The First Epistle of John

Towards the end of the New Testament appear three letters apparently written by the apostle John, author of the fourth gospel.  The first is not long (105 verses); the other two are much shorter.

The first letter is a general pastoral letter, concerned about the growth of people in a church.  (The other two letters are addressed to individuals.  II John is addressed to an unknown "lady chosen by God", possibly a single individual, possibly a more general address to the Church personified.  III John is addressed to Gaius, "my dear friend."  Both of these letters address the issue of hospitality to visiting ministers.)

The theme of the first letter of John is that True Christianity has three parts:

1. Belief that Jesus came in the flesh;
2. Obedience to God;
3. Love for others.

The certainty of one's relationship with God is theological, moral and social.

I John includes Hebrew parallelisms. In this book there are sharp contrasts: antichrists/Christ, light/darkness, purity/sin. At each turn, the reader is presented with only two options; everything is black or white. The World is an important topic in this book, as is true Christian fellowship.

Like the book of Hebrews, the teaching is cyclical (or spiral), returning to the same concepts again and again.  Like the book of Hebrews, there is no named author or reader; like the book of Hebrews the concern is of believers, those already committed to following Jesus.

(The book contains 105 verses, could be memorized in 15 weeks at a verse a day.)

I have, as a reference, a nice commentary by John Stott, The Letters of John, from InterVarsity Press, 1988. (At this time, used copies are available from Amazon for 99 cents.)

Other online resources for I John

There is a nice summary of I John at OverviewBible.com.  Summaries of the second and third letters are here and here. The Bible Project now has a nice video summary here.)

Wikipedia, of course, covers I John, II John and III John, and also has an overview of the three Johannine epistles.

The Comma

There is a fairly notorious medieval corruption of Scripture in I John 5: 7-8, where presumably a scribe elaborated on the concept of the Trinity in the margins of an ancient text and the elaboration crept into medieval translations. An account of this insertion is given here on the evangelical Christian website of Bible.org. Appearing in the King James translation of the Bible, this added sentence has been removed and footnoted in more modern translations. This medieval corruption of Scripture was noted by Erasmus, who refused to put it into his New Testament translation of Greek. As a mathematician, I will point out that Sir Isaac Newton (!!) wrote a paper, An Historical Account of Two Corruptions of Scripture, on this very problem.