First Letter of John written

The first letter of John has no address, no greeting, no signature and no formal ending. It opens instead like a witness statement: that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.

Every clause there is physical, and that is deliberate, because of what the letter is arguing against.

Teachers had left the community and were saying that Jesus had not really come in the flesh. The technical name for that position is docetism, from the Greek verb to seem, and it held that a divine being could not truly take on a body, so the human appearance was a semblance. It was one of the first serious controversies in the church, and Ignatius of Antioch is attacking the same idea within a generation.

The response is stated as a test: every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.

The word antichrist appears in this letter and nowhere else except its companion, and it does not mean what popular usage has made of it. It is used in the plural for the people who had left: even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.

Alongside the polemic runs the other theme, and the letter alternates between them so consistently that it is difficult to outline. Love is what a claim to know God has to produce. Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. Anyone who does not love remains in death. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?

Then two of the shortest statements about God in the Bible: God is light, and God is love.

The author is not named. The traditional identification with John the apostle rests on the close similarity of language and outlook to the fourth Gospel, and on the testimony of second-century writers.

It also contains the assurance the letter says it was written for: I write these things to you who believe so that you may know that you have eternal life.

The letter is written in the simplest Greek in the New Testament and is often the first thing a student reads, and its simplicity is deceptive: its sentences circle rather than progress, and outlining it defeats most attempts.

One verse in it, about three that testify in heaven, appears in the King James Bible and in no Greek manuscript before the sixteenth century. It was inserted from a Latin gloss and modern editions omit it.

Confidence is the word that recurs at the end of the letter, and what it rests on is stated plainly: we know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other.

The letter never names its readers, its writer or its location, and it is the only document in the New Testament that gives no external information about itself whatever.