The New Testament contains four works bearing the name “John” and known to contemporary scholars as the “Johannine literature.”1 By far, the best known is the Gospel of John, one of the earliest accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus. Nestled toward the back of Christian Bibles, however, are three brief works sharing the same name as the Gospel: a set of epistles, or letters, which later scribes entitled “1 John,” “2 John,” and “3 John.”2
As suggested by the names of these works, early Christians attributed these to the same author as the Gospel, an author they had come to identify or conflate with a known disciple of Jesus: John, the son of Zebedee. Our earliest references to these epistles, dating to the second through the fourth centuries, embrace or at least attest to this tradition. Nevertheless, by the mid-twentieth century, scholars began to doubt that these texts shared a common author. They recognized subtle differences between these works – differences that pointed to the activity of different hands in the collection. Today, most credit the Gospel and Epistles of John to at least two, if not more, writers.3
The case for the separate origins and authorship of these works does not and should not rest on a single line of evidence. It is, instead, a cumulative case resting on the correlation of several features of the texts. That case incorporates two external lines of evidence: (a) the different circulation histories of these texts and (b) the fact that ancient Christians questioned the authenticity of some of them. It is also rooted in two internal features of the texts, specifically: (c) differences in thought and (d) differences in vocabulary and diction. In this chapter, I will lay out the data that make it unlikely that one author produced all four works – the faint fingerprints of different hands.
1.1 External Evidence
The first clue that the Gospel and Epistles of John do not share a common author is the fact that the texts share an uneven and problematic reception history. From the evidence that survives, it is clear that John was already circulating among readers by the early second century. But as R. Alan Culpepper observes, “each of the Epistles followed a different path toward its ultimate reception as an apostolic writing.”4 References to 1 John appear in texts dating to the early second century. By contrast, 2 John is not attested until the late second century, and 3 John does not enter the historical record until the late second or early third centuries CE. More problematically, when the latter two epistles surface, they do so as a focus of intense scrutiny by many early Christians, who doubted their authenticity for hundreds of years.
1.1.1 The Reception of the Gospel
We do not know precisely when the author of the Gospel introduced his text into circulation, though it is difficult to assign the text a date later than the early second century. The Gospel seems to have been written before Papias’ now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, commonly dated to c. 125 or 130.5 Admittedly, the very few surviving fragments of the Exposition do not demonstrate that Papias knew or used the Gospel of John.6 Nevertheless, Eusebius mentions that Papias’ work incorporated “testimonies from the first Epistle of John and from the first [Epistle] of Peter likewise.”7 If, as I will argue in Chapter 2, there is good evidence that 1 John was dependent upon the Gospel, then John predates Papias’ work.8 In turn, perhaps the earliest known quotation from John appears in the works of Ignatius of Antioch, though scholars dispute the dating and even authenticity of these letters.9
More secure attestations of John appear in works dating to the mid to late second century. Justin Martyr (d. c. 165) seems to condense John 3:3, 5 in his First Apology.10 There is ample evidence that the Gospel of John was a significant inspiration for the Gnostic Apocryphon of John and the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, sources known to Irenaeus in the late second century. Irenaeus also references a now-lost commentary on John by the Valentinian writer Ptolemy.11 Ultimately, however, the first extant mentions of the Gospel appear in the writings of Irenaeus himself.12
1.1.2 The Reception of 1 John
All the available evidence suggests that 1 John also emerged by the early second century. As we have already seen, Eusebius says that Papias’ Exposition incorporated “testimonies from the first Epistle of John.”13 One also finds statements similar to 1 John in a few texts commonly dated to the second century, though it is not always clear if these texts allude to 1 John specifically since that text has significant linguistic overlap with the Gospel and 2 John.14 Once again, then, our first definitive reference to the work appears in the writings of Irenaeus. In the third book of his Against the Heresies, Irenaeus condemns those who deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus as “antichrists,” citing the words that “John, the disciple of the Lord” “testifies to us in his epistle” (i.e., 1 John 2:18–19, 21–22).15 Later in the same discussion, he cites another condemnation of the “antichrists” in 1 John (4:1–3) as the words of Jesus’ “disciple” “in the epistle.”16
As far as we can tell, 1 John enjoyed a mostly stable and positive reception – certainly a more stable one than 2 and 3 John. Nevertheless, some Christians questioned its authenticity. The fifth-century theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia is said to have rejected every one of the so-called Catholic Epistles, including 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John.17 And in his ninth-century biblical commentaries, the Church of the East bishop Ishoʿdad of Merv claims that though some patristic writers affirmed that the three Catholic Epistles of James, 1 Peter, and 1 John “are by the Apostles … others say they are not so at all, because their words do not square with those of the Apostles.”18 Ishoʿdad himself, in turn, would summarily reject the apostolic authorship of 1 John:
About this epistle also many have erred, [supposing] that it is John, from the title which is attached and inscribed upon it; both in the beginning and the composition of the discourse, which its author borrows; yet they ought to have searched and found out how much humbler the idea and disposition and authority of the words of this letter are than the sound words of the Evangelist …19
1.1.3 The Reception of 2 and 3 John
Unlike the Gospel of John and 1 John, no clear trace of 2 John appears in the historical record until the last quarter of the second century. The first writer to cite or mention the text is Irenaeus, who does both. In one place, he expressly attributes the letter to “John, the disciple of the Lord.”20 In another place, he confuses or conflates the letter’s contents with the contents of 1 John. In a section quoting multiple times from the epistles, Irenaeus cites 1 John, then introduces a line from 2 John as “words of the aforementioned epistle” immediately before providing a quote from 1 John, which he credits “again” to “the epistle.”21 Irenaeus never quotes from 3 John, which may indicate that he did know that letter.
Something similar holds for Clement of Alexandria, writing around the turn of the third century. In his extant writings, Clement speaks of 1 John as “the greater epistle” of John, suggesting his knowledge of at least one shorter epistle.22 No mentions of 2 or 3 John appear in his surviving works, but fragments of Clement’s Outlines (Hypotyposes) preserved in a sixth-century Latin translation indicate that he knew and utilized 2 John – and perhaps only 2 John. Discussing the Latin translation, Cassiodorus reports that Clement commented on only four catholic epistles in the Outlines. In turn, he reproduces comments from Clement on precisely four epistles: 1 Peter, Jude, 1 John, and 2 John.23
Other lines of evidence support the possibility that 1 and 2 John once circulated together without 3 John. Although there are issues with its text, the only surviving copy of the Muratorian Fragment indicates that “two [epistles] by John mentioned above are retained in the Catholic [Church].”24 References to 1 and 2 John alone also appear in writings from Lucifer of Cagliari (d. ca. 371) and Priscillan (d. 385) as well as the Codex Speculum.25 Additionally, several extant manuscripts support the possibility that 1 and 2 John once circulated together without 3 John. In the Latin tradition, the seventh-century Leon Palimpsest (MS 67 or “l”) seems to rely on a different source text for 1 and 2 John than it does for 3 John.26 Likewise, the Old Latin introduces 2 John 1 as a work of “John the Elder” (“Iohannes senior”) but does not apply similar language to 3 John 1.27
Instead, the first clear traces of a “third” letter surface extremely late, specifically, in the fourth century CE. The letter appears for the first time in the great fourth-century codices: Codex Sinaiticus (א) and Codex Vaticanus (B). It is also in the fourth century that we find the first extant quotations of the letter. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the text was already in circulation in the early third century. In his Church History, Eusebius reproduces quotations from two lost works by Origen (d. ca. 254) and Dionysius of Alexandria (d. ca. 264) that discuss a “third epistle.”28 Those references are interesting as the first mentions of the complete set of Johannine letters, but they are even more valuable as our first indications that 2 and 3 John were objects of intense criticism and suspicion in antiquity – a point that deserves closer examination.
1.1.3.1 Dispute over 2 and 3 John
As far as we know, the earliest work to have discussed the reception of the letters of 2 and 3 John is Origen of Alexandria’s Expositions on the Gospel According to John. Today, we possess only fragments of that work. One such fragment – the fragment of interest to us – appears in Eusebius’ Church History and discusses the works of the apostle John:
And in the fifth volume of his Expositions on the Gospel according to John, the same person [Origen] says this with reference to the epistles of the apostles: “But he who was made sufficient to become a minister of the new covenant … even Paul … did not so much as write to all the churches that he taught; and even to those to which he wrote he sent but a few lines. And Peter, on whom the Church of Christ is built, against which the gates of Hades shall not prevail, has left one acknowledged epistle, and it may be a second also; for it is doubted. Why need I speak of him who leaned on Jesus’ breast, John, who has left behind one Gospel, confessing that he could write so many that even the world itself could not contain them; and he wrote also the Apocalypse, being ordered to keep silence and not to write the voice of seven thunders? He has left also an epistle of a very few lines, and it may be, a second and a third; for not all say these are genuine. Only, the two of them together are not a hundred lines long.”29
If the quotation is Origen’s own, it is remarkable as (a) our earliest reference to 3 John, (b) our earliest reference to the complete set of three Johannine epistles, and (c) our first, clear evidence that not all third-century Christians regarded 2 and 3 John as “genuine” works. Because we do not possess Origen’s original discussion, however, we do not know whether Eusebius has reshaped or interpolated any part of this material. (James Barker, for one, speculates that the reference to 2 and 3 John may be a gloss by Eusebius.)30
The quotation’s distinction between “genuine” (γνησίους) and “doubted” (ἀμφιβάλλεται) works follows the language of Hellenistic authenticity criticism (Echtheitskritik) – the ancient field of study devoted to determining whether texts were wrongly or falsely attributed to specific authors. Evidently, some early Christians questioned the pedigrees of 2 and 3 John, holding them under suspicion as inauthentic works and later interlopers into the body of apostolic literature. One can safely assume that these suspicions impacted Origen since he never once cites 2 and 3 John in his voluminous literary output. Perhaps not coincidentally, other contemporaries of Origen also fail to cite either of the shorter Johannines, including the Latin authors Tertullian and Cyprian.
An echo of this dispute appears in our next extant discussion of 3 John, an authenticity-critical discussion of Revelation penned by the third-century writer Dionysius of Alexandria and reproduced by Eusebius.31 When enumerating the works of John, “the son of Zebedee,” within a larger argument against the Johannine authorship of Revelation, Dionysius lists only “the Gospel” and a singular “Epistle.” As Eusebius quotes him:
We should not readily agree that [the author of the Apocalypse] was the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, whose are the Gospel entitled “According to John” and the Catholic Epistle. For I form my judgment from the character of each and from the nature of the language and from what is known as the general construction of the book that [the John therein mentioned] is not the same. For the evangelist nowhere adds his name, nor yet proclaims himself, throughout either the Gospel or the Epistle [οὔτε διὰ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου οὔτε διὰ τῆς ἐπιστολῆς].32
In turn, when Dionysius references 2 and 3 John in a later aside, he does so in terms that stop short of accepting their authenticity:
Then lower down [Dionysius] again speaks thus. “… But the evangelist did not write his name even at the beginning of the Catholic Epistle, but without anything superfluous began with the mystery itself of the divine revelation: ‘That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes.’ It was in respect of this revelation that the Lord also called Peter blessed, saying: ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but my heavenly Father.’ Nay not even in the second and third extant epistles bearing ‘John,’ although they are short, is John set forth by name [ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ φερομένῃ Ἰωάννου καὶ τρίτῃ, καίτοι βραχείαις οὔσαις ἐπιστολαῖς, ὁ Ἰωάννης ὀνομαστὶ πρόκειται]; but he has written ‘the elder,’ without giving his name.”33
If these words are Dionysius’ own and not a gloss by Eusebius, then Dionysius knew 2 and 3 John.34 When Dionysius speaks of these shorter letters, however, he does so only in passing, “as a parenthesis.”35 And whereas he expressly calls 1 John an epistle “of” John, he calls 2 and 3 John merely “the second and third bearing [φερομένῃ] ‘John’” – that is, given the title “John.” This subtle distinction may indicate that Dionysius questioned the attribution of 2 and 3 John.36
This controversy over 2 and 3 John continued deep into late antiquity. In a discussion also drawing on the categories of Hellenistic authenticity criticism, Eusebius identifies 1 John among the “accepted” (ὁμολογουμένοι) texts and 2 and 3 John among those “known” (γνωρίμοι) but “disputed” or “spoken against” (ἀντιλεγομένοι) by Christians in the fourth century CE:
At this point it seems reasonable to summarize the writings of the New Testament which have been quoted. In the first place should be put the holy tetrad of the Gospels. To them follows the writing of the Acts of the Apostles. After this should be reckoned the Epistles of Paul. Following them the Epistle of John called the first, and in the same way should be recognized the Epistle of Peter. In addition to these should be put, if it seem desirable, the Revelation of John, the arguments concerning which we will expound at the proper time. These belong to the Recognized Books [καὶ ταῦτα μὲν ἐν ὁμολογουμένοις]. Of the Disputed Books [τῶν δ’ ἀντιλεγομένων] which are nevertheless known to most are the Epistle called of James, that of Jude, the second Epistle of Peter, and the so-called second and third Epistles of John, which may be the work of the evangelist or of some other with the same name.37
In another place, Eusebius clarifies that Christians who disputed specific texts did not read them publicly in their churches.38
Even sixth-century sources register continued divisions over the status of 2 and 3 John. In his Topographia Christiana, Cosmas Indicopleustes indicates that “the Church from the first has held the Catholic Epistles to be doubtful,” outlining the range of opinions in his day:
In fact most of the authorities deny that these Epistles were written by the Apostles, but assign them to some other authors – simple Presbyters … But others receive also the Epistle of James along with these two [the first Epistle of Peter and the first of John] while others receive them all. Among the Syrians, however, none are found except only the three already mentioned, namely, the Epistle of James and that of Peter and that of John – while the others do not even find a place among them. The perfect Christian ought not therefore to depend upon books that are doubtful, seeing that those which have been admitted into the Canon, and which are commonly acknowledged, suffice to declare everything concerning both the heavens and the earth and the elements and the whole scheme of Christian doctrine.39
Cosmas’ note that “the Syrians” do not “find a place” for 2 and 3 John suits what we know of the evolution of the Syriac Bible. The Greek New Testament was translated into Syriac at least once before the fourth century – a translation known as the “Old Syriac” (Vetus Syra). We possess only two manuscripts of this translation, the Curetonian and the Sinaitic Syriac, each of which contains only the four Gospels. Nevertheless, scholars agree that the Old Syriac also incorporated Acts and the Pauline epistles since quotations of these texts with renderings different from those in the later Peshitta version survive in the writings of early Syriac writers, including Aphrahat and Ephrem. By contrast, no such quotations exist for the Catholic Epistles or Revelation, indicating that these books – including all three Johannine epistles – “were not accepted as canonical by the early Syriac-speaking Church.” This situation shifted in the fifth century when the Peshitta itself emerged. In its earliest form, the Peshitta contained three, but only three, Catholic epistles: James, 1 Peter, and 1 John.40 As Lieu notes, “the fact that 2 and 3 John were not translated into Syriac at the same time as 1 John” indicates that the translation surfaced in “a time and place when they were not known or were rejected.”41 Copies of the Peshitta with this smaller, twenty-two-book New Testament survived into the medieval period among East Syriac Christians. At a later time, the smaller Johannine letters also found a place in the Syriac Bible. In the sixth and seventh centuries, two miaphysite bishops, Philoxenus of Mabbug and Thomas of Harqel, undertook new translations, hoping to bring the then-extant Syriac texts in line with contemporary Greek manuscripts. Their versions, the Philoxenian (508) and the Harklean (616), incorporated all the remaining Catholic epistles in their Greek models, including 2 and 3 John. Consequently, copies of both letters were inserted into West Syriac recensions of the Peshitta.
Evidence of these controversies is also littered across early lists of accepted or canonical books from other regions. As we have seen, the only surviving copy of the Muratorian Fragment (possibly 4th c.) accepts not three but only “two of the above-mentioned (or, bearing the name of) John.”42 One of these must be 1 John as the fragment expressly cites 1 John 1:1–3 as the words of “John … in his epistles.”43 The other is presumably 2 John. A Western text, the African Cheltenham or Mommsen List (ca. 360), contains a scribal correction under the main text indicating that of the Epistles of John, not three but “one only” (una sola) should be regarded as canonical.44 The pseudepigraphal Canon of Amphilochius of Iconium indicates that although some Christians believe an “unfalsifiable canon of divinely inspired scriptures” should be limited to “one” epistle of John, others admit “three” of John.45 Likewise, Pseudo-Chrysostom’s Synopsis of Sacred Scripture lists only 1 John.46
Finally, a sixth-century writer, Oecumenius, gives us a window into what later became a developed body of arguments marshaled against the idea that 2 and 3 John were penned by the same author as 1 John:
There are some people who think that this and the following letter are not by John the beloved disciple but by someone else of the same name. The reasons they give for this are that in both letters he describes himself as the elder and addresses a single correspondent (either the Elect Lady as here, or Gaius), which is not the case in the Catholic Epistle (1 John). Moreover, he starts with a personal introduction in both these letters, which is missing from 1 John. In answer to these points we would say that he did not put an introduction in his first letter because he was writing neither to a particular church nor to a specific individual. The fact that he calls himself an elder rather than an apostle may be due to the fact that he was not the first missionary to preach the gospel in Asia Minor. There he followed Paul, but unlike his predecessor, who merely passed through, John remained in the province and ministered directly to the local people. Nor did he refer to himself as a slave of Christ because as the beloved disciple he had the confidence that he had gone beyond the fear of slavery.47
These arguments may not explain the reasons why Christians were initially skeptical of these works, but they give us a clear sense of how that skepticism was defended in later centuries.
1.1.3.2 Explaining the Absence
Our earliest surviving references to the Gospel of John and 1 John date to the early second century. The shorter texts, however, do not surface until much later – 2 John in the second half of the second century and 3 John no earlier than the third century – and they were subject to more intense criticism than the first two. For scholars who assume a first-century dating for all three texts, this staggered attestation and uneven reception require special explanations.
The most popular explanation for the late introduction of 2 and 3 John into the historical record is that they were too unremarkable to be cited. Klaus Wengst writes that any early silence concerning the letters “is certainly due to the fact that they offer little quotable in their brevity.”48 In the same vein, a recent introduction to the Gospel and Letters of John finds it “unsurprising, given the brevity of the two other letters … that they are not used by the church in the second century or even into the third century.”49 As popular as this explanation is, however, it passes over a crucial fact about the reception of these texts. The epistles we know as 2 and 3 John are not merely absent from the historical record; they were also suspected of being spurious works. Raymond Brown is correct:
If the only problem were lack of citation by church writers, one could rightly argue that II and III John are the shortest works in the NT and that there would have been little occasion to cite them. But more is involved; for when II and III John are mentioned in the third and fourth centuries, there is marked doubt about them.50
One must explain the origins of that deep and persistent opposition.
In their attempts to explain that opposition, some scholars propose that 2 and 3 John faced skepticism because they do not expressly or clearly position themselves as letters by an apostle. Raymond Brown, for one, speculates that although Christians embraced the Gospel of John and 1 John as the work of an apostle, 2 and 3 John are addressed from “the Elder/Presbyter” – a title that many ancient Christians would not have recognized as an appropriate title for an apostle. In his view, this “lack of apostolic authorship constituted a serious obstacle to the acceptance of the shorter Epistles as Scripture.”51 The problem is that our earliest sources do not neatly map onto this hypothesis. As we have seen, the earliest writers who seem to know and reject 2 and 3 John, Origen and Dionysius, assume that the letters position themselves as works by the apostle John. Conversely, the first authors to credit 2 and 3 John to a different hand than 1 John, namely, Eusebius and Jerome, accept the text as canonical. More problematically still, Brown’s proposal cannot explain why 2 John had a somewhat more positive reception than 3 John. If the term “Elder/Presbyter” in 2 and 3 John were the primary obstacle to their acceptance, then one would expect both letters to come under the same scrutiny. Instead, as we have seen, 2 John enters the historical record several decades earlier than 3 John, and it seems to have circulated in some circles that were negative towards 3 John.
Admittedly, Brown anticipates this second objection in his argumentation. To counter it, he adds a further motive for the rejection of 3 John, arguing that it might have been excluded from canonical lists since it was not “addressed to a church” like 2 John but “addressed to an individual.”52 The fact that Brown’s model requires multiple, stacked speculations speaks to its inelegance. More to the point, the explanation makes little sense as the same early sources that affirm 2 John but not 3 John – for example, the writings of Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria as well as the Muratorian Fragment – recognize other personal letters in the New Testament, such as Philemon, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus.53 Although later Christians supported their doubts about 2 and 3 John with arguments similar to Brown’s, these reasons are unlikely to be the core reason for the marginalization of these works.
1.1.3.3 A More Compelling Explanation
In the end, there is a more straightforward explanation for the problems surrounding 2 and 3 John – frankly, an explanation consistent with attested early Christian views toward the letters. The letters of 2 and 3 John may be works by different hands from those that penned the longer Johannine works. This explanation satisfyingly explains both the absence of these works for some time and the disputes that surrounded them for centuries. The two letters might not have been written until a much later date than John and 1 John, and Christians might have been skeptical of these letters precisely because of their late appearance, if not also because of other suspicious features.
1.2 Internal Evidence
The external evidence offers us reason to suspect that the Gospel of John and at least some of the Epistles emerged in different contexts, as works of various hands. This suspicion grows when we examine the letters closely. As Raimo Hakola writes, “the majority of scholars nowadays think that the gospel and the epistles were not written by a single hand” since “despite the similarities in the style and in theology, there are also marked differences which suggest that the gospel and the epistles have emerged in different situations …”54
In isolation, differences such as these do not necessarily indicate multiple authorship. One could attribute any single divergence between texts to various factors such as different genres, different situations, a development in the author’s thought, or even the declining abilities of an aging author. But it is precisely the correlation of these differences with one another and with the reception history outlined above that suggests something more is at play. Each difference, stacked upon the previous one, makes it less and less likely that these texts reflect a single mind.
1.2.1 John and 1 John
Since John and 1 John emerge at roughly the same point in the historical record – the early second century CE – one might be inclined to assign both texts to a single author. Through the first half of the twentieth century, however, scholars began documenting subtle but demonstrable differences in the language of the two texts. They also noticed essential divergences in the thought world of the two. Mapping those differences lends weight to the idea that different writers penned the two texts.
1.2.1.1 Divergences in Language
John and 1 John have impressive continuities in their language. They take up common idioms and even rely on similar rhetorical devices. Nevertheless, the two also have distinct linguistic profiles, including different levels of grammatical clarity, different preferred syntactical constructions, and different idioms. These differences undermine the idea that the Gospel and 1 John share a common author.
Clarity of Expression
Far and away, the most startling and global contrast between the Gospel and 1 John is a linguistic one. The Gospel has a relatively smooth and accessible Greek style. The Epistle, by contrast, is notoriously dense with grammatical issues, including a convoluted and tortured syntax, non-sequiturs, confusing arguments, and ambiguities that create a minefield of interpretive problems. David Rensberger, for one, speaks of “the frustratingly obscure syntax so common in 1 John.”55 Similarly, John Painter writes that the “syntax” of the epistle “is so unclear that problems confront the reader in almost every verse.”56 Judith Lieu observes that “a lack of grammatical precision” is “characteristic of the author’s style.”57 And Rudolf Bultmann can find examples of syntax that are “most difficult, indeed almost incomprehensible.”58 The problems begin in the opening lines of the text – a passage called “a grammatical tangle” (C. H. Dodd), a “morass” and “scramble,” which “borders on incongruence” (Robert Kysar), and an example of “incoherence” with an “undeniable crudity of expression” (James L. Houlden).59
For Raymond Brown, the differences between the Gospel and 1 John are so pervasive and palpable that they suggest the two were composed by different hands:
I am persuaded that there is a marked difference between the two works in terms of clarity of expression. Having translated both GJohn and I John, I found the first relatively simple, while the obscurity of the second was infuriating … If one studies my notes (following the units of text in the commentary) wherein I point out the number of scholars divided over the grammar and meaning of almost every verse in I John, one might well conclude that, simply from the viewpoint of translating correctly, there are more difficulties in any two chapters of I John than in the whole of the much longer John … the greater obscurity of the Epistles becomes an argument for difference of authorship.60
Similarly, John Painter remarks, “the author of 1 John lacks the fundamental literary skills manifest in the Gospel” – an issue that “does not make common authorship probable.”61 As a close reader of John and 1 John, I could not agree more.
Rhetorical Questions
Beyond the more confused language of 1 John vis-à-vis the Gospel, scholars detect minor differences in the rhetoric of each text. Perhaps the most telling is the use of rhetorical questions to advance argumentation. As Dodd notes, rhetorical questions are “common in the Greek philosophical Diatribé, as also in the Epistles of Paul and James.”62 They are also a favorite device of the author of 1 John; four examples appear in the letter, as brief as it is:
Who is the liar …? (2:22)
And why did he murder him? (3:12)
Who is it that overcomes the world? (5:5)
Strikingly, no rhetorical questions are used to advance argumentation in John’s much more extensive discourse material.63 Their presence in 1 John betrays an author with a subtly different rhetorical style.
Vocabulary
Another noted divergence between the Gospel and 1 John concerns their vocabulary. Scholars have long noted that 1 John foregrounds many terms that do not appear in the Gospel. Some unique expressions encode ideas that set the epistle apart from the Gospel, many of which we will discuss below (e.g., “atonement/expiation” [ἱλασμός; 2:2; 4:10], “antichrist” [ἀντίχριστος; 2:18], “last hour” [ἐσχάτη ὥρα; 2:18], “confess sins” [ὁμολογῶμεν τὰς ἁμαρτίας; 1:9]). A few others encode notions found in the Gospel but, curiously, under different terms encountered in other early Christian texts. These include: “Spirit of God” (πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ; 4:2) and “day of judgment” (ἡμέρᾳ τῆς κρίσεως; 4:17). Divergences such as these further confirm that the author of 1 John is a different person from the author of the Gospel.
1.2.1.2 Different Ideas
The case for distinguishing the authors of John and 1 John is not one-dimensional. Beyond the linguistic and stylistic divergences identified above, scholars also recognize critical differences in the ideas communicated in both texts. Most prominently, the epistle assumes future-eschatological ideas shared with other early Christian traditions but missing from John (e.g., the coming of “antichrists”). One can also discern differences in the way the texts construct the “new commandment,” Jesus’ death, the Spirit, and “light” and “darkness” symbolism. These ideas indicate other streams of influence and a different mind than one can detect in the Gospel.
Coming “Antichrists”
One of the most prominent, even signature, themes of the Epistles of John is the coming of “antichrist.” The concept is elaborated multiple times in 1 John (2:18–23; 4:1–6), and it is one of the few ideas taken up in the very compressed space of 2 John (v. 7). In the former, the coming of “antichrist” is presented as an established or known point of eschatological expectation, one with which the text’s readers are supposed to be familiar. In turn, both 1 and 2 John articulate a single understanding of “antichrist.” Each claims that this expectation has been fulfilled not in a single person but in the manifestation of the one “spirit of antichrist” in many individuals:
… you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come …
For many deceivers have gone out into the world – those who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh – this is the deceiver and the antichrist. (2 John 7)
By contrast, the Gospel never uses the term “antichrist.” More problematically, it is difficult to map the Epistles’ concept of an “antichrist” onto the Gospel; no single text in that work anticipates the future emergence of a single or multiple human antichrists.64 For that matter, the Gospel also contains no clear notion of a single “spirit of antichrist” or “spirit of error” that inhabits “the world” as a counterpart to “the spirit of truth” as 1 John does (1 John 4:3, 4, 6; cf. John 14:16–17; 16:13). As Hakola correctly observes, one must look to other streams of influence for these notions:
The idea that there are different spiritual beings in the world that act either on the side of God or against God has clear parallels in Jewish apocalyptic and dualistic thinking. The clearest parallels to the juxtaposition of the Spirit of truth and the Spirit of error are found in the doctrine of the two spirits in the Qumran Community Rule (1QS III, 7–9) and in The Testament of Judah (20:1; cf. also T. Sim. 2:7; T. Jud. 19:4; T. Levi 3:3). The pattern of thought appearing in these sources forms a much closer background to 1 John 4:1–6 than the more refined concept of the Spirit-Paraclete found in Jesus’ farewell speeches in the gospel.65
“Last Hour”
Interwoven with the “antichrist” theme is a second prominent eschatological concept unique to 1 John: the “last hour.” Once again, the epistle suggests its readers’ familiarity with this point of eschatological speculation. It also clearly defines its parameters; according to the text, the signature sign of the arrival of “the last hour” is the “coming” of the “antichrist” or “antichrists”: “Children, it is the last hour … now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour” (2:18).
Here again, 1 John assumes a developed concept absent from the Gospel. The term “last hour” does not appear in the Gospel. The text utilizes two tantalizingly similar idioms; it speaks of “the hour” of Jesus’ departure, which is defined by the coming of the Spirit (2:4; 4:21, 23; 5:25, 28–29; 7:30; 8:20; 12:23; 16:2–4, 25, 32; 17:1), and it also references “the last day” (6:39–40, 44, 54; 11:24; 12:48). Nevertheless, the text does not expressly relate these concepts or otherwise link vocabularies of the “last” and “hour.” For that matter, it is not clear how one could map any concept in the Gospel onto the “last hour” since the last hour’s defining characteristic – the future emergence of the “antichrist” – presupposes another idea that is absent from the Gospel. In the end, then, the “last hour” is vaguely similar to expressions the Gospel uses but is not identifiable with any of them. It is the sort of expression an author might use who wants to evoke, imitate, or adapt the language of the Gospel, albeit in less careful ways or to communicate a distinct concept.
“Coming” and “Manifestation”
In 1 John, the “last hour” has a definite end point: a future, visible, second coming of Jesus (2:28). The text describes that event multiple times, using an expression found nowhere in the Gospel. In one place, the event is called the “coming” (παρουσία) of Jesus (2:28), an expression widely represented in other Christian sources, including the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Matthew, and the epistles of James and 2 Peter.66 In another place, it is called the “day of judgment” (4:17), an expression found in Matthew and 2 Peter.67 First John also refers to this future event as the time Jesus will be “revealed,” identifying it as the time when humans will be transformed into the form and existence Jesus possesses: “it does not yet appear what we will be, but we know that when he is revealed [φανερωθῇ], we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (3:2; cf. 1 Cor. 15:23).
There is no denying that 1 John has broken new ground here; no line in the Gospel makes the above points, at least in the same language.68 But the divergence is more profound since the ideas 1 John expresses stand in tension with what the Gospel teaches. In John, believers do not await a future time for Jesus to come and reveal himself; instead, Jesus comes and reveals himself now, making it possible for humans to “see him” precisely through a spiritual indwelling: “I am coming to you … the world will see me no more, but you will see me; 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 … I will love them and reveal myself to them” (14:18–21). A careful reader can detect a divergence in thought between these texts. As Raimo Hakola writes, the ideas in 1 John “are familiar from other, non-Johannine, Christian sources but hard to connect with the thought of the gospel.”69 They suggest a different author – an author embedded in other fields of eschatological speculation and less attuned, or receptive, to how the Gospel utilizes the same concepts.
“New Commandment(s)”
Not all divergences between John and 1 John concern eschatology. Another subtle but meaningful contrast between the two concerns the “new commandment.” In John 13:34, Jesus reveals this commandment to his disciples, glossing it as a single, simple instruction: “a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” The author of 1 John alludes to these words: “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). In 1 John, however, the author does not gloss what this commandment is immediately. When he does, he defines it in more complex – arguably, overloaded – terms than the Gospel. Now it as a double command, in which “believing” has first place and “love” has second place: “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).
The formulation found in 1 John is not un-Johannine in content; both of its elements resemble the language of the Gospel. But the difference between these formulations is noticeable. In 1 John, we see a different way of construing the “new commandment” that suggests a different concept at play and, potentially, a different mind.
“Anointing”
In two places, 1 John speaks of an “anointing” that comes from God, which “dwells in” humans, and which “teaches [humans] about everything” (2:20, 27). Although cryptic, these lines may refer to the Spirit, who John’s Jesus claims “dwells with you, and will be in you” and who “will teach you all things” (John 14:26).70 This supposition finds support in the fact that “the anointing” is counterposed to the “spirit of antichrist,” as the “spirit of truth” later is (1 John 2:19–24; cf. 4:2–6).
To quote Dodd, the language of these verses “betrays a way of thinking about the Spirit which is not quite that of the Fourth Gospel.”71 The Gospel never casts the Spirit, or the act of receiving the Spirit, as an “anointing.” Other early Christian texts do, however – for example, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 10:38; cf. Luke 4:18; 2 Cor. 1:21). The presence of this metaphor in 1 John suits an author other than the one who composed the Gospel, one familiar with different images for the Spirit’s reception among humans.
Blood Cleansing
As Raymond Brown observes, if one considers the simple number of references to “blood” in each work, “proportionately ‘blood’ is far more important in I John” than in the Gospel.72 No less distinctive is what 1 John attributes to that substance; drawing on sacrificial vocabularies, the epistle casts Jesus’ blood as the agent of purifying human sin: “if we walk in the light … the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1:7; cf. “forgive” and “cleanse” in 1:9).
The ideas 1 John communicates answer to a wide range of early Christian writings that cast Jesus’ “blood” as the basis or instrument of forgiveness or that cast it as a cleansing agent (e.g., Rom 5:9; Acts 20:28; Col 1:20; Eph 1:7; 2:13; Heb 9:14; 10:22; 1 Pet 1:2, 18–19; Rev. 1:5; 5:9; 7:14). They also give 1 John a distinct profile from John. In all its extensive discourse material, the Gospel never takes up the image of blood cleansing sin. In John, it is the “word” of Jesus that makes humans “clean” (15:3).
“Expiation”
In two places, 1 John refers to Jesus using a specific ritual term associated with sacrifice: “atonement” or “expiation” (ἱλασμός).73 In one verse, the epistle presents Jesus as “the atonement for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (2:2). In another, the epistle asserts that “God … sent his Son to be the atonement for our sins” (4:10). Paul applies a very similar term to Jesus in Romans, where he claims that “God put [Christ Jesus] forward as an atonement [ἱλαστήριον] by his blood” (Rom. 3:25). Vocabularies of “atonement” are not explicit in the Gospel of John, however.
“Light” and “Darkness”
Both the Gospel and 1 John incorporate “light” and “darkness” imagery, but the two deploy that imagery in different schemes. On the one hand, the Gospel imagines the coming and going of Jesus as the coming and going of “light” from the world. Early in the text, Jesus frames his manifestation on earth as an illumination of all human beings: “the light has come into the world” (3:19). Later, however, Jesus reveals that the light will eventually depart, plunging the world into darkness: “the light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light lest the darkness overtake you” (12:35). Amidst this darkness, however, believers will continue to possess the “light”: “believe in the light, that you may become children of light” (12:36). The imagery here mirrors the concept that the world will no longer be able to see Jesus but that those who believe will, through Jesus’ spiritual indwelling (14:19–20).
The presentation of Jesus as “light” finds a rough parallel in 1 John 1:5. But 1 John builds a different scheme from this image. The epistle presupposes a gradual conquest of the darkness of this present age by the light: “the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining” (2:8). There are no easy ways to anchor this statement in the thought of the Gospel.
1.2.2 John and the Shorter Epistles
Because 2 and 3 John are so brief, each containing fewer than 250 words, my comments on them will be briefer. We have already seen that the reception history of 2 and 3 John suggests they might have been written much later than the Gospel. That impression grows when we examine the language and ideas of the letters more closely.
1.2.2.1 2 John
Since 2 John is so compact, it has less doctrinal content to compare or contrast with that of John. Nevertheless, it contains one teaching that distinguishes the Epistles from the Gospel: the notion of “antichrist.” Like 1 John, 2 John speaks of “antichrists” and describes the emergence of “many antichrists,” who are identified by what they confess or do not confess concerning Jesus.
The letter also contains certain linguistic peculiarities that give it a different cast from the Gospel and, frankly, 1 John. Some can be explained by the fact that 2 John follows different literary conventions and has slightly different interests.74 Nevertheless, a few examples point to different authorship. First, the letter uses the adjective “elect” or “chosen” (ἐκλεκτός; v. 1) in ways that find weak parallels in other Johannine works but stronger parallels in other New Testament literatures (e.g., 2 Pet. 5:13). The text also warns its readers to “watch/take heed” (βλέπετε) in order to gain a “full reward” (μισθὸν πλήρη; v. 8) – idioms that are not found in other Johannine texts, but which “have a Synoptic ring to them” as Schnackenburg acknowledges.75 And last, the expression “dwell/abide/remain in the teaching” (μένων ἐν τῇ διδαχῇ; v. 9) uses the familiar Johannine verb “to dwell/abide/remain” (μένω) but pairs that verb with an object with which it is never paired in the other texts (“teaching”; διδαχῇ). The letter also contrasts that verb with a verb never set in such a contrast in the other Johannine texts: “to go ahead” (προάγων; v. 9).
1.2.2.2 3 John
Third John is not well suited to a doctrinal contrast since it mostly lacks doctrinal content. But as I will explore in greater detail in Chapter 2, 3 John is undeniably different from the Gospel and other epistles in its language. As Judith Lieu writes, the epistle has an “uneven relationship with the rest of the Johannine literature, which otherwise is characterized by a consistent … set of language patterns; although undoubtedly Johannine, and appealing to those values, 3 John uses its own vocabulary.”76 A few of these differences are sufficient to illustrate this point. First, 3 John is the only Johannine text to use the term “church,” and it uses it not once, but three times (“ἐκκλησία”; vv. 6, 9, 10). The epistle is also peculiar for referencing God (or Jesus) by the metonym “the Name”: “they have gone out for the sake of the Name” (v. 7) – something done in no other Johannine text.77 No less unusual is the wording of the health wish at the beginning of the letter: “I pray in all respects that you are prospering and are well, just as your soul prospers” (v. 2). The language and concept of one’s “soul prospering” does not answer to a known thread of Johannine theology.
As one can see, these differences do not reflect or flow organically from the generic differences between 3 John and, for example, the Gospel. They are an independent set of peculiarities, one which any model of the epistle’s origin must integrate. In practice, they increase the challenges confronting anyone who would assign the Gospel and Epistles to the same author.
1.3 Conclusion
Most critical scholars do not believe that the Gospel and Epistles of John were written by the same hand. That view is based on the convergence of multiple lines of evidence, each of which, stacked upon the other, strains the hypothesis of single authorship to the breaking point. One might be able to work out special explanations for individual differences explored above. For example, one might speculate that a supposed single author for all these texts altered facets of his theology across his career. But it is more difficult to explain how those theological differences emerged and why they coincide with unrelated linguistic differences. (Of course, with this greater complexity come more points of potential vulnerability or dubiousness.) And even if one could overcome those obstacles, one would be even harder pressed to explain every facet of the unusual reception history of these texts – to offer viable reasons for why these texts surfaced in different periods, why they circulated separately, and why so many early Christians questioned their authenticity (to different degrees, no less). At some point, the explanations become too numerous, involved, and complex; the probabilistic load proves too great.
Instead, the simplest and most elegant explanation is that the Gospel and Epistles stem from multiple authors. In one stroke, this thesis cuts through all the data above, offering a single, satisfactory solution to multiple problems. This solution, then, is the preferred one.
Of course, once we determine that multiple authors are represented in the collection, we are left with the question: how many? To solve that riddle, we must examine a wider breadth of data than we have explored here. After all, the many divergences between the Gospel and Epistles only tell half of the story. For all their differences, the four Johannine works are also bound together by a much more impressive body of similarities, ones that have long been cited as evidence that the texts share a single author. As we will see, those similarities will ironically strengthen the case for multiple authors in the collection. This is because they are the kind of convergences that make better sense when we posit multiple authors for the Gospel and Epistles – specifically, signs of direct literary borrowing, as would occur between multiple authors. But crucially, they are also the kind of convergences that can help us fully resolve the number of authors in this collection and the order in which they wrote.
Even at a cursory glance, it is obvious that the Gospel and Epistles of John share a “family likeness,” a distinctive set of commonalities that binds them together and sets them apart from other early Christian works.1 By one measure, over forty expressions are highly characteristic of or distinctive to these texts – idioms including “dwell/abide in God,” “do the truth,” and “walk in the light.” Before the twentieth century, the reason for these linguistic convergences seemed obvious: according to tradition, all four texts were written by the same author. It was reasonable, then, to believe that these texts were similar because they bore the imprint of that one author’s idiolect, his distinctive, individual speech patterns. Nevertheless, the idea that the same author wrote all four texts was increasingly discarded through the twentieth century as critical scholars detected the activity of multiple hands in the collection.
If the four Johannine texts were not written by the same author, however, how do we explain their similarities? How could different authors produce works so strikingly similar in language and ideas? By the 1960s, scholars developed a solution to this problem. They reasoned that if the four texts do not come from the pen of a single author, they must have been written by writers embedded within a single Christian network, sect, or community – one with a distinctive tradition and even speech profile.2 Like other social groups, religious communities can develop distinctive social dialects. For instance, if one hears an individual speak of “going to Mass,” one can infer that the individual is probably a Catholic since the term “Mass” is used primarily by Roman Catholics. By analogy, scholars have speculated that behind such distinctive expressions as “dwell/abide in God” and “walk in the light” lurked an ancient Christian circle, network, or sect that gave these texts a distinctive character, a group most commonly referred to as the “Johannine Community.” In this model, the linguistic similarities between the four Johannine texts are accidental, the result of sociolinguistic factors.
There is, however, another way to explain the kinds of convergences we see in the Johannine texts. Those convergences may be due to direct literary contact and imitation. Writers in different social and geographic contexts can produce similarly worded texts if one is familiar with the work of the other and chooses to incorporate that work’s language and ideas in their own text. Interestingly, most scholars – even those who subscribe to the idea of a Johannine Community – are convinced that the Epistles show signs of dependence on the Gospel, if not also on one another.3
In this chapter, I review the evidence for this view, demonstrating that there is nothing coincidental about the linguistic similarities between the Gospel, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John. Those convergences are deliberate, the product of direct literary borrowing. After the Gospel was written, the authors of the Epistles produced derivative works in its image, imitating and adapting its distinctive elements. In this case, the Johannine texts are not a pool of independent documents; instead, they are a single, intact literary tradition growing and flowering through the second century CE. As we will see, that tradition unfolded in four stages. The Gospel was written first. Next, a second author penned 1 John, imitating the Gospel’s distinctive language. A third author then penned 2 John, imitating both the Gospel and 1 John. And last, a final author penned 3 John, incorporating elements from all three earlier texts.4
2.1 Establishing Literary Dependence
Literary borrowing can take on many different forms. An author may harvest an extensive amount of text from an earlier work, or they may extract only a few phrases, clauses, or key ideas. They may keep most of what they borrow intact, or they may adapt what they take. Because of this spectrum of options, because of the many ways an author may choose to reuse material from earlier sources, no single criterion or test can determine whether a given text is dependent on another one. Instead, we must consider multiple possible signs of borrowing and reuse. In what follows, I will offer a brief catalog of the sorts of similarities that scholars use to establish genetic links within other literary multi-author collections such as the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the letters attributed to Paul.
Before presenting these criteria, however, it is essential to make several caveats or qualifications about their use. First, all determinations of linguistic dependence are probabilistic; there is a non-zero chance that two texts may share certain similarities by mere coincidence. And yet, certain convergences are more difficult to explain by chance; where we find them, it is more probable to assume that one text is modeled on the other.
This brings us to a second important point. Probabilities and improbabilities can multiply or stack. A given parallel may not seem remarkable or decisive in isolation. But its presence alongside other parallels increases the likelihood that it is not the product of chance. That is, these parallels become more compelling in aggregate. The reason is simple: the more parallels we find in a given text, the harder it is to cast them all as coincidental. Each parallel increases the explanatory load, the probabilistic load, on any claim that they are due to chance alone.
2.1.1 Verbatim Strings
The most obvious signs of literary dependence are strings of verbatim agreement between texts, that is, places where two texts agree word-for-word. The reason for this is simple. The human mind moves through a startling number of variables and choices when producing a single sentence. Although every person has a finite pool of vocabulary and phrase structures to build sentences from, the ways in which one can combine those structures are mathematically infinite. In this case, “the way in which people express themselves varies from person to person, even if writing about the same subject,” so that “it is unlikely that the topic will be expressed in exactly the same way (e.g., the same … grammatical syntax), and using exactly the same words (i.e., the same vocabulary).”5 Whenever we encounter strings of text that agree word-for-word, then, we should suspect literary dependence.
It is usually easy to find such strings, but they can vary significantly. For example, these strings may be of different lengths, and they may be juxtaposed with new or modified material. This variability is due to the fact that authors are not photocopiers; they are independent writers with different agendas, and they sometimes manipulate borrowed text to serve their aims. Some authors modify parts of their borrowed text to prevent readers from detecting their use of sources. (We can draw an analogy to a student trying to hide his plagiarism of a document by making extensive changes to the borrowed text.) Others introduce changes to improve a source text stylistically or grammatically. Still others want to alter the ideas or message of their borrowed text. In the example below, the author of the pseudonymous 2 Thessalonians reproduces text from 1 Thessalonians, albeit with minor, and sometimes trivial, changes probably meant to mask his direct copying of that earlier document (e.g., the reversal of the words “labor” and “toil”):
| 2 Thessalonians | 1 Thessalonians |
|---|---|
…but with toil and labor, we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you. (2 Thess. 3:8) | For you remember our labor and toil, brethren; we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you … (1 Thess. 2:9) |
In the next example, the disguised author of 2 Peter introduces even more extensive changes and rewordings to text taken from Jude:
In the words of Mark Goodacre, it is the “plagiarist’s charter” to introduce changes into borrowed materials.6
Certain factors, of course, increase the likelihood that literary dependence is at play in a given verbatim string. For instance, the lengthier the continuous identical speech we find, the more likely literary dependence becomes.7 Each additional element in the sequence strains the probability of the entire string emerging by chance. Along the same lines, the more strings we find in a single document, the less likely chance is a factor. The presence of a single coincidence is more likely due to chance than several.
2.1.2 Dense Concentrations of Similarities
Although continuous strings of identical material are an obvious sign of literary borrowing, they are not the only sign. Sometimes, one may find few such strings at all. This is because some authors take still greater pains to distance their new texts from their source texts, more aggressively substituting words in a string, rearranging entire phrases, and recontextualizing materials. In these instances, we cannot rely on unbroken strings of verbatim overlap to establish literary dependence. Instead, we can look to another possible sign of copying: the dense concentration of identical language and parallel ideas. The idea is, again, probabilistic: two authors might coincidentally overlap in their language, but the more numerous the overlaps in a concentrated section, the less likely that overlap is the product of coincidence alone.
The following parables from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew do not share verbatim strings. Nevertheless, as Mark Goodacre argues, there are sound reasons to identify the parable in Matthew as a creative expansion of the parable in Mark. The first reason is that the two appear in roughly the same location in their respective narratives, wedged between the parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1–20; Matt. 13:1–23) and the parable of the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30–31; Matt. 13:31–32). But the other critical evidence is that the two passages share a dense concentration of shared words, including, “kingdom” (βασιλεία), “person” (ἄνθρωπος), “sleep” (καθεύδω), “to sprout/grow” (βλαστάνω), “stalk” (χόρτος), “wheat” (σῖτος), “fruit/grain” (καρπός), and “harvest” (θερισμός).8
| Mark | Matthew |
|---|---|
| He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full wheat in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once, he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.” (4:26–29) | He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field, but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. So when the stalks came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time, I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” (13:24–30) |
That cluster of similarities points to literary dependence here, albeit with more dramatic modifications.
2.1.3 Serial Adaptation and Conflation
Two other signs of literary dependence are serial adaptation and conflation. Serial adaptation, or serial quotation, is when an author takes unrelated materials from multiple passages in his sources and unites them in a single passage. Conflation, by contrast, is when a later author consciously or unconsciously combines related materials in a new discussion.9 Often, as Leslie Mitton writes, the earlier materials “are associated together in their writer’s mind by some common word or idea, and so come to be ‘conflated’ … some mutual similarity serves as the link that draws them together and blends them.”10 In the example below, the disguised author of the pseudo-Pauline Ephesians blends ideas and phrases from two earlier passages attributed to Paul—passages that are themselves bound by not one, but two, common themes: “immoral/immorality” (ἀκάθαρτος/ἀκαθαρσία) and “idolater/idolatry” (εἰδωλολάτρης/εἰδωλολατρία).11
| Ephesians | Colossians and Philippians |
|---|---|
| Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure person, or one who is covetous, that is, an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. (Eph. 5:5) | cf. Put to death therefore… immorality… and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Col. 3:5) cf. … neither the immoral, nor idolaters… will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6:9–10) |
Of course, an author such as Paul might naturally reuse phrases and combine ideas that appear elsewhere in his writings. But he would be less likely to do this regularly and mechanically. In the words of E. P. Sanders, “Paul was too original a writer to construct new sentences out of fragments of old ones.”12 Instead, conflation and serial adaptation on a wider scale are more the domain of an imitator who draws heavily from source texts to piece together plausible speech for an author. Thus, as Mitton insists, when reuses and recombinations “of this kind can be shown to occur, not just as rare and peculiar coincidences, but as a regular feature,” one possesses “strong evidence of literary dependence.”13 Tellingly, the example above is hardly an isolated one; Ephesians is littered with conflations and serial adaptations.14
2.1.4 Reuse of Peculiar, Distinctive, or Unparalleled Expressions
Some parallels between texts can be purely coincidental since only a limited number of words or phrases exist to describe any idea, let alone the same idea. As Sanders puts it, “we should be surprised if many of the same words did not occur in any two passages in which Paul discusses his doctrine of righteousness,” for instance.15 But some words or phrases are less commonly encountered than others. Certain words may be rare or especially peculiar; some may even represent unique coinages or neologisms.
These parallels are especially interesting when determining literary relationships since their rarity makes them all the less likely to appear in multiple places coincidentally. If it is unusual to see any author use a particular expression, seeing two or more authors use it is much more unusual. The more we see two texts sharing the same peculiar expressions, the more skeptical we should be that these parallels are due to mere coincidence.
2.1.5 Similar Expressions Employed Differently
Since it is common for authors speaking on the same topic to take up at least some of the same words or phrases, it is especially striking when the opposite happens, that is, when one finds dense clusters of common words and phrases in passages making very different points. It is also telling when one finds parallel words and phrases with conspicuously different meanings.16 These instances point to the possible activity of an imitator, an individual interested in co-opting the language of a previous work but perhaps less interested in the precise configurations or uses of that language in their source text.
2.1.6 Similarities that Presuppose the Written Form/Medium
If we find similarities between two passages, how can we know that the author gained this new material directly from another text instead of from oral channels? One way is to see if the shared material presupposes the framework of a text, the act of writing, or the act of reading. Similarities that presuppose a literary context require a literary explanation.
One example of this sort of similarity forms the backbone of the idea that certain gospels directly copied materials from other gospels. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew both incorporate passages set on the Mount of Olives in which Jesus turns to his disciples and warns them of events about to occur at the end of time. These two passages have substantial overlap, including extensive verbatim parallels. One of these parallels, however, is a single parenthetical comment in which the narrator of each text urges his “reader” to decipher Jesus’ enigmatic language:
| Matthew | Mark |
|---|---|
| And answering, Jesus said to them … “So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle.” (Matt. 24:4, 15–18) | And Jesus began to say to them … “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle.” (Mark 14:5, 14–16) |
This parenthetical comment does not come from Jesus, since the scene presupposes him speaking verbally to his disciples. By the same token, the comment does not come from any oral tradition since it expressly addresses “the reader.” Instead, this parallel is one that could have only emerged from a literary source, from a written text that has been copied.17 In this instance, the author of Matthew has directly copied a narratorial comment he has found in the written text of Mark.18
2.1.7 Similarities Concentrated in the Same Locations
Certain parallels may not explicitly mention reading and writing, but they may presuppose the written form in other ways. One way is by using the same language in the same places. Here again, the issue is one of probability. Two authors may coincidentally discuss the same ideas or utilize the same words or phrases in their works. But they would not necessarily do so at analogous junctures or places in their texts – at least in the absence of some literary convention demanding that they do so (e.g., genre expectations).19 In these cases, we are hard-pressed to explain not only the coincidence of language but also the coincidence of location.
2.2 Evidence for Dependence
When we study the Johannine texts with these points in mind, we arrive at two conclusions. First, the similarities between the Gospel and Letters of John are not due to random chance but reflect literary contact and dependence. Second, these texts were written in a certain order, one that aligns with their divergent reception histories. As I will demonstrate below, the Gospel – the earliest attested Johannine work – was written first; all three letters seem to know and utilize it. The next text in this chain was 1 John, which served as a source for 2 and 3 John. These shorter letters, in turn, occupy the latest strata of this literature, with 2 John predating 3 John.20
2.2.1 John and 1 John
One way to map literary relationships across four texts is to begin with two texts and determine whether and how they might be related. Once one establishes a relative chronology of these two – that is, an ordering of which text came first – one can introduce a third and fourth text and see how each fits or does not fit within that sequence. For this exercise, I will begin with the Gospel of John and 1 John, the two longest texts in the collection, since they offer the most data for such an analysis.
2.2.1.1 Verbal Parallels
The sheer level of linguistic overlap between John and 1 John leaps off the page, even on first read. In the words of Raymond Brown, “it is difficult to find … works more similar in expression.”21 As I noted above, over forty expressions – some phrases, some clauses – are highly characteristic of the Johannine texts and present in at least John and 1 John22:
| Idiom | 1 John | Gospel of John | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | walk (περιπατεῖν) in the darkness/night | 1 John 2:11 | John 8:12; 11:10 |
| 6 | do the truth23 | 1 John 1:6 | John 3:21 |
| 7 | know the truth | 1 John 2:21 | John 8:32 |
| 8 | be of/from (ἐκ) the truth | 1 John 2:21; 3:19 | John 18:37 |
| 9 | the Spirit of truth | 1 John 4:6 | John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13 |
| 10 | know the true one/true God | 1 John 5:20 | John 7:28; 17:3 |
| 11 | be of/from (ἐκ) God | 1 John 3:10; 4:1– 4, 6; 5:19 (cf. 3:16) | John 7:17; 8:47 |
| 12 | be born of/from (ἐκ) God/the Father | 1 John 2:29; 3:9; 5:1, 4, 18 | John 1:13 |
| 13 | be of/from (ἐκ) the devil/evil one | 1 John 3:8; cf. 3:12 | John 8:44 |
| 14 | be of/from (ἐκ) the world | 1 John 2:16; 4:5 | John 8:23; 15:19; 17:14, 16; 18:36 |
| 15 | overcome (νικᾶν) the world | 1 John 5:4, 5 | John 16:33 |
| 16 | the world hates (μισεῖν) you | 1 John 3:13 | John 7:7; 15:18 |
| 17 | be in God or the Son/Jesus | 1 John 2:5; 5:20 | John 14:20 |
| 18 | dwell/abide (μένειν) in God or the Son/Jesus | 1 John 2:6, 27–28; 3:6, 24; 4:13–16 | John 15:4–7 |
| 19 | dwell/abide (μένειν) in love | 1 John 4:16 | John 15:9–10 |
| 20 | God or the Son/Jesus dwells/abides (μένειν) in one | 1 John 3:24; 4:12–16 | John 6:56; 15:4, 5 |
| 21 | word dwells/abides (μένειν) in one | 1 John 2:14 | John 5:38 |
| 22 | truth is in a person | 1 John 1:8; 2:4 | John 8:44 |
| 23 | dwells/abides (μένειν) forever | 1 John 2:17 | John 8:35; 12:34 |
| 24 | new commandment | 1 John 2:7, 8 | John 13:34 |
| 25 | command to “love one another” | 1 John 3:11, 23; cf. 4:21 | John 13:34; 15:12, 17 |
| 26 | keep his commandments (often linked to love) | 1 John 2:3–4; 3:22–24; 5:2–3 | John 14:15, 21; 15:10 |
| 27 | keep his word | 1 John 2:5 | John 8:51–52, 55; 14:23–24; 15:20 |
| 28 | whatever one asks is received | 1 John 3:22; 5:14-15 | John 14:13–14; 15:7, 16; 16:23 |
| 29 | lay down one’s life for (τίθημι ψυχὴν ὑπέρ) others | 1 John 3:16 | John 10:11, 15, 17, 18; 13:37 |
| 30 | Jesus takes away (αἴρειν) sins | 1 John 3:5 | John 1:29 |
| 31 | to pass (μεταβαίνειν) from death to life | 1 John 3:14 | John 5:24 |
Given its brevity, 1 John is especially dense with these peculiar and distinctive expressions. If we count only those idioms in the chart above, then 65 of with 105 verses of 1 John (62.0%) show points of contact with the Gospel. Such a dense concentration of high-quality similarities is strong evidence of literary contact.
Weighing the Differences
As impressive as this overlap is, some scholars argue against literary contact between these texts by stressing their differences over and above their similarities. Judith Lieu, for one, argues that “there is no compelling evidence of a direct literary relationship between 1 John and the Gospel” since “the consistent subtle differences of wording, inference, context, and combination even where close parallels appear suggest that both writings draw independently on earlier formulations.”24 Similarly, Raimo Hakola insists that “clear differences in how common idioms and themes are developed” point away from “direct literary dependence” between the texts.25
The problem with this objection, as Mark Goodacre notes, is that “the absence of agreement … says nothing about the presence of agreement” when assessing literary relationships.26 A literary relationship exists between texts whether one is 5% derivative from the other or 95% derivative. Indeed, “only one direct-connect parallel is required to demonstrate literary dependence between two documents.”27 This is especially true since plagiarists and imitators are known to incorporate language selectively and to rework whatever language they choose to include at different rates. In short, the only positive evidence one can offer against literary dependence is the absence of similarity – not the presence of differences.
2.2.1.2 Formal Parallels
As extensive and dense as these linguistic parallels are, an even stronger case for literary contact between the Gospel and 1 John can be made from their structural similarities, that is, from their shared literary conventions and features. As George Parsenios writes, taken together or individually, “these larger structural bonds … make it extremely difficult to imagine how a ‘Johannine tradition’ does not rely on literary dependence in some form.”28
Stylistic Introductions
The first and most extensive structural parallel binding John and 1 John is immediately apparent to casual readers of these works. Both texts open with a prologue or proem characterized by a stylistically rich, almost poetic, style (John 1:1–18; 1 John 1:1–4). The very presence of such artful passages is surprising enough; they are not required by the genre of either text. No prior narrative gospel – neither Matthew, nor Mark, nor Luke – contains anything analogous to John’s prologue.29 But more to the point, these introductions, “though by no means identical … stand together against anything else in the NT, sharing a large number of common features in a short space.”30 The proem of 1 John is a mere 85 words long; if we add verse 5, which is a “transitional verse,” the passage is still compact at 109 words.31 And yet, nearly every clause is steeped in parallels to the Gospel.
The similarities between these passages begin with the common ways they construct their narrators. Both feature a voice speaking in the first-person “we” who emphasizes that he has “seen” Jesus:
Second, both passages take up a complex vision of Jesus as the creative Logos or “Word” (λόγος) at the “beginning.” This synthesis, rooted in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, is highly distinctive to these texts; no earlier Christian work attests the same amalgam of ideas.32 Interestingly, this synthesis is also mostly absent from subsequent sections of John and 1 John, making it a localized feature particular to the introductions of both works:33
| Feature | 1 John | Gospel of John | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Jesus as the Logos/“Word” (λόγος) | 1 John 1:1 | John 1:1, 14 |
| 4 | The “Word” “was” (ἦν) in/from the “beginning” (ἀρχή) | 1 John 1:1 | John 1:1–2 |
| 5 | “Beginning” (ἀρχή) as the first content word in the text | 1 John 1:1 | John 1:1 |
| 6 | The “Word” as “with” God/the Father (πρὸς τὸν θεόν/πατέρα) | 1 John 1:2 | John 1:1–2 |
| 7 | Association of the “Word” (λόγος) with “life” (ζωή) | 1 John 1:1–2 | John 1:4 |
| 8 | The “Word” as the Father’s Son | 1 John 1:3 | John 1:14, 18 |
| 9 | The “Word” becomes present or manifest to “us” (ἡμῖν) | 1 John 2 | John 1:14 |
Beyond these impressive parallels, the passages share other key terms, including some taken from John 19:35 (suggesting conflation):
With each point of overlap, the possibility of coincidence, even within a shared social milieu, becomes remote. The statistical improbabilities stack too high. For this reason, most scholars agree that the opening lines of these texts reflect direct literary borrowing.
Those writers who disagree with this conclusion again predictably stress the subtle differences between the above passages, insisting that they point away from direct dependence and towards something like a common oral tradition. Hakola writes that the differences between these texts “suggest that 1 John 1:1–4 is not simply a reproduction of John 1:1–18 but that a shared tradition has been developed in different ways in these passages.”34 The coexistence of similarities and differences, however, is not necessarily evidence of orality, and it is a mistake to treat it as such. Written communications are also vulnerable to the kinds of interventions, both accidental and deliberate, that produce differences.35 More to the point, authors utilizing source material are especially motivated to introduce such changes. Their goal, after all, is not to reproduce a text precisely; they are not photocopiers. Instead, their aim is to reuse older materials in new ways and to new ends.
The two passages do present us with what Parsenios calls “similarity-in-difference”; they take up the same words and phrases, but not always in the same form or with the same intention.36 For instance, whereas the first line of the Gospel uses the expression “in the beginning” (ἐν ἀρχῇ; John 1:1), 1 John uses the inexact equivalent “from the beginning” (ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς; 1 John 1:1). That being said, the Gospel also uses the same expression in other passages when referring to primordial realities: “the devil was a murderer from the beginning [ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς]” (John 8:44; cf. 1 John 3:8). The author of 1 John had both possibilities at his disposal and opted to use one here.
Other differences are a matter of interpretation and a less secure ground for claiming the two texts are unrelated. For example, Hakola claims that whereas John 1 concerns a vision of Jesus as “the preexistent Word that was with God before Creation,” the phrase “Word of life” in 1 John 1 refers to something very different, supposedly, the “message” Jesus delivered from “the beginning” of his ministry.37 The problem is that 1 John 1 says that the “Word of life” is one “we have heard … we have seen with our eyes … we have looked upon and touched with our hands” (1:1). This is not a reference to a mere message; it can only be a reference to Jesus, the “Word … made flesh” (John 1:14). What Hakola sees as a significant difference may instead be a conscious decision by the author of 1 John to meld the Gospel’s use of “word” for both Jesus and his teaching, just as the author has melded two meanings of the word “beginning” in the Gospel. (There, the word “beginning” refers to creation [1:1–2; 8:44] and the start of Jesus’ ministry [8:25; 15:27; 16:4].)
Hakola, then, is correct that “1 John 1:1–4 is not simply a reproduction of John 1:1–18.”38 But this still leaves us with a critical literary question: why do so many similar features converge at precisely the opening lines of both texts? Why do these two texts, as different as they are, begin with the same clustering of themes, language, and stylistic choices? A literary problem such as this demands a literary explanation.
Certain scholars suggest that the similarities between the two passages, especially their quasi-poetic character, reflect their common dependence on a hypothetical “hymn” of the hypothetical Johannine Community.39 There is no firm evidence for a hymn behind the passage, however.40 For that matter, even if such a hymn existed, it would still be difficult to explain why that hymn should have exerted so much influence on both texts in precisely the same place: their opening lines.41 As George Parsenios writes:
This kind of close association suggests more than a coincidence arising from a common tradition. If the various terms and phrases that the texts share were randomly scattered throughout the works, then their similarities might be merely coincidental. But the fact that 1 John and John both employ common phrases and words in their opening lines suggests that one of them is imitating the other … More than a common tradition seems to be at work when two texts not only use the same words but also use them in the same places.42
Opening Line
A second similarity between John and 1 John deepens the impression that the two are connected. Specifically, both texts make similar segues from their opening lines into their respective body texts. At the conclusion of its prologue, the Gospel of John commences its narrative with the words, “and this is the testimony” (καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ μαρτυρία; 1:19). Not coincidentally, after its preface, 1 John segues into its main line of argumentation with the words: “and this is the message” (καὶ ἔστιν αὕτη ἡ ἀγγελία; 1:5).43 Any attempt to claim that the two texts are independent of one another would have to reckon with this literary parallel as well. Oral traditions do not inform how literary texts are structured.
Statement of Purpose
Looking beyond the formal similarities outlined above, the Gospel and 1 John share yet a third feature in common, namely, a statement of purpose towards the conclusion of each text in which the author indicates his rationale for writing. Once again, the presence of this device in both texts is surprising. Nothing in the genre of either text dictates that each should have included such a statement; for both to have this device is remarkable. The other Johannine epistles, for that matter, lack such statements.44 Still more impressively, these lines are strikingly similar, sharing a core idea and clustering the same key terms. In each, the narrator connects his act of “writing” to the notion that those who “believe” may possess “life” through “the name” of the “Son of God.” The two sentences also share a common pattern. They each begin with the term “these things” (ταῦτα), and they incorporate the same verb in their first clause, “writing” (γράφω). Both, in turn, incorporate a purpose clause, with “so that” (ἵνα) followed by a subjunctive verb and the conjunction “that” (ὅτι):
Interestingly, although the two texts begin with the same expression (“these things”), they use this expression to refer to different things. In John, “these things” refers specifically to the “signs” Jesus performs (20:30), whereas in 1 John, “these things” refers to the material that precedes the verse.45 As we have seen, using the same expressions with different referents in mind is a mark of literary imitation. There are also signs of conflation in the passage; 1 John 5:13 shares language not only with John 20:31 but also John 3:18 (“believe in the name”). The clinching evidence that these statements reflect literary dependence, however, is that each presupposes the act of writing. No oral tradition would dictate that authors state a common motivation for “writing.” Instead, we should presume a direct link between these texts and conclude that one is modeled off the other.
2.2.1.3 Direction of Influence
Up to this point, we have established that literary borrowing offers the best explanation for the shared features of John and 1 John. But if the two texts stand within a single lineage, where does this lineage begin? Which text came first and served as a model for the other? In practice, contemporary scholars have trouble disentangling their answers to these questions from the Johannine Community Hypothesis. As François Vouga writes, many models are “based on ideas about how the Johannine revelation tradition developed historically or theologically” within that hypothetical group.46 The problem, of course, is that such approaches pile speculation atop speculation; if the community’s existence is hypothetical, the complex intellectual and social histories reconstructed for it are that much more tenuous. It is hardly surprising, then, that such models also arrive at wildly divergent results. Udo Schnelle uses this sort of argumentation to unpersuasively argue that the Epistles were written before the Gospel.47 Raymond Brown, by contrast, wields it in support of the Gospel’s priority.48 If we set aside this dubious approach and focus strictly on the textual data, however, we end up with firm reasons to believe that the Gospel was written before 1 John. Specifically, 1 John seems to allude to the Gospel at various points.49
Plausibility as a Source
When determining the relationship between two texts, it is helpful to isolate those passages that show the most substantial overlap between them and decide which is more likely to have emerged independently. When comparing John and 1 John, the natural starting point for such an exercise is their opening lines:
The Gospel has strong, independent motivations for using the term “beginning” (“ἀρχῇ”) in its first clause. As C. K. Barrett writes, “that John’s opening verse is intended to recall the opening verse of Genesis is certain,” a verse that reads: “in the beginning [ἐν ἀρχῇ], God created the heavens and the earth” (LXX Gen 1:1). 50 Additionally, many scholars today affirm that the author of John knew Mark and patterned his Gospel after it.51 In this case, it may be telling that Mark opens with the same noun: “beginning” (ἀρχή) (“the beginning [ἀρχὴ] of the gospel of Jesus Christ”; 1:1).
By contrast, neither of these apparent backgrounds explains the presence of “beginning” (ἀρχῇ) in the opening lines of 1 John. That passage has a weaker relationship to the Genesis creation story. In fact, to detect any connection between Genesis and 1 John, one must be familiar with the Gospel’s prologue.52 Additionally, because 1 John is written as an epistle, one would hardly expect its opening line to allude to the opening line of a gospel like Mark. It would also be difficult to explain the force of that allusion. Instead, the only compelling background and inspiration for 1 John’s use of the phrase lies in the Gospel of John’s prologue, which it imitates.
Presumed Knowledge of the Gospel
Another reason to posit the priority of the Gospel is that the argumentation of 1 John is opaque without reference to that longer text. As Vouga puts it, “only through the structure of [John] can the associations in the thought process of 1John be explained.”53 Consider, for example, 1 John’s convoluted discussion of the “new commandment.” According to the Gospel, on the night before his death, Jesus said to his disciples: “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (13:34). The epistle alludes to this thread in the Gospel, but in an unclear way:
Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and you because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother lives in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in such a person. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go because the darkness has brought on blindness.
Curiously, the author begins by insisting that he is “writing … no new commandment,” but he never actually names the commandment.54 The following lines presuppose the command to “love one another,” but they are not phrased as a commandment (1 John 2:9–11). Only later in the epistle does the author expressly state the instruction to love others, but he does not call this instruction a “new commandment,” as before (3:11). Only a reader familiar with the Gospel can recognize the thrust of the “new commandment” and follow this loose and disconnected teaching in 1 John.
Something similar can be said of a later line in the epistle, in which the author affirms that Jesus came “by water and blood”:
This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, 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.
Although the author’s argumentation in this passage confounds many interpreters, the basis for his argument is clear.55 The above lines presuppose images and details related in the account of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Gospel of John. That passage indicates that at Jesus’ death, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out” (19:34). The passage also mentions Jesus handing over the “Spirit” to God (19:30), and it incorporates the narrator’s parenthetical language of “testifying” and “testimony” (19:35). Without having access to the specific narration of Jesus’ crucifixion provided in John alone, the imagery of 1 John 5:6–8 is entirely opaque.56
More Complicated Models
Rather than posit a single line of dependence running from John to 1 John, as I have done here, some interpreters suggest more complex models of how the two texts emerged. One line of proposals argues that the Gospel was composed in two (if not more) major editions. In these scenarios, a hypothetical, earlier edition of John was a source for 1 John, which in turn shaped or informed a later edition of John (in essence, a JohnA–1 John–JohnB model).57
As popular as these models may be in some circles, however, they are excessively speculative and best discarded. In the abstract, Occam’s razor would always have us prefer a single line of dependence between the texts to any more complicated (multistage or back-and-forth) relationship. More problematically still, there is no consensus that John passed through multiple editions, and there is hardly any agreement as to the number and boundaries of those supposed editions or layers.58 Worse, attempts to determine the boundaries of such layers and situate them in relation to 1 John – at least at the fine level some scholars have attempted – are highly prone to circular reasoning (in which one relies on 1 John to determine what material in John is redactional before concluding that a given redactional layer of John depends on 1 John). In short, these models introduce far more problems than they resolve. We are on much firmer ground with the simpler model: 1 John’s dependence on John.
2.2.2 2 John
We have established that the Gospel of John and 1 John stand in a single literary lineage. The Gospel emerged first; next, a second author wrote 1 John, resourcing the language and formal features of the Gospel. Our next task, then, is to understand how 2 John might fit into this lineage. As it stands, a broad spectrum of writers – among them, Rudolf Bultmann, Jürgen Heise, Gerd Schunack, Judith Lieu, and Ruth Edwards – have argued that 2 John represents a later text, modeled on the longer Johannine works.59 I agree with this assessment. Line for line, no Johannine work shows a higher concentration of the classic signs of literary dependence – from verbatim parallels to conflation and serial adaptation – than 2 John.
2.2.2.1 Overlap with John and 1 John
Our first clue that 2 John is a derivative work is the dramatic scale of its overlap with John and 1 John. From one perspective, 2 John is primarily a condensation of the content of 1 John. Indeed, as Hans-Josef Klauck remarks, “apart from verses 10–11, 2 John contains hardly a thought that would not also be found in 1 John.”60 But what makes this overlap especially dramatic is the sheer quantity of verbatim similarities packed within the letter. Some 80/245 words answer to the longer Johannine works (32.7%). Not surprisingly, the percentage increases if we bracket out the framing material of the letter and consider only its body (no such frames, after all, appear in the other Johannine texts). In that case, 57/151 words (37.7%) find near-precise parallels in John and 1 John. No less telling is the nature of this overlap. As seen below, several similarities rise above common vocabulary or phrases. In verses 5–7, one finds entire sentences or clauses agreeing verbatim with lines in the longer Johannine texts:
Additionally, since the parallels in 2 John answer to such a diverse set of passages, the letter is rich with examples of conflation and serial adaptation. In particular, verses 4b–7 represent an almost continuous cento of statements strewn across John and 1 John, with 51/70 words (72.9%) corresponding to words in one of six locations (John 10:18; 1 John 2:7, 22, 28; 3:11; 4:1–3; 5:3). These parallels are especially impressive when laid out in Greek (though I will translate and discuss specific examples below):61
| 2 John 4–7 | John and 1 John |
|---|---|
v. 4 … καθὼς ἐντολὴν ἐλάβομεν παρὰ τοῦ πατρός. | cf. … ταύτην τὴν ἐντολὴν ἔλαβον παρὰ τοῦ πατρός μου. (John 10:18) |
v. 5 καὶ νῦν ἐρωτῶ σε, κυρία, οὐχ ὡς ἐντολὴν γράφων σοι καινὴν ἀλλʼ ἣν εἴχομεν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους | cf. καὶ νῦν … (1 John 2:28) … οὐκ ἐντολὴν καινὴν γράφω ὑμῖν ἀλλʼ ἐντολὴν παλαιὰν ἣν εἴχετε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς … (1 John 2:7) … ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους … (1 John 3:11) |
v. 6 καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ἵνα περιπατῶμεν κατὰ τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ αὕτη ἡ ἐντολή ἐστιν, καθὼς ἠκούσατε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα ἐν αὐτῇ περιπατῆτε. | cf. αὕτη γάρ ἐστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ, ἵνα τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦ τηρῶμεν … (1 John 5:3) ὅτι αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγγελία ἣν ἠκούσατε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς, ἵνα … (1 John 3:11) |
v. 7 ὅτι πολλοὶ πλάνοι ἐξῆλθον εἰς τὸν κόσμον, οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί· οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ πλάνος καὶ ὁ ἀντίχριστος. | cf. … ὅτι πολλοὶ ψευδοπροφῆται ἐξεληλύθασιν εἰς τὸν κόσμον … πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ ὁμολογεῖ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν, καὶ πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ μὴ ὁμολογεῖ τὸν Ἰησοῦν … τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου … (1 John 4:1–3) οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἀντίχριστος (1 John 2:22) |
One finds examples of conflation – the combination of materials sharing elements in common – between verses 5 and 7. Specifically, verse 5 unites 1 John 2:7 and 3:11, each of which contains the expression “from the beginning” (ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς). In turn, verses 5–6 unite materials from 1 John 3:11 and 5:3, each of which incorporates the language of “love” (ἀγαπῶμεν/ἀγάπη). And verse 7 unites 1 John 2:22 and 4:1–3, each of which incorporates the clause, “this is … the antichrist” ([οὗτός/τοῦτό] ἐστιν [ὁ ἀντίχριστος/τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου]. Additionally, serial adaptation – the combination of unlike materials – is evident in the juxtaposed thoughts of verses 4–5 and verses 6–7. Last, one finds examples of the subtle rearrangement of words at multiple points in this synopsis, in vv. 5, 6, and 7. This pervasive evidence of reuse and recombination is unlikely for an author constructing an original work; it points instead to direct literary contact between works.
A final parallel, in turn, clinches the case for direct literary contact between the two texts, specifically, a parallel line that directly presupposes a literary context. In 1 John, the narrator notes that he is “writing” his readers a “new commandment” before indicating – without needing to – that this is not a new commandment but one his readers have “had from the beginning” (2:7). Remarkably, the narrator of 2 John draws up a nearly identical, and structurally parallel, comment:
| 2 John 5–6 | 1 John 2:7 |
|---|---|
οὐχ ὡς ἐντολὴν γράφων σοι καινὴν ἀλλʼ ἣν εἴχομεν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς … καθὼς ἠκούσατε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς. | οὐκ ἐντολὴν καινὴν γράφω ὑμῖν ἀλλʼἐντολὴν παλαιὰν ἣν εἴχετε ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς … ὁ λόγος ὃν ἠκούσατε. |
… not as one writing you a new commandment, but one that we have had from the beginning … as you have heard from the beginning. | … I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning … the word which you have heard. |
Since these parallel statements presuppose the act of “writing,” their similarities demand a literary explanation.
2.2.2.2 Direction of Influence
If we posit some literary copying between 1 and 2 John, the question arises: who copied whom? The reception history, of course, suggests that 1 John might have preceded 2 John. As it turns out, that order holds up when we examine how certain parallel lines fit into their respective texts. In multiple examples, elements shared in common between 1 John and 2 John seem to fit less comfortably in the latter, as if the author of the latter has aggressively wrested them from their more natural contexts in the former.
Staccato Argumentation
At face value, 2 John is supposed to be a letter relating important teachings to a particular “Elect Lady and her children.” Little about the letter seems organic, however. Instead, at multiple points, the text relates ideas in a rapid manner, forcing ideas together in confusing structures. For example, in verses 5–6, the “Elder” of 2 John presents a specific request of the “Elect Lady,” but as Lieu observes, “what the elder is requesting is obscured by the complex grammatical structure through the end of verse 6, exacerbated by the numerous textual variants that reflect scribal attempts to clarify their own solutions.”62 Between his actual request (“I beg you, Lady”) and the content of the command (“that you follow love”; cf. “that” in John 13:34; 1 John 3:12; 4:21), the author confusingly compresses an entire series of ideas explicated carefully across several longer passages in 1 John:
This rapid and staccato juxtaposition of arguments gives the impression of an author condensing the main points of a longer epistle into a small space.
Unclear Links
This tendency to compress arguments creates another unusual feature of 2 John: unclear transitions between its thoughts. Consider, for example, the transition between the above sentence and the next one:
And now I beg you, Lady … that you walk in [love]. For [ὅτι] many deceivers have gone out into the world – those not confessing Jesus Christ coming in the flesh – this is the deceiver and the antichrist.
Despite the causal conjunction “for” (ὅτι), the logical relationship between these two statements is unclear, and the author never develops that relationship. There is, however, another way to make sense of the conjunction. The “for” may be an element copied and pasted directly from 1 John 4:1, a verse in which “for” connects more coherent and complementary ideas, supporting a logical flow of argument:63
Once again, a confusing element in 2 John makes more sense when we read its parallels in 1 John.
Underdeveloped Ideas
We can see the same forces at work when we compare how 1 John and 2 John introduce the idea of “antichrists.” The letter of 1 John builds a complex vision of the coming of “antichrist(s),” explaining that the expectation of a single “antichrist” is fulfilled by the coming of “many antichrists,” who have “gone out into the world” in a single “spirit of antichrist” (2:18–19; 4:1–3). By contrast, the one verse to take up this theme in 2 John (v. 7) “is so succinctly formulated that it would be difficult to understand its intention without reference to … 1 John [4:1–3] alongside the earlier explanation of the antichrist in 1 John 2:18–19.”64 The author references the existence of “many deceivers” (plural) and calls them “the antichrist” (singular) without ever elaborating on the complex relationship between these ideas, and in a jump that seems – at first glance – to be ungrammatical:
For many deceivers have gone out into the world – those who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh – this is the deceiver and the antichrist.
That sudden shift from plural (“deceivers/those”) to singular (“this/deceiver”), however, makes much more sense if we understand the verse as a bricolage of statements from 1 John, some of which use the singular and others the plural:
Rather than see 2 John as an independent introduction of the idea of “antichrists,” then, we should see it as something else: a conflation of expressions from 1 John 4:1 and 2:21–22, omitting important context and leaving behind an unusual shift in grammatical number.
Trivialized Language
A final feature of 2 John enhances the case for it being a highly derivative and rough cento of Johannine language. Specifically, the letter employs Johannine vocabulary differently from 1 John. In some respects, one could even say it deploys that language in unsophisticated ways. Schunack remarks that multiple examples exist in which “the same thing is no longer said [in 2 John] when the same thing is repeated.”65 More pointedly, Lieu detects a “tendency for Johannine language to become slogans in 2 John.”66
One of the words affected by this process is, interestingly, one of the signature expressions of the Johannine corpus, the language of one’s “joy” being “fulfilled.” In the Gospel, the phrase is a specialized expression, consistently referring to the spiritual state of “joy” that the human person receives from Jesus through his indwelling presence, which the world cannot “receive”:
These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be fulfilled.
A little while, and you will see me no more; again a little while, and you will see me … So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. On that day, you will ask nothing of me …
The expression “joy … fulfilled” also appears in 1 John, where it is arguably still linked to spiritual union and indwelling. The author indicates that his joy will be fulfilled as his readers embrace his message and join him in a spiritual “fellowship” that binds them to one another and to the Father and Son:
… 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 his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy may be fulfilled … If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
In 2 John, however, this specialized expression loses its depth. The text deploys the rich, loaded expression of “joy … fulfilled” to complete a stock pleasantry, conventional for ancient Greek letters – the anticipation of a pleasurable future visit: “I hope to come to see you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be fulfilled” (2 John 1:12).67 We are far from a genuinely “Johannine” thought world, in which the fact that the addressees “walk in the truth” (cf. v. 4) would already ensure that their “joy” is “fulfilled.” The imitator assimilates the language of prior texts but crudely, exposing his work as a pale pastiche.
2.2.2.3 Linguistic Departures
Up to this point, we have seen 2 John as a text that extensively, even mechanically, imitates the language of earlier Johannine texts. But interestingly, there are places in the letter where the author departs from stereotypical Johannine terminology – departures that point, once again to the text’s derivative character, revealing that the work imitates several models. Perhaps the most telling of these is found in the opening greeting of the letter: “Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in truth and love” (v. 3). The presence of an opening greeting is already peculiar, distinguishing 2 John from 1 John, which lacks any such feature. But as Ruth Edwards notes, the section also seems to blend very different speech profiles:
Observe … the curious juxtaposition of favorite Johannine vocabulary – ‘love’, ‘truth’, abide’ (vv. 1–2) – with untypical vocabulary (v. 3), notably charis (only once in John’s Gospel, never in 1 John), ‘mercy’ (not elsewhere in the Johannine literature), the un-Johannine ‘Father God’ (lacking the article with ‘God’ and the modifier ‘our’), and the peculiar, quasi-liturgical, description of Jesus as ‘the Son of the Father’.68
It is not especially difficult to determine the origin of these un-Johannine turns of phrase. The triple formula “grace, mercy, and peace” and invocation of the Father and Jesus evokes Paul’s signature and probably self-coined greeting in his undisputed letters (“grace to you and peace from God [the/our] father and [the/our] Lord Jesus Christ”; Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:3; 2 Cor. 1:2; Gal. 1:3; Phil. 1:2; 1 Thess. 1:1; Phlm 1:3) – a greeting emulated in several pseudepigraphal letters in Paul’s name (2 Thess. 1:2; Col 1:2; Eph. 1:2; Tit. 1:4).69 Its closest match, however, appears in two decidedly late Pauline pseudepigrapha – namely, the two letters to Timothy: “Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus …” (1 Tim. 1:2; 2 Tim. 1:2).70 Since the (un-Johannine or less typically Johannine) terms “grace” and “mercy” fit more comfortably into Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts, including 1 and 2 Timothy (e.g., 1 Tim. 1:13, 16; 2 Tim. 1:16. 18), the direction of influence would seem to run from that literature to 2 John.
What is particularly interesting is how the author of 2 John has assimilated this (Deutero-)Pauline greeting. As Edwards writes, the author seems to have taken “typical Johannine vocabulary in the phrase ‘in truth and love’” and “tacked [it] on to the Pauline-style greeting.”71 This pattern suggests two things about our author – first, his self-consciousness about straying too far from his Johannine models, and secondly, his tendency to maintain his authorial facade by doubling down, even crassly, on stereotypical Johannine language.72
As we saw, another peculiarity of the letter is its use of the adjective “elect” or “chosen” (ἐκλεκτός). The term appears in no other Johannine text, but it plays a prominent role in 2 John. In the letter’s prescript, “the Elder” identifies his addressees as an “Elect Lady and her children” (ἐκλεκτῇ κυρίᾳ καὶ τοῖς τέκνοις αὐτῆς; v. 1). Then, at the end of the letter, he introduces another set of figures, writing, “the children of your elect sister greet you” (ἀσπάζεταί τὰ τέκνα τῆς ἀδελφῆς σου τῆς ἐκλεκτῆς; v. 13). Most likely, the two “elect” women mentioned are probably not literal persons but personifications of local Christian communities – a fact confirmed in the verses that follow.73 For one, the text never enhances its portrait of “the Elect Lady” with texture or personal details. On the contrary, the letter refers to the “Elect Lady” in the third person as soon as it introduces her, that is, in its very prescript (“her children”; v. 1) – a move that may point to some level of abstraction. The letter also casually drifts between second-person singular (vv. 4–7, 13) and second-person plural (vv. 8–12) forms of address, suggesting that the “Elect Lady” and the “children” may be interchangeable entities, or that the “Lady” herself is a plural entity. It may also be telling that the Elder sends greetings not from “the elect sister” herself but from “the children of your elect sister” (v. 13). If the sister were a real person, one might expect the Elder to relate personal greetings from her as well.74
Tellingly, the construction of a church as an “Elect Lady” aligns 2 John with other Christian texts that apply feminine metaphors to individual churches (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:2) or the collective “church” (Eph. 5:23–33), some outrightly personifying these as women. The narrator of the Shepherd of Hermas addresses the personified “Church” as “Lady” (Κυρίᾳ).75 The most compelling parallels to the “Elect Lady” language of 2 John, however, lie in the pseudonymous letter of 1 Peter, a work with apparent Pauline influence that might have influenced 2 John in turn.76 Like the narrator of 2 John, the narrator of that letter identifies himself as an “elder” (more precisely, a “fellow elder” [5:1]). He also addresses his letter to a “chosen” set of addressees (1:2; cf. 2:9), echoing Paul’s language (Rom. 8:33; cf. Rom. 9:11; 11:5, 7, 28; 1 Thess. 1:4). Most strikingly of all, 1 Peter closes with greetings to an elect woman – specifically, “to her, in Babylon, who is also elect” (ἡ ἐν Βαβυλῶνι συνεκλεκτὴ; 5:13) – likely a reference to the Christian community of Rome.77
2.2.3 3 John
Few scholars today consider 3 John a derivative work, mainly because they believe its contents are too realistic to be the product of imitation and creative writing – a problematic assumption, as I will argue in a later chapter. But eight of the fifteen total verses of the letter (vv. 1, 3–4, 11–15) contain elements parallel to the contents of other Johannine texts, some displaying features consistent with the techniques of a literary imitator. More importantly, as I noted in the last chapter, the letter also contains a bevy of linguistic features that would suggest a very different speech profile and location for its author – another sign that its relationship with the other Johannine texts is more likely due to direct literary dependence.
2.2.3.1 Linguistic Departures
The best starting point for recognizing 3 John as a derivative text is to recognize how different it is from the others. As Judith Lieu observes, 3 John has an “uneven relationship with the rest of the Johannine literature, which otherwise is characterized by a consistent … set of language patterns; although undoubtedly Johannine, and appealing to those values, 3 John uses its own vocabulary.”78 For one, the letter is peculiar for concentrating “language which was becoming technical in other parts of the church” but which is conspicuously absent in other Johannine texts.79
For instance, no other Johannine texts use the term “church” – a curiosity given that both 1 and 2 John presuppose church settings. (2 John 10 seems to reference a local church with the word “house.”) By contrast, 3 John uses the term “church” not once, but three times (“ἐκκλησία”; 3 John 6, 9, 10). Perhaps not coincidentally, the term “church” is richly represented in other early Christian writings, beginning with the letters of Paul.
Other usages point more directly to a Pauline contribution. Third John is also the only Johannine text to refer to itinerants as “brothers” (3 John 5) and to use the term “fellow workers” (συνεργοί; 3 John 8) – characteristically Pauline language (Phil. 2:25; 1 Thess. 3:2).80 No less interestingly, the epistle uses the term “send forward” (προπέμπειν), a term that carries “a technical meaning in missionary contexts of patronage or financial sponsorship for the journey” in Pauline texts (Rom. 15:24; 1 Cor. 16:6; 2 Cor. 1:16; Tit. 3:13) and some other early Christian literature (Acts 15:3; Polycarp, Phil. 1.1), but not in earlier Greek works.81
A few other linguistic features suggest a more eclectic field of influences for the author. One is the use of the metonym “the Name” for God or Jesus: “they have gone out for the sake of the Name” (3 John 7). No other Johannine text uses this sort of language. The expression is also rare in the New Testament, appearing elsewhere only in Acts 5:41 (“they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the Name”). Parallels exist in other second-century texts, however.82 The letter’s terminology for “gentiles” (ἐθνικοί; 3 John 7) is shared with only Matthew (5:47; 6:7; 18:17). No less unusual is the health wish at the beginning of the letter – a secular convention found in no other New Testament writing: “I pray in all respects that you are prospering and are well, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 2). A wish that an addressee may “prosper” (εὐοδοῦσθαι) is rare in all the extant letters from antiquity.83 It is that much more curious in a Johannine text. The verb “prosper” is found in no other Johannine text, and the notion of one’s “soul” (ψυχή) “prospering” (εὐοδοῦσθαι) evokes no known thread in the theology of the other texts.
The concentration of so many peculiarities in such a brief letter is remarkable. Together, they suggest a different extraction and field of influences for 3 John relative to its predecessors. They also sharpen the contrast between those lines of 3 John evidently modeled on previous Johannine works and the author’s own speech. In short, they intimate that the “Johanninisms” in the letter may be more ornamental than natural – deliberate attempts to imitate or co-opt the language of the Gospel and earlier epistles to position the letter in the same tradition.
Special Explanations
The linguistic peculiarities of 3 John are a known problem in the study of this text, one that has always required special explanations. In her analysis, Lieu speculates that the conspicuous presence of “distinctive, non-Johannine vocabulary” in 3 John and its “firmer links with secular conventions and language” may indicate a decline or diminishing of the so-called Johannine dialect in the Johannine Community: “3 John would express how the Elder wrote naturally, thus betraying that Johannine language had become something of a code to be adopted as appropriate but not constituting the author’s habitual way of thinking.”84 In turn, Lieu surmises that instances in which the author uses “Johannine” expressions may serve a particular function in his work – specifically, they may serve to “defend his ‘Johannine’ status and claim the Johannine mantle.”85
The idea that 3 John’s takes up Johannine language as a signaling device suits one peculiarity of the letter, namely, the unnaturally high frequency of some signature Johannine terms within it. The term “truth” appears six times in 3 John (in 3 John 1, 3, 4, 8, 12), “testify/testimony” appears five times (in 3 John 3, 6, 12), and “love/beloved” six times (1:1, 2, 5, 6, 11). To quote Ruth Edwards, these amount to “a remarkable number of occurrences for such a short letter.”86 Would we expect all correspondence from the Elder to layer the same language so densely? Or does the density of this language point to its artificiality, a straining to appear “Johannine?”
Nevertheless, Lieu’s speculation that this signaling reflects the decline of a hypothetical “Johannine language” feels overdetermined. If the strategy is literary, it requires only a literary explanation; it does not require positing multiple hypothetical dialects in a community, let alone an entire scenario of dialect attrition and death. As I see it, there is another, more compelling, scenario in which we can make sense of this unusual code-switching. Rather than identify that code-switching as the strategy of a real, known author reaffirming a distant Johannine tradition, we can interpret it as the strategy of a pseudepigraphal author co-opting the style of earlier texts. Such an author would be very motivated to gesture towards “his ‘Johannine’ status and claim the Johannine mantle.” In fact, there is good reason to think that the overtly “Johannine” language in 3 John reflects a program of strategic imitation and co-opting: the letter contains several features suggestive of literary dependence.
2.2.3.2 Overlap with John and 1 John
As we saw above, 2 John is especially rich – even oversaturated – with signs of literary dependence on the Gospel of John and 1 John. But a text hardly needs so many parallels for it to be derivative. A literary relationship, after all, can exist between texts whether one is 95% derivative from the other or 5% derivative.
Along these lines, 3 John has fewer direct parallels with the larger Johannines than 2 John. It is not a mere cento of earlier Johannine works but has an independent character, a unique style, and – as we have seen – a distinctive linguistic profile. Nevertheless, several correspondences point to the letter’s independent knowledge of the longer Johannine texts. We can point to a structural overlap (an instance of conflation) and several verbal parallels.
Structural Overlap
One would hardly expect a common formal or structuring element in texts as different as the Gospel and 3 John. One, after all, is an extended narrative account; the other is a brief letter that adheres tightly to ancient epistolary conventions. And yet, the two texts do share a specific literary convention – namely, narratorial affidavits. These affidavits also follow a particular pattern: the narrator first “testifies” to a fact he is writing before affirming that the “testimony” is true.
Two such affidavits appear in the Gospel: the first in chapter 19 and the second in chapter 21, a chapter likely to be a secondary addition to the text. Interestingly, the affidavit in 3 John melds elements of these parallel texts in a clear example of conflation. That affidavit is structurally comparable to the one in John 19:
| 3 John 12 | Gospel of John 19:35 |
|---|---|
καὶ ἡμεῖς δὲ μαρτυροῦμεν, καὶ οἶδας ὅτι ἡ μαρτυρία ἡμῶν ἀληθής ἐστιν. | καὶ ὁ ἑωρακὼς μεμαρτύρηκεν, καὶ ἀληθινὴ αὐτοῦ ἐστιν ἡ μαρτυρία καὶ ἐκεῖνος οἶδεν ὅτι ἀληθῆ λέγει … |
And we also testify, and you know that our testimony is true. | And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth … |
But the affidavit in 3 John also shares important features with the one in John 21, specifically, (a) the use of the first plural (“we”) and (b) the idea that some party “knows” the “testimony is true”:
| 3 John 12 | Gospel of John 21:24 |
|---|---|
καὶ ἡμεῖς δὲ μαρτυροῦμεν, καὶ οἶδας ὅτι ἡ μαρτυρία ἡμῶν ἀληθής ἐστιν. | οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ μαθητὴς ὁ μαρτυρῶν… καὶ οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀληθὴς αὐτοῦ ἡ μαρτυρία ἐστίν |
And we also testify, and you know that our testimony is true. | This is the disciple who is testifying … and we know that his testimony is true. |
As Hans-Joseph Klauck insists, the similarities between the affidavits in the Gospel and 3 John leave “no doubt” of “a relationship between these texts.”87
Beyond conflation, another feature of 3 John’s affidavit suggests its derivative character: it is situated in a very different context and deployed for very different ends from those of its counterparts in the Gospel. The two affidavits in John find a background in depositions of eyewitness testimony, in which witnesses to an event swear to the historical accuracy of their reports.88 In John 19, the narrator introduces his affidavit parenthetically to confirm the historicity of an unusual narrative detail, namely, that when “one of the soldiers pierced [Jesus’] side with a spear … there came out blood and water” (19:34). (The extraordinary presence of “water” here is a supernatural sign meant to confirm Jesus’ earlier teaching that those who believe will have the “living water” of the Spirit within them [7:38–39].)89 Accordingly, the narrator self-consciously insists on the eyewitness origins and reliability of his account: “he who has seen this has testified, and his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth” (19:35).90 The affidavit in John 21 serves the same function, confirming the historical accuracy of the descriptions that precede it. By contrast, 3 John wrests the formula from this matrix, stripping it of any connection to historical reporting. Instead, it deploys the formula in a very different context: the recommendation of a third party.91 The Elder validates the credentials of a man named Demetrius: “Demetrius is well spoken of by everyone… We also testify, and you know that our testimony is true” (3 John 11–12). Here we have a classic fingerprint of literary borrowing: similar expressions employed differently.
Verbal Overlap
Besides the above, 3 John shares other – specifically, verbal – forms of overlap with the larger Johannine texts not shared with 2 John:
| 3 John | Gospel of John and 1 John (and absent in 2 John) |
|---|---|
| “Beloved” as a form of address (3 John 2, 5, 11; cf. also “beloved Gaius” in 3 John 1) | “Beloved” as a form of address (1 John 2:7; 3:2, 21; 4:1, 7, 11) |
| “The good-doer is of/from God; the evil-doer has not seen God.” (3 John 11) | “… no one who sins has either seen him or known him … Everyone who does what is right is righteous … all who do not do what is right are not of/from God” (1 John 3:6–7, 10) |
| “Peace be with you [sg.]” (3 John 15) | “Peace be with you [pl.]” (John 20:19, 21, 26)92 |
The first of these parallels provides solid evidence of a direct relationship between 3 John and 1 John. The specific term “beloved” (ἀγαπητός) appears nowhere else in the Johannine corpus except in these two letters, each of which uses the term as the narrator’s regular, even preferred, form of address for his readers.93
2.2.3.3 Overlap with 2 John
As interesting as 3 John’s overlap with the larger Johannine texts is, its correspondences with 2 John are far more extensive. I have highlighted several macro-similarities between the two letters; the two are of roughly the same length, and both adhere tightly to a standard Greek epistolary form. But the two texts also share strong linguistic ties, veering multiple times into verbatim or near-verbatim similarities.
Those similarities begin to take shape in the prescripts of both texts. The two letters depart from the traditional form of Greek prescripts by adding a highly distinctive element. In each, the Elder describes his addressee as one “whom I love in truth”:
The expression draws apparent inspiration from 1 John 3:18, which encourages the “little children” to “love … in deed and truth” (ἐν ἔργῳ καὶ ἀληθείᾳ).
These parallels continue into the body of each letter. In both 2 and 3 John, the Elder opens his correspondence by claiming that he “rejoiced greatly” upon receiving good reports that certain “children” “walk in the truth” (2 John 4; 3 John 3–4). The fact that both letters open with such statements is not unusual; it was a standard convention of ancient Greek letter writing to open one’s correspondence with a reaction to recent reports by messengers, letters, or other sources about the other party in the correspondence.94 What is unusual, however, is that both statements communicate the same essential idea, with an unmistakable likeness in thought and language:
| 3 John 3–4 | 2 John 4 |
|---|---|
ἐχάρην γὰρ λίαν ἐρχομένων ἀδελφῶν καὶ μαρτυρούντων σου τῇ ἀληθείᾳ, καθὼς σὺ ἐν ἀληθείᾳ περιπατεῖς μειζοτέραν τούτων οὐκ ἔχω χαράν, ἵνα ἀκούω | ἐχάρην λίαν ὅτι εὕρηκα |
| τὰ ἐμὰ τέκνα ἐν ἀληθείᾳ περιπατοῦντα. | ἐκ τῶν τέκνων σου περιπατοῦντας ἐν ἀληθείᾳ … |
when some of the brethren arrived and testified to the truth, as indeed you do walk in the truth. No greater joy can I have than this, to hear that | I rejoiced greatly to find |
| my children walk in the truth. | some of your children walking in the truth … |
Two features of these lines enhance the case for contact between them. First, the language of “walking in the truth” is highly distinctive, occurring only in 2 and 3 John. (The closest analogs in the larger Johannine texts are articulated around images of light/darkness, specifically, “walking in the light/darkness” [1 John 1:6–7; 2:11; 8:12; cf. John 12:35] and “walking in the day/night” [John 11:9–10]). Second, the language appears in both epistles precisely and only at this juncture. And last, despite sharing that highly distinctive phraseology, the two passages employ this expression differently. In 2 John, the Elder rejoices “to find some of your [i.e., the Elect Lady’s] children walking in the truth”; in 3 John, by contrast, the Elder explains that he has “no greater joy” than to hear “that my children walk in the truth.” This variance means we cannot trace the linguistic overlap to a single, stock, letter convention; no such convention is evident here. Instead, we have a similarity-in-difference very much suggestive of the imitator’s craft, in which critical words are arranged into new patterns or applied in different ways.
Similar observations apply to the last and most significant site of overlap between these letters, namely, their postscripts. These sections contain the densest concentration of verbatim correspondence in the epistle, with some 17/27 words agreeing (62.9%), including a five-word string:
| 3 John 13–15 | 2 John 12 |
|---|---|
Πολλὰ εἶχον γράψαι σοι ἀλλʼ οὐ θέλω διὰ μέλανος καὶ καλάμου σοι γράφειν· ἐλπίζω δὲ εὐθέως σε ἰδεῖν, | Πολλὰ ἔχων ὑμῖν γράφειν οὐκ ἐβουλήθην διὰ χάρτου καὶ μέλανος, ἀλλʼ ἐλπίζω γενέσθαι πρὸς ὑμᾶς |
καὶ στόμα πρὸς στόμα λαλήσομεν. ἀσπάζονταί σε οἱ φίλοι… | καὶ στόμα πρὸς στόμα λαλῆσαι … Ἀσπάζεταί σε τὰ τέκνα τῆς ἀδελφῆς σου τῆς ἐκλεκτῆς. |
I had much to write to you, but I do not wish with ink and pen to write you, | I have much to write to you, I would rather not with paper and ink, |
but I hope to see you soon, and we will talk together face to face. The friends greet you … | but I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face … The children of your elect sister greet you. |
At first glance, this level of similarity may not seem remarkable; after all, one expects some formulaic language in the framing sections of letters. But minute differences between these passages suggest the deliberate, surgical adaptations typical of an imitator. The phrase “write … with paper and ink” in 2 John – the sort of phrase we would expect an author would take up as a stock formula or expression – is instead reversed (“ink and pen”) with a minute substitution (“paper” for “pen”) in 3 John. (Compare the similar reversals we saw between 1 Thess. 2:9 and 2 Thess. 3:8.). Other rearrangements and substitutions also pepper the two passages.
2.2.3.4 Direction of Influence
In light of the above evidence, it is safe to situate 3 John within the same literary chain as the other works. But where does it fit in this chain? Is it an early text or a late text? In my view, it is almost certainly the last of the four texts to be written.
3 John and the Longer Johannines
We have every reason to conclude that 3 John was written after the Gospel of John and 1 John. First – and this point cannot be stated enough – it is prima facie difficult to assign priority to a text that enters the historical record no earlier than the third century, and even then, only in a fragment appearing in a fourth-century source. But it is virtually unthinkable to do so when we know that the text was held as suspect according to the earliest writers to cite it and for centuries after. None of this suits the image of 3 John as the earliest document, modeled by the other better-established texts.
Second, when we recognize that 3 John must be linked to other texts in direct, literary relationships, we must contend with the fact that 3 John makes little sense as a possible model or source text for the Gospel and 1 John. It is highly unlikely that a single, stray personal letter almost devoid of theological engagement would spur a literary tradition of the kind and scope of the Johannine literature. But even if we insisted on this possibility, we would be surprised by how little 3 John would have directly contributed to the other texts. We would be puzzled, for example, by the absence of some of 3 John’s core expressions in the other Johannine texts – certainly the repeated term “church,” but also other salient expressions in the letter (e.g., “the Name” as a designation for God, “good-doers,” “evil-doers,” and “soul prospering”). We would also be surprised to see such pivotal expressions as “walking in the truth” and “Elder” passed over by the Gospel and 1 John, but somehow incorporated in 2 John – a text modeled after them. In the end, all that makes 3 John distinctive points to it being a later and peripheral entrant in the Johannine lineage, not a core text.95
3 John and 2 John
If 3 John does not predate the Gospel of John or 1 John, we should situate it on or near the stratum occupied by 2 John. This position suits the close kinship of these letters in other respects, from their strong verbatim similarities to their troubled reception histories. But did 3 John precede 2 John? Or did 2 John precede 3 John? The question is not easy to answer because the texts in question are so brief.
One attempt to break this stalemate contends that 3 John may be the earlier text because it sometimes has simpler – arguably, more primitive – language. Consider, for example, how much more elaborate the opening verses of 2 John are than the opening of 3 John:
Citing these verses, Judith Lieu claims that the likeliest evolutionary route would have started with a brief text and moved to a more elaborate one.96 In his work on literary dependence in the gospels, however, Mark Goodacre cautions against correlating brevity and simplicity with earlier sources. “In source criticism,” he notes, “there is no such rule as ‘the simpler, the earlier.’ [Authors] may well expand material they inherit; they may distill or summarize it. Earlier sources may feature more elaborate material; they may feature less elaborate material.”97
Applied to the case before us, it is possible that 2 John elaborated the bare prescript of 3 John. But the opposite is also possible; it may be that 3 John merely opted to take only the essential features of 2 John’s prescript, leaving those materials it deemed extraneous behind. Notably, 2 John’s prescript is longer than non-Christian examples in the same period, many of which avoid extended honorifics and elaborate greeting formulae.98 One can imagine that the author of 3 John shortened his prescript to conform more closely to these ancient examples, if not for stylistic reasons, then for efficiency in a letter meant to fit onto a single papyrus sheet. Note too that many pseudo-historical or literary letters from antiquity – a category in which I will place 3 John – omit the conventional greeting.99
The decisive blow against Lieu’s appeal to primitivity, however, is the fact that this appeal cannot be carried through consistently. In another section, 2 John has the simpler language, and 3 John seems to elaborate that language with trite uses of quasi-Johannine expressions, specifically, “testified to the truth” (cf. John 5:33; 18:37) and “(no) greater X” (cf. John 15:13):
| 2 John 4 | 3 John 3–4 |
|---|---|
I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth … | For I rejoiced greatly when some of the brethren arrived and testified to the truth, as indeed you do walk in the truth. No greater joy can I have than this, to hear that my children walk in the truth. |
In short, these comparisons produce ambiguous results.
If we cannot rely on this sort of internal data, we might consider other data, beginning with the reception history of these letters, and just as well.100 That reception history has proven fairly accurate so far, producing the very ordering we have reconstructed so far (John, then 1 John, then 2/3 John). Interestingly, that reception history suggests 2 John’s priority over 3 John. Recall again that our earliest mention of 2 John predates our earliest mention of 3 John by half a century. Although it is possible that our many second-century sources merely overlooked 3 John, it is also possible that 3 John did not exist until the late second or early third century. In this case, we should also be reluctant to claim 3 John preceded 2 John.
The idea that 2 John was probably written before 3 John also finds support in sources that suggest that 1 and 2 John sometimes circulated together without 3 John. Again, several writers – among them, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and the author of the Muratorian Fragment – only mention 1 and 2 John. And as we saw, certain manuscripts show minute differences in the translation of 1 and 2 John on the one hand and 3 John on the other. Tellingly, we do not find evidence of the converse; that is, there are no indications that 1 and 3 John ever circulated together without 2 John. This state of affairs presents a challenge for those who would argue that 3 John was the earlier and more secure text – a text so authoritative by the time 2 John was written that the author of the latter would seek to co-opt its authority. The most plausible scenario is that 2 John entered circulation before 3 John. The evidence, as limited as it is, moves in only one direction.
We do not have to build this case on external data alone, however. As I see it, one other internal feature of the two texts makes 2 John’s priority even more likely, namely, the fact that both letters refer to their narrators in shadowy terms as “the Elder.” This epithet is consistent with the style of 2 John, which uses vague epithets throughout (e.g., “Elect Lady and her children,” “Lady,” “children of your elect sister”). By contrast, it sits less comfortably within 3 John, which always assigns proper names to individual characters (“Gaius,” “Diotrephes,” and “Demetrius”).101 Most likely, 2 John pioneered the use of the title “Elder” before 3 John later co-opted it.
2.2.4 Number of Authors
When we examine the texts closely, it becomes clear that the similarities between the four Johannine texts are not coincidental. Instead, these works were produced through processes of direct literary borrowing. Individual authors imitated the style and language of earlier works when developing their own. The only question that remains, then, is how many authors are represented in the collection.
Occam’s razor would incline us to hypothesize as few authors as possible, all things being equal. In this case, however, all things are not equal. When we examine the four texts closely, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Gospel and Epistles are the literary products of four distinct authors, one each for John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John. We need three authors to make sense of the literary borrowing of (a) 1 John from John and (b) 2 John from 1 John. But given the distinct linguistic profile of 3 John and the evidence of 3 John’s use of 2 John, we have ample ground to posit a fourth hand in the collection.
Positing four authors for the Gospel and Epistles of John makes good sense for one other reason. One point that is not remarked upon enough is how different the Johannine works are from one another despite the many literary parallels between them.102 We explored the traits that distinguish the Gospel from the Epistles in Chapter 1, but the Epistles are also remarkably different from one another. In terms of language, we can contrast 1 John – a text riddled with grammatical peculiarities and a convoluted style – with the smoother and more organized Greek of 3 John. But the differences in the form of these epistles are even more striking. First John lacks conventional epistolary features. By contrast, “no other New Testament letter, not even Philemon, has so completely the form of a Hellenistic private letter as II and III John.”103 Similarly, 1 John is starkly anonymous, never directly identifying its author or audience. By contrast, 2 John uses a system of cryptic designations; the author adopts the vague title “the Elder,” and he addresses his audience – evidently a congregation – in veiled language as “the Elect Lady” and speaks of her “Elect Sister.” And both of these strategies stand in dramatic contrast to 3 John, which speaks in concrete terms of “churches” and freely weaves specific first names (“Gaius,” “Diotrephes,” and “Demetrius”). If a single author wrote even two of these texts, why would he adopt such profoundly different strategies across them? The likeliest explanation is that different minds composed each text.
2.3 Conclusion
At the outset of this chapter, I referred to the Gospel and Letters of John as a “family of texts.” In the end, this metaphor seems apt in more than one respect. It suits the likeness of these texts, their resemblance to one another. But it also works as a genetic metaphor, implying direct lines of relationship between them. Upon closer inspection, these texts are not independent creations; instead, they fall into a single line of descent, a single genealogy. That line of descent is literary; the authors of these texts read earlier works in the line and, crucially, imitated what they read. The Gospel of John was written before any other text, setting this literary tradition in motion. Soon after, another pen wrote 1 John, a text that incorporates dozens of distinctive expressions from the Gospel and models several of its structural features. Finally, other writers wrote the epistles we now know as 2 and 3 John.
As I have noted throughout this chapter, the idea that the four texts were produced this way hardly lies outside the mainstream of Johannine scholarship. On the contrary, most scholars assume direct links between the four texts. What scholars have failed to do is to bring this empirically grounded insight into conversation – or better, collision – with the “Johannine Community” hypothesis. If the four Johannine texts show signs of literary contact, their similarities would neither require nor demonstrate that they were all written within a common community, as so many scholars claim. Writers in very different intellectual, geographic, and/or temporal contexts could have produced similar works as long as they had access to previous models.
We might draw an analogy here to one of the best-known problems in biblical studies: the Synoptic problem. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke share common ideas and language, but no one insists that the three were all written within the same geographical setting or narrow social matrix. The reason is simple: literary contact sufficiently explains their overlap. If the author of Matthew possessed a copy of Mark, he could reproduce any number of phrases from that text, even if he was embedded in a different religious-social-cultural matrix hundreds of miles away. We can draw another, even more helpful analogy from the relationship between the genuine letters of Paul and those pseudonymously written in his name. Like the Johannine epistles, these letters do not come from the same author, but they share many linguistic features in common. And yet, scholars do not credit their similarities to a common sociolect but to direct imitation; the pseudonymous letters written in the name of Paul deliberately imitate the language of Paul’s authentic letters to present themselves falsely as works by the same author. Lurking behind these texts is a loose lot of writers separated by geography and time – even decades and centuries.
If we build upon these insights, we have no reason to constrain ourselves to imagine only a single “community” setting for the Gospel and Epistles. Instead, we can imagine other matrices for these texts and other links between their respective authors. For example, we can speculate that the Johannine authors, like the Synoptic authors, hailed from different geographical, social, and linguistic matrices and were indirectly connected through their literary products. In this scenario, what similarities exist between their writings would be due to their access to earlier works and their desire to imitate those works.
As it stands, we already have good reason for suspecting that some or all of the Johannine texts emerged in different contexts, namely, the subtle but notable differences in outlook, ideas, and phraseology we have cataloged across this study so far. As I noted in the last chapter, those differences were crucial in building the current consensus that now assigns the Gospel and Epistles of John to more than one author. But as Hakola insists, the same “marked differences” also “suggest that the gospel and the epistles have emerged in different situations.”104 What Hakola calls evidence of “different situations” – that is, different situations in the life of a single community – might as well be something else: evidence of different “communities” (to use that expression).105 That is, the distinct linguistic and ideological traits of each text may point to their origin in different intellectual, social, and geographical contexts, just as the major and minor differences between works such as Mark, Matthew, and Thomas – works that also share direct extensive literary relationships – suggest they were written by authors of different extractions.106 When we recognize this possibility, the search for the origins of the Epistles becomes more challenging but potentially more rewarding as well. Through these letters, we are poised to see new corners of the early Jesus movement, lost for centuries but still reflected in ancient words.
The Gospel and Letters of John are linked by pervasive imitation and copying. But why is imitation a core feature of this corpus? Why did the authors of these epistles, or letters, borrow so extensively from earlier works? To answer these questions, we must recognize one other feature, one other commonality, uniting these texts that is widely overlooked by contemporary scholars: their authorial claims.
By the late twentieth century, most scholars had rejected the view that a single individual wrote the Gospel and Epistles of John. But that view rests on a valid observation, one easily overlooked by critics trained to read these texts as the work of different hands. Although these texts may not share a common real author, they do share a common implied author.1 Each letter positions itself as the work of the same anonymous eyewitness first encountered in the Gospel: a voice who speaks in a “we”/“I” voice and uses distinctive speech patterns. Even if these texts were not written by a single hand, they were meant to appear as if they were.
When we understand this point, we can fully appreciate what the Gospel and Epistles are: they are a chain, a lineage, of falsely authored works. This kind of literature is quite familiar to biblical scholars. It survives in such collections as the canonical letters of Paul, which include numerous pseudonymous works (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus). Those letters were also written by multiple authors, they also contain signs of direct copying and borrowing, and they also claim a single authorial persona. As I will argue here, conceptualizing the Johannine Epistles as a similar collection allows us to make sense of all the data we have gathered to this point, clarifying the unique interplay of dissimilarity and similarity across the Epistles.
3.1 Disguised Authorship in the Gospel of John
Across two millennia, most Christians have believed that all four texts – John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John – were written by a single hand. The success of this tradition is no accident. The idea that a single author stands behind all four works is the most natural way to read the authorial claims of each, and with good reason. As I will argue here, this reading has been deliberately planted in the texts by their authors.
To appreciate this point, we must begin with the text we have already identified as the earliest Johannine work: the Gospel of John. Although the Gospel is mostly opaque about its origins, it positions itself as an eyewitness record, one condensing the witness of an enigmatic “disciple whom Jesus loved.” This claim takes shape in chapters 1–20 at various strategic points, but it is most explicitly stated in chapter 21.
3.1.1 “We”
The Gospel begins constructing its implied author as an eyewitness to the life of Jesus in its prologue, a typical site for authors to introduce themselves. There, one encounters a brief instance of first-person speech by the narrator – the only such statement in chapters 1–20:
And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us [ἐν ἡμῖν], and we saw [ἐθεασάμεθα] his glory – glory as of the unique son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The author first positions himself among Jesus’ contemporaries (“the Word became flesh and dwelled among us”). Then, continuing in the same “we/us” first-person voice, he claims, “and we saw his glory.” (Note that the “we” of 1:14 is anaphoric, referring back to the “us” of the previous clause.) According to the Gospel, Jesus manifested his glory to others through the miraculous “signs” he performed in his time on earth, as in 2:11: “Jesus performed this, the first of his signs, at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (cf. 11:40). In 1:14, then, the text constructs its narrator as an eyewitness voice – a voice that can speak with authority to the life of Jesus and the signs he performed.
At this point, however, the Gospel still leaves a great deal unsaid. Is the eyewitness “we” the voice of multiple eyewitnesses who collectively produced this text? Or is the “we” the voice of a single figure among these eyewitnesses, either speaking on behalf of a group or speaking in a plural “we” (a nosism)? Any of these interpretations is plausible. Notably, other texts in the Gospel show individual figures speaking in the “we” form. This is true of Nicodemus, meeting with Jesus alone (3:2); this is true of Mary Magdalene (20:2); this is also true of Jesus himself, who (quite jarringly) shifts between “we,” “I,” and third-person self-references in consecutive lines:
Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.
3.1.2 “The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved”
Although the prologue remains vague about the identity of this narrator, later chapters add depth to this authorial cast. Midway through the narrative, a new character emerges among the many eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life mentioned in the account: a nameless, male follower of Jesus referred to as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”2 The appellation given to this disciple suggests his special character, and indeed, the narrative casts this figure as Jesus’ most intimate and steadfast companion through the climactic events of his life. When Jesus reclines for his final, earthly supper (13:2, 4), this disciple occupies the most privileged position at the table: he reclines on Jesus’ “bosom,” evoking the image of Jesus reclining in the bosom of the Father (13:23; cf. 1:18). By contrast, the text positions Peter – Jesus’ most prominent disciple in other texts (e.g., Matt. 16:18) – at a greater distance from Jesus. In the scene, Peter must have his questions to Jesus relayed through the disciple whom Jesus loved:
One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was lying close to the breast of Jesus, so Simon Peter beckoned to him and said, “Tell us who it is of whom he speaks.” So lying thus, close to the breast of Jesus, he said to him, “Lord, who is it?”
Later chapters reinforce the impression that this disciple is superior to the others. During the supper, Jesus predicts that all the disciples will scatter and abandon him (16:32) and that even Peter would deny him (13:38; cf. 18:25–27). In those later scenes, however, the disciple Jesus loves remains steadfast. He is the only male disciple depicted at Jesus’ crucifixion, and moments before his death, Jesus entrusts his mother to this figure (19:26–27). Likewise, at the resurrection, when Mary Magdalene tells the disciples that she cannot find the body of Jesus, Peter and “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” run to the empty tomb. The narrator is keen to note that “the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first … stooping to look in” before him, and that the disciple, upon entering the tomb with Peter, “saw and believed” (20:2–8).3
The fact that the Gospel calls this disciple “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” in 20:2 further implies that he is also the unnamed “other disciple” who appears with Peter in one other text:
Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple. As this disciple was known to the high priest, he entered the court of the high priest along with Jesus while Peter stood outside at the door. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out and spoke to the maid who kept the door and brought Peter in.
The attributes of this “other disciple” also fit “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This disciple adheres to Jesus more steadfastly than Peter or any other disciples, following him even into the place of his interrogation. He also mediates Peter’s access to Jesus, as in 13:23–25. The disciple’s uniqueness is also implied by the fact that the Gospel describes this disciple as one “known to the high priest” – a description that casts him as a figure of some stature (18:15).
Although the Gospel does not expressly identify this figure as one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, there are good reasons for thinking that the disciple should be understood as a member of that group.4 A position among the Twelve would be consistent with the disciple’s prominence and close association with Peter. All the “disciples” named in the Farewell Discourse are also numbered among the Twelve – specifically, Peter, Thomas, and Judas (6:68–71; 20:24).5 Likewise, Jesus tells the Twelve that he has chosen them in 6:70, language that echoes Jesus’ later claim that he has chosen those present for the Farewell Discourse, including “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 15:16, 19).6 The text stops short of indicating who among the Twelve the disciple might specifically be, however.7 Instead, it would seem that the elusive identity of the disciple is a critical facet of his persona.8
Even if the identity of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is kept elusive, his function is clear. As the narrative unfolds, he becomes a key guarantor of the text’s witness. More importantly, he is also cast as an implied author of the text, if not the sole implied author of the text.
The crucifixion scene clearly demonstrates the disciple’s involvement with the Gospel’s production. In that episode, the narrator describes a miraculous sign that purportedly occurred at the scene but which is unknown from earlier gospels, namely, a flow of “water” from the pierced side of Jesus (19:34).9 Perhaps anticipating skepticism over the accuracy of his account or to emphasize the significance of this miracle, the narrator parenthetically mentions that “he who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth – that you also may believe” (19:35). The “he” (masculine pronoun) refers to the disciple whom Jesus loved mentioned at 19:26–27 – the only male disciple who did not abandon Jesus but remained with him up to the crucifixion (16:32; cf. 18:15–16).
But what is the narrator’s relationship to this “he?” Although the Gospel stops short of directly identifying the narrator with this disciple, the text closely links them – so much so that one must conclude that the narrator encompasses this “he” voice, at least in part. On the one hand, if we understand this narrator as the collective voice of a group of eyewitnesses – a perfectly valid reading – then it would be natural to locate the eyewitness disciple within this “we” as a member of the group.10 On the other hand, if we take the “we” to be the voice of a single, individual author using a nosism (“we” in place of “I”), then the likeliest candidate to be that author is “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This makes sense in the abstract; after all, why would an eyewitness narrator need to rely on the testimony of a separate eyewitness, and why would he construct an extraordinary cast for a different disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved?11
Other features of 19:35 strengthen the case for closely identifying the narrator’s voice with the voice of the disciple Jesus loved. First, the parenthetical comment “he knows [οἶδεν] that he tells the truth” suggests that the disciple is presently alive. It is also most fitting for a speaker who knows and can validate his inner mental state. Still more telling is the narrator’s note that the disciple’s testimony is made precisely to and for the text’s readers: “he who saw it has borne witness … so that you may believe.” It is, in short, a testimony firmly contextualized in the production of the Gospel. Finally, one cannot miss the alignment between the claim that the disciple “has borne witness … so that you may believe” to the narrator’s own stated purpose in writing later in the text: “these things are written so that you may believe” (20:31).12
In this case, then, the “we” of 1:14 would seem to include, if not directly correspond to, the “he” of 19:35. The second option, of course, is precisely how ancient Christians understood the authorial claim of John, and with good reason. Ancient readers were accustomed to ancient historians and biographers – among them, Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Polybius, and Josephus – alternating pronouns in similar ways, using first-person pronouns in framing sections (including nosisms) but preferring the use of third-person references in the narrative proper (illeisms).13 Polybius, for one, links the practice to stylistic reasons and the desire for narratorial modesty:
One need not be surprised if we refer to ourselves by proper name and other times by common expressions … For since we have been much involved in the events to be recorded hereafter, it is necessary to alter our self-designations so that we not … fall into a boorish rhetorical style without being aware by constantly interjecting “of me” or “on account of me.” But by making use of all these and substituting always what is fitting at the time, we should avoid as much as possible the exceeding offensiveness of speaking about ourselves, since by nature such expression is unacceptable but is often necessary when what is being represented cannot be signified in a different way.14
3.1.3 Eyewitness Claims in Chapter 21
The idea that John is an eyewitness work is implicit through the first twenty chapters of John, but it is made explicit in chapter 21, an appendix to the text added by a later scribe.15 That scribe, hoping to authenticate his product, introduced a second epilogue reaffirming the eyewitness authorship of the Gospel up to and (crucially) including his interpolated chapter. Tellingly, this second epilogue is a bricolage of three verses of the original Gospel (including two that communicate the text’s eyewitness claims), namely, 1:14; 19:35, and the text's original conclusion, 20:31:16
| John 21:24–25 | John 1:14 | John 19:35 | John 20:30–31 |
|---|---|---|---|
| This is the disciple who is testifying to these things | cf. “He who saw it has testified” | ||
| And has written these things | cf. “these are written that you may believe …” | ||
| And we know that his testimony is true | cf. “we” | cf. “his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth” | |
| But there are also many other things that Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. | cf. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book …” |
At first, the narrator follows the pattern of all preceding verses in the Gospel; the narrator speaks in the first-person plural (“we”) and makes only third-person references to “the disciple.”17 In this line, however, the narrator makes explicit what was only implicit in previous chapters, namely, that a single male eyewitness, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” is both “testifying” in the Gospel of John and has actually “written these things” (that is, all its text up to and including the epilogue).18 Then, following through on this premise that a single disciple “has written these things,” the author allows the individual “disciple” to inhabit a singular “I” voice for the first time – something that the author of chapters 1–20 does not do, but that the authors of 1, 2, and 3 John, who freely move between “we” and “I” language, will do.19
3.1.3.1 A Single Implied Author
Not all scholars agree with this interpretation of 21:24–25. Some cite the clause “and we know that his testimony is true” as definitive proof that the disciple cannot be the implied author of John – as if, through the shift from “we” to “he,” “the author differentiates himself (as is not always recognized) from the ‘beloved disciple.’”20 I disagree. The claim that the “we”/“I” voice of 21:24–25 cannot possibly be the voice of the disciple himself is invalidated by the simple fact that many readers – in fact, all known ancient readers of John – had no trouble equating the two.
The reasons why ancient Christians read 21:24 in a different way are obvious, and they are persuasive. First and foremost, the text explicitly casts the disciple as the one “who has written these things.” This is precisely how a text would identify its implied author (cf. 3 John 9). It is unthinkable, then, to read this verse in the opposite vein. Second, a single author is more compatible with the “I” language of 21:25. Third, as jarring as the sudden shift from “we” to “he” of 20:31 may seem, ancient readers were accustomed to authors fluidly slipping between first-person plural, first-person singular, and third-person self-references in compressed spaces. This was especially true around framing material, such as prologues and epilogues. For example, in the opening lines of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shifts from a third-person self-reference (“Thucydides the Athenian”) to first-person singular (“I”) and plural (“we”) self-references.21 Josephus too shifts from narratorial “we” to “I” in an epilogue, mirroring the shift we see in John 21:24–25:
Here we close the history, which we promised to relate with perfect accuracy for the information of those who wish to learn how this war was waged by the Romans against the Jews. Of its style my readers must be left to judge; but, as concerning truth, I would not hesitate boldly to assert that, throughout the entire narrative, this has been my single aim.22
In some cases, these shifts could produce tangles like the one observed in 21:24, in which an author refers to himself in the first and third persons in the same line. Especially striking is a single passage from the writings of Polybius, in which he juxtaposes not three but five forms in a tightly compressed space: “Polybius,” “I,” “we,” and (in references to himself and Scipio) “the men” and “them”:
For I promised before to describe in detail why and how the fame of Scipio in Rome advanced so much and burst forth more quickly than was his due and with this how it happened that Polybius grew in friendship and intimacy with the aforementioned person to such an extent that, not only did the report about them extend as far as Italy and Greece, but their conduct and companionship also became well known in more distant regions. We have, therefore, indicated in what has been said previously that the beginning of the friendship between the aforementioned men came out of a certain loan of books and the conversation about them.23
We also find these constructions in other genres, including epistolary. One especially instructive example appears in 2 Corinthians. There, Paul, simultaneously speaks of himself in the first and third persons for reasons of modesty, that is, to avoid boasting over his visionary experiences (vv. 12:6–7). In the process, he builds statements extremely close to what we find in John 21 (“we know that his testimony is true”):
I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows – was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.
It is possible that the similar alternations we see in John 21:24 25 – the casual drift between “we,” “I,” and “he/him” language – also represent an instance of narratorial modesty. Alternatively, this sort of drift might have been part of the scribe’s natural style. Or perhaps the construction was entirely artificial. It is possible that the scribe might have felt a particular need to compress so many different self-references in the verses for strategic reasons, that is, to cover all the various forms of narratorial self-reference in the original text of John (“we,” “disciple,” “he/his”). Recall again that the verses are essentially a bricolage of phrases derived from chapters 1–20. Whatever the case, ancient readers of John had no difficulty distilling the scribe’s point in 21:24–25. These verses draw out the essential authorial claim of chapters 1–20 – that the Gospel is, in some way, an eyewitness account. – a point the redactor of John made to convince readers that his work, chapter 21, was the conclusion of that account, invested with the same authority.24
3.1.4 Evaluating the Claim
As we have seen, the Gospel constructs its implied author as an eyewitness to the life of Jesus. And yet, we have every reason to question this claim. Much of the text is of suspect historicity, including entire discourses whose style, tone, and contents differ so radically from the sayings of Jesus preserved in Paul and the Synoptics as to indicate “creativity … on a large scale.”25 That these discourses are the author’s fabrications is evident from the fact that “when Jesus, the literary character, speaks, he speaks the language of the author and his narrator.”26 In some passages, in fact, “it is impossible to tell when Jesus … stops speaking … and when or if the narrator speaks,” most notably 3:13–21, 31–36.27 In short, Jesus’ voice has been commandeered by the author, who makes him the mouthpiece of an intricate system of ideas foreign to the Synoptics, including the need to be “born from above,” “abide/dwell in God,” and “walk in the light.”
More to the point, the eyewitness claimed by the text is probably a fabrication in his own right. Since the literary turn in Johannine studies (1980s onwards), several writers have argued that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” may be a mere literary device or invention.28 The text casts the eyewitness as Jesus’ most intimate disciple – a figure moving in his inner circle and outranking even Peter in access to him (13:23–25). And yet, the identity of this figure is unknown, concealed under what Harold Attridge describes as “studied anonymity.”29 All efforts to identify him with a known disciple of Jesus result in “a dead end”; the text “systematically defeats any attempt to identify who that witness was.”30 He is unattested in other early sources. For example, every Synoptic parallel that could corroborate his presence at a given moment in Jesus’ life does not. No such disciple appears in the Synoptic crucifixion scenes (Mk 15:40–41; Mt. 27:55–56; cf. John 19:26–27) nor in Luke’s description of Peter’s visit to the tomb (Lk. 24:12; cf. John 20:2–10). No less problematically, the eyewitness has a highly artificial texture. “Unlike the other Johannine characters … he is the ideal disciple, the paradigm of discipleship,” who “has no misunderstandings.”31
As David Litwa writes, the similarities between John’s eyewitness and those found in ancient pseudepigrapha “force the critical reader to reflect on why scholars even today argue strongly for the historicity of the Beloved Disciple … while easily discounting the historicity of similar eyewitness claims.”32 Some such works adopt in-text characters as narrators or sources, often presenting them in similarly idealized casts:
[In the Life of Apollonius] Damis, for instance, is Apollonius’ closest disciple who sticks by him and even suffers arrest in Rome … A basic similarity can be detected in John. Although Jesus loves all his disciples, the Beloved Disciple is the most intimate. Unlike Jesus’ other followers, the Beloved Disciple does not abandon Jesus after he is arrested. Rather, he follows Jesus into the courtyard of his enemy (John 18.15). Presumably it was even more dangerous to stand at the foot of the cross (John 19.26).33
The identification of these in-text characters with the implied author may also unfold as gradually as in John, surfacing in isolated fragments of first-person speech.34 Similarly, these eyewitnesses may be obscure or anonymous.35 In pseudepigrapha, anonymity serves a particular purpose: it ensures that the eyewitness remains “beyond empirical verification,” and “to a certain degree, unfalsifiable as well.”36 Texts may even imply the (fictional) deaths of these figures to sustain a sense of realism – a device also seen in John 21.37
The author of John had strong incentives to invent such an eyewitness. The device not only imbues the Gospel an air of historical authenticity, it also gave the Gospel an edge in the quest for readers. Mark and Matthew do not claim to be eyewitness accounts, and Luke distinguishes himself from “those who … were eyewitnesses” (1:2). As David Litwa notes, if the author of John “knew the Synoptic Gospels (as seems likely to many), he may have used the eyewitness convention to outperform his perceived competitors.”38
3.2 Disguised Authorship in the Epistles
The Gospel of John claims that it was written by an invented “disciple whom Jesus loved,” a character who sometimes speaks as a “we” or “I” and other times in the third person (1:14; 19:26, 35; 21: 24–25). What scholars overlook, however, is that the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John participate in the same authorial pretense; they also position themselves as works by the same character. The Epistles similarly alternate between first-person plural “we” and singular “I” speech (1 John 1:1; 2:1; 2 John 5, 8, 12; 3 John 1, 12–14). They also present themselves as works by an eyewitness to the life of Jesus who “testifies” to what he has “seen” or who insists that his “testimony is true” (1 John 1:1–4; 3 John 1:12; cf. John 1:14; 19:35; 21:24). Last, and perhaps most strikingly of all, these texts also take up the same idiolect – the same individual speech patterns – as the Gospel’s author, including the same distinctive turns of phrase and critical terms.
These similarities are hardly coincidental. Instead, they are evidence that these works were meant to appear to be works by the same hand. Since the Epistles were not written by the same author as the Gospel, however, the conclusion is inescapable: the Epistles are falsely authored works, as, indeed, all three – and especially the latter two – were suspected of being in antiquity.
3.2.1 1 John
First John shows an astute awareness of the complexities of the Gospel’s authorial self-representation, and it mirrors that authorial cast to a great extent. Not surprisingly, the construction of this duplicate implied author begins in the opening lines of 1 John, a section of the text I have already highlighted as a site of deliberate imitation of the Gospel. Those sentences are written in an exclusive first-person plural (“we”), they present the text’s implied author as one who has “seen” Jesus, and they draw language from the narrator’s affidavit in 19:35 (cf. “he who saw this has testified” and “we have seen and testify”):
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, which our hands have touched – concerning the word of life … we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard we also proclaim to you, so that you may have fellowship with us … And we are writing this that our joy may be fulfilled.
Especially beside so many other Johannine touches – expressions such as “beginning,” “word,” “life,” “with the Father,” and “joy… fulfilled” – this preface leaves readers with the impression that the passage’s “we” voice is the “we” narrator who speaks in the Gospel.
As the epistle continues, the narrator also takes up a second pronoun: a singular “I” (“My little children, I am writing this to you …” [2:1]; “Beloved, I am writing you …” [2:7; cf. 2:11–14, 21, 26; 5:13]). Far from distancing the text’s implied author from his counterpart in the Gospel, this alternation strengthens the link between the two. It echoes the diverse and changing ways in which the Gospel’s narrator speaks in his text: as a plural “we” in the prologue and as the singular “disciple whom Jesus loved” in later chapters. In the same passages, the author also continues imitating the speech inventory of the Gospel’s narrator, reproducing his distinctive idioms. In this way, the text suggests that the voice of the Gospel speaks in 1 John.
As unmistakable as these features are, many scholars miss these connections. They miss them because their imaginations are constrained by the dominant scholarly paradigms around these texts, namely, that the texts have different authors, situated in a later community. Under the influence of these views, some writers go so far as to deny that the narrator makes “a claim to an eyewitness experience of the historical ministry of Jesus.”39 Here, Ehrman is correct: “When more critical commentators – Brown, Lieu, Schnackenburg, and others – reject the idea that the author is claiming to be an eyewitness to the fleshly reality of Jesus in his public ministry, it is almost always because they are convinced that in fact he was not an eyewitness.”40 Each “fails to consider the possibility that the author wants to portray himself as an eyewitness in order to validate his claims about the real fleshly existence of Jesus.”41
3.2.1.1 Strict Anonymity
For all the consistencies between the narrators of the Gospel and 1 John, the latter departs from the former in one important respect. In the Gospel, the narrator refers to himself (or to a constituent eyewitness) in the third person under the epithet “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (21:24; cf. 19:26, 35). Not so in 1 John. In this text, written in the first person, the narrator maintains a strict, even intense, anonymity.
The fact that 1 John’s narrator does not directly identify himself as the “disciple whom Jesus loved” does not prevent us from equating the two. The same narrator does not style himself “the Elder” either, as do the narrators of 2 or 3 John, and yet, most biblical scholars assign these epistles to a single authorial persona. Note too that although the author does not expressly identify himself as a particular “disciple,” he casts himself as a disciple by positioning himself among those who knew Jesus firsthand – an essential attribute of Jesus’ disciples.
Notably, other falsely authored works also shy away from direct authorial claims even while assuming the identity of specific figures. The book of Wisdom, for example, never names its author, but it signals to its readers that it was composed by Solomon, the biblical king who constructed the first Temple and was renowned for his wisdom. More than halfway through the text, its anonymous speaker relates that he prayed for the gift of wisdom (7:7; cf. 1 Kings 3:9); he later addresses God with the words, “you have chosen me to be king of your people … you have commanded the building of a temple on your holy mountain” (9:7–8). The implication is clear. Similarly, the book of Hebrews never names its author, but elements of the text suggest to its readers that they are reading a work of Paul’s. In its closing verses, the text’s voice signals that he is located in Italy, a region where Paul ministered (13:24); he also explains that he will visit soon in the company of Timothy, a known companion of Paul’s (13:23). These cues and others have led Christians to attribute the work to Paul through most of the past two millennia.42
It is unclear why the author of 1 John opted for an implicit, rather than explicit, claim to the identity of the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” The author might have wanted to mimic the strong anonymity of most parts of the Gospel.43 It is also possible that the author preferred not to deploy the title “disciple whom Jesus loved” in a first-person letter since the Gospel only takes up the title in the third person. Alternatively, as Clare Rothschild observes, some authors chose to keep their authorial claims implicit since pseudonymity was “a culpable offense risking punishment.”44 In this case, the author of 1 John might have shied away from a direct identification to preserve deniability. We can also not rule out modesty as a factor. Whatever the case, we are meant to read 1 John as a work by the same author as John.
3.2.2 2 and 3 John
What is true of 1 John is true of the other epistles. Although 2 and 3 John construct their implied author(s) in a more developed cast than the implied author of 1 John by styling him “the Elder,” they do nothing to deter their readers from conflating these figures. On the contrary, they invite – even direct – that identification. For this reason, even today, most critical commentators speculate that a single author penned the three letters.
3.2.2.1 2 John
Many scholars assume that 1 John and 2 John may be works of a single author, and with good reason: the two fit together.45 Second John constructs an implied author situated within the same crisis described in 1 John: the emergence of “antichrists” who “have gone out into the world” (v. 7; cf. 1 John 2:18–19; 4:1–3). The narrator of the text stakes out the same ideological position as the author of 1 John within that crisis, reiterating the same points, even verbatim. Finally, the implied author speaks in the familiar idiolect of the narrators of John and 1 John – an idiolect suffused with such Johannine language as “truth,” “abide/dwell,” and “new commandment.”
Nevertheless, 2 John makes a critical modification to the eyewitness. Unlike 1 John, which keeps its narrator veiled in strict anonymity, 2 John has its narrator identify himself under an enigmatic title: “the Elder” (1:1). The use of a substitute title for an implied author is not unknown, even in pseudo-historical letter collections that present themselves as works by known authors. One example appears in the pseudepigraphal letters of Diogenes, a collection of letters incrementally expanded by multiple hands between the first century BCE and the first century CE.46 In the prescript of Letter 49, an author presenting himself as Diogenes identifies himself merely as “the Cynic”:47
The Cynic to Aroueca [Ὁ κύων Ἀρουέκᾳ]. Know yourself (for thus you would do well) and, if there is any disease afflicting your soul, senselessness for example, get a doctor for it. And pray the gods that you do not do more harm than good by choosing one that only seems to be a good physician. Do not thus delay, for wine is being stored up for you, but you will ruin it if you do not filter it. But if you do this, you will be a valuable friend, not only to me but to all the others too. My greeting and salutation has been sent on the condition that you do not disregard what is written.48
The same device also appears in other kinds of pseudepigrapha. Consider, for one, a work included in contemporary Bibles: the book of Ecclesiastes. The prescript of that text identifies its author merely as “the Teacher [Qoheleth], the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1). Later chapters, in turn, sustain this use of an epithet alone (1:2, 12; 7:27; 12:8, 9, 10), while folding in indications that this royal figure “acquired great wisdom” (1:16) and crafted “proverbs” (12:9). The reference here is obviously to the ancient Israelite king Solomon, renowned for his wisdom (1 Kings 4:29–34). Still, the text studiously avoids taking up Solomon’s name. The epithet “Teacher” does not disconfirm the idea that the text was written by Solomon, but it shies away from an explicit claim. Ecclesiastes, in short, deliberately leaves space for both receptive and skeptical readers to engage the text and defer a judgment on authorship. All the while, it works more subtly to consolidate its false authorial claim.49
Similar factors might have motivated the epithet “the Elder” in 2 John. Unlike its predecessors, 2 John adopts a conventional letter form, which requires the sender to identify himself in the prescript (“X to Y”). The author might have been hesitant to use a specific name since his models, John and 1 John, never named their narrators.50 To stand within the same tradition, however, he chose the epithet “Elder.” On its face, the designation is ambiguous – a title appropriate for any Christian leader or figure of advanced age but specific to none. And yet, by extension, it was also a term suitable for the particular author implied by the text: an eyewitness disciple of Jesus. In 1 Peter, the voice of “Peter” identifies himself as “a fellow elder [συμπρεσβύτερος] and a witness to the sufferings of Christ” (5:1; cf. 1:1).51 And in the extant fragments of his Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, Papias applies the term “elder” to the disciples:
But if any who had also followed the elders ever came along, I would examine the words of the elders – what did Andrew or what did Peter say, or what did Philip, or what did Thomas or James, or what did John or Matthew, or any other of the disciples of the Lord – and what Aristion and John the elder, disciples of the Lord, were saying.52
Selecting “the Elder” allowed the author to claim the identity of this eyewitness, perhaps directly in conversation with one or another of these texts. At the same time, the ambiguity of the title might have also allowed the author to remain strategically elusive, leaving space for skeptical readers to defer judgment on the text’s authorship.53
3.2.2.2 3 John
Written after 2 John, the epistle now known as 3 John lays the most decisive claim on earlier Johannine forms of address. First, by presenting itself as a letter from “the Elder” and deploying his familiar formulae, the text introduces itself as the work of the same hand as 2 John.54 Once again, “the Elder” addresses his reader(s) as those whom he “loves in truth,” praises them for walking “in the truth,” and closes with the note that he has more to write but would rather not use ink. But 3 John reaches further back in the Johannine tradition, building links to the Gospel and 1 John as well. Like the narrator constructed in John and 1 John, the narrator of 3 John alternates between “we” (v. 12) and “I” (1–4, 9–10, 13–14) forms. Furthermore, he uses the term “beloved” for his readers (vv. 2, 5, 11; cf. v. 1), a form also used by the narrator of 1 John (2:7; 3:2, 21; 4:1, 7, 11). Finally, near the end of the letter, “the Elder” uses the language of testimony, endorsing a figure named Demetrius with the words, “we also testify, and you know that our testimony is true” (3 John 12). As noted in Chapter 2, this statement parallels and seems to be modeled on the Gospel narrator’s affidavit: “he who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth” (John 19:35).55 In fact, the clause “you know that our testimony is true” may allude to the Gospel, expressly citing and leveraging the existing trust its (implied and real) readers have in the author from his other supposed works. The net effect of these moves is obvious. The narrator casts himself as the one – the same – writer who supposedly penned all the earlier Johannine texts.
3.2.3 Ancient Skepticism
The Epistles of John claim the same author of the Gospel of John: an unnamed eyewitness to the life of Jesus. This claim fails on three counts, however. It fails, first, because several features of the letters – their different reception histories, different linguistic features, and different theological claims – do not support the idea that these texts were written by the same hand as wrote the Gospel. It fails, second, because the texts show signs of direct literary borrowing from the Gospel – a peculiarity for a single author. But above all, it fails because although these texts claim the same implied author as the Gospel, that figure did not exist. The Gospel is not the work of an eyewitness, let alone the specific unnamed disciple it constructs as its author. Neither, then, are the Epistles. By claiming an invented figure as their implied author, these works expose themselves for what they are: extensions of a fabrication and fabrications in their own right. They are a lineage of falsely authored texts.
The idea that three Johannine epistles are all falsely authored texts fits one other feature of the Epistles: their problematic reception histories. We know that all three epistles were suspected of being falsely authored works by at least some ancient and medieval Christians. The most intense scrutiny fell on 2 and 3 John, which were excluded from some canonical lists for centuries. In reopening questions about these works, I stand within an established line of Christian skepticism. It is probably telling that all other New Testament texts once under the same clouds of suspicion – for example, Jude and 2 Peter – are recognized as pseudonymous by scholars today.56
The situation is, of course, somewhat different for 1 John. Many features of the letter – its divergences from the Gospel, signs of literary borrowing, and dubious authorial cast – suggest that it too is a falsely authored work. Nevertheless, it received far less scrutiny than 2 and 3 John, though its authenticity was challenged in some later Syriac sources.57 Then again, 1 Peter was not subject to the scrutiny of 2 Peter, even though many critical scholars have concluded that it too is pseudonymous.58 Many critical scholars also reject the authorial claims of 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, James, and others – all because of their dubious internal features. We can, then, still posit that 1 John is pseudepigraphal. As for why 1 John might have escaped greater suspicion, it is possible that its early date was a factor. (The epistle, after all, enters the historical record about the same time of the Gospel of John and significantly before 2 and 3 John.) Alternatively, the internal features of 1 John might not have raised the same suspicions as those of 2 and 3 John.59
3.2.4 A Lineage of Falsely Authored Works
The idea that a text such as John might have triggered the production of multiple falsely authored texts written by different pens is perfectly plausible. Many ancient literary corpora attracted these sorts of additions. Within Christian literature, the canonical Pauline letter collection includes contributions by roughly a half-dozen different authors – namely, (1) Paul himself (the authentic core), (2) the author of 2 Thessalonians, (3) the author of Colossians, (4) the author of Ephesians, (5+) the author(s) of the Pastorals, and (6) the author of Hebrews.60 Even more authors created the non-canonical (7) 3 Corinthians, (8) Laodiceans, (9) Letters of Paul and Seneca, and (10) the lost Epistle of Paul to the Alexandrians.61 Similarly, the extant Petrine letters – 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the Epistula Petri (embedded in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies), and the Letter of Peter to Philip – are pseudonymous, and yet each was also written by a different hand.62
Chains of pseudepigraphy could also transcend genres, as in the case of the Johannine literature.63 Beyond the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters mentioned above, an Apocalypse of Paul and a Prayer of the Apostle Paul were discovered at Nag Hammadi.64 Likewise, other writers contributed to an emerging “Petrine Discourse” by penning a narrative Apocalypse of Peter and a Coptic Apocalypse of Peter – texts with some direct literary relationship to 2 Peter – as well as a Gospel of Peter.65
Since these collections span multiple centuries, it is clear that many of the above authors had no direct connection to or contact with one another. Instead, these authors wrote from different (intellectual, geographical, and temporal) matrices.66 In this case, then, we are more than justified in suspecting that the Epistles of John might have also come from writers who hailed from different matrices.
3.3 Conclusion
Ancient Christians were able to see a vital fact that eludes many scholars, namely, that the Gospel and Letters of John were written in a single voice as if they were works of a single individual. But contemporary scholars can appreciate what most ancient Christians, less equipped to conduct careful literary analyses, were not in a position to see. They can understand that the Gospel and Epistles of John were written by different hands. The similarities between these works indicate a common authorial claim in these texts; the differences, in turn, falsify that claim. In the subtle interplay of the two – the tension of similarity and difference – the true character of the Epistles of John shines through. These letters are falsely authored works written in the persona of the invented eyewitness of the Gospel of John.
What makes this thesis so compelling is that it can answer multiple questions, core questions, about the Epistles that other scholarly models, especially the Johannine Community Hypothesis, fail to address. If the Epistles were written by multiple known authors and transmitted by a single community, why do these works borrow so directly and extensively from the Gospel and one another, even to the point of double-digit percentages of verbal overlap? (Under the Community Hypothesis, there is no obvious reason why they should have; one needs a separate explanation for this.) For that matter, why do the Epistles mirror the Gospel in their “we”/“I” “testifying” cast? (That, too, is hardly necessary for letters by different authors. One again needs a special explanation for this.) Why would later Christians attribute these works to a single author? (Wouldn’t a common community have transmitted the memory of multiple authors?) And why did a large segment of Christians question the authenticity of some of these texts? (Wouldn’t the community that transmitted 1 John as an authentic work also have commended 2 and 3 John as authentic?) Although the Community Hypothesis is meant to explain the basic features of the Epistles, it stops decidedly short of resolving the many riddles surrounding these texts. To answer these tangled questions, we need either more than the Community Hypothesis or something other than the Community Hypothesis.
By contrast, the idea that the Epistles are a lineage of falsely authored works cuts through all these questions in a single, swift stroke. Falsely authored works are known to extensively borrow language from their models by design (imitation of style). Falsely authored works would also assume a single “we”/“I” “testifying” authorial cast, again by design. Falsely authored works sharing the same authorial pretense would be misperceived by certain audiences as works by the same author by design. And falsely authored works would very likely have different circulation histories than their models and be the object of legitimate and enduring scrutiny. (Consider, for example, the doubts surrounding the pseudonymous letters of Jude, 2 Peter, and Laodiceans in antiquity.) In the search for the simplest and most elegant explanation for the internal features and external reception of the Epistles, this model stands alone.
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.
