationships onto these authors, then, it is probably best to simply conceptualize them as a series, a chain, of independent writers. We may struggle to isolate their precise (personal, geographical, and chronological) locations. We may also find it impossible to calculate the degrees of (personal, geographical, and chronological) separation between them. What we can say with confidence is that the authors of the Epistles consumed the same literature and that they had the literary expertise to augment that emerging corpus in pursuit of their individual agendas. Writing from their distinct locations, these authors participated in the same creative activity, elaborating the same historicizing fiction.
4.3.2 Audience
If we cannot construct a “community” around the authors of the Epistles, what about the real audiences of these texts? Although the in-text/implied audience of the Epistles is contrived, each of the three texts was obviously disseminated to some real, external audience(s). Could we not conceptualize one or more of those real audiences as “Johannine” – as a “Johannine Community” – especially because they were expected to interpret texts written in a “Johannine” idiom?23 Here again, we have to show judicious restraint.
We know something about the circulation of the Epistles. We know that these works circulated across a broad spectrum of real readers, readers gradually coalescing into the groups scholars reconstruct as “Proto-Catholics,” “Cerinthians,” “Valentinians,” “Sethians,” and others. We also know that readers in these groups, like readers today, were able to comprehend and use the language of these works without being part of a definably “Johannine Christianity” (similarly hailing Jesus as the Word/Logos and speaking of a new birth and an experience of dwelling in Christ). They were able to do so because of their familiarity with the ideas and language of the Gospel of John, the same foundational text the authors of the Epistles possessed and imitated.24 There is no reason to think that the initial, intended audiences of the Epistles were any different. Wherever we plot each of these audiences across the second and/or third centuries, they might as well have hailed from one of the many, varied, known Christianities already consuming the Gospel of John and integrating its idioms into their own religious expressions.
The fact that the Epistles may seem more consistently “Johannine” in their language than other (e.g., Valentinian or Proto-Catholic) works does not necessarily mean that they stem from a pure “Johannine” Christianity. This consistency is easily overstated. (As we have seen, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John have divergent linguistic and ideological traits.) More importantly, this consistency of style already has an obvious explanation; it reflects the fact that the Epistles, unlike other contemporary works, participate in the same pseudepigraphal practice. They co-opt the persona of the Gospel’s narrator and imitate his style. In short, any attempt to construct any of the Epistles as the product of a pure “Johannine Christianity” begs evidence that we simply do not have and will not have. And we should never posit an entire hypothetical entity such as “Johannine Christianity” in the absence of evidence.25
We are also on tenuous ground if we assume that these real audiences represented a single community. Not surprisingly, studies that make this assumption generally brush past the challenge of dating these texts – a necessary first step in determining whether and how the implied audiences of these three Epistles should be related to one another. And yet, the later we can potentially date 2 and 3 John, the less likely it is that the Epistles were written within a single, definable group such as a living “Johannine Christianity.” (Otherwise, we would be hard-pressed to explain why no contemporary author mentions this supposedly enduring and influential group.)26 Many studies that assume that the Epistles come from a single community also omit any mention of the uneven reception history of these texts, bypassing ancient and modern doubts over the origins and pedigrees of 2 and/or 3 John, and conveniently so.27 If the Johannine Epistles were all produced and packaged together within the same community around the same time, we are hard-pressed to explain why these texts had such profoundly divergent reception histories. Finally, the same studies also downplay the significant linguistic differences between the letters. In short, these studies circumvent the preliminary, foundational basis for any historical contextualization of these works.
There are real audiences to find behind each of the Johannine texts. To find them, we should avoid constraining ourselves to a single hypothesis of their nature and shape. We should entertain a wider spectrum of potential audiences for these epistles, especially those audiences whose existence is documented. And we should also integrate a broader range of data in our reconstructions than many studies currently do, even if that data suggests a more complex and diverse origin for these works.
4.4 Conclusion
The Epistles of John are falsely authored works written in the persona of an invented figure. As I have argued in this chapter, this insight necessarily impacts how one can utilize these texts in historical research. When a letter is articulated around a fictionalized sender, one can no longer assume that the in-text world of that letter maps directly onto the work’s external reality. In pseudo-historical letters, the boundaries of reality and unreality are irretrievably blurred. Consequently, attempts to reconstruct history from the in-text worlds of the Epistles of John are definitively compromised and ultimately untenable.
Of course, even if 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John contain fictionalized elements, a real external history lurks behind each of these works. The Epistles were written by real authors seeking to communicate to real audiences within real situations. Although these texts conceal and disguise those real audiences and situations, providing us with only indirect, limited, and problematic access to them, they are nonetheless artifacts of a real past. As I have argued here, we are poised to reconstruct that past from the more stable data available to us in each epistle. Those data include the distinct ideological positions we can reconstruct for each author as well as the distinct intellectual and literary influences shaping their thinking. They also include the distinctive linguistic features of each text, including instances in which each author breaks from the style of earlier Johannine works and unconsciously reverts to his natural speech style.
Even as one research horizon slips out of view, then, another opens up. The conclusion that 1, 2, and 3 John are falsely authored works is not the end of serious historical inquiry into these texts. Instead, it is the beginning of a new and more exciting inquiry, one open to wider possibilities for the origins, provenances, and aims of each text. In that new inquiry, we can set out to recover the true social matrices – even the multiple social matrices – in which these texts were produced. We can coordinate each text with a broader set of historical situations, intellectual currents, and geographical settings than earlier studies could have ever entertained, bound as they were to the image of a single Johannine Community. We can also set these texts in dialogue with a broader sampling of ancient literature than previous scholars have considered, exploring possible links between the Epistles and the wide variety of pseudo-historical and fictional literary works surviving from Greco-Roman antiquity. The rich and varied landscape of ancient Christianity opens up before us and, with it, the hidden worlds of three disguised writers: the real authors of 1, 2, and 3 John.
