Author’s Preface

It is an interesting time to be writing a commentary on any book in the Johannine corpus, for Johannine studies have been shifting, the consensus among scholars of the past thirty years is crumbling, and a new one has not yet emerged. Because the letters of John cannot be interpreted independently of the Fourth Gospel, the currents of Johannine gospel scholarship have largely directed interpretation of the letters as well.

Johannine scholarship has shifted away from the twentieth-century approaches that were largely shaped by Bultmann’s existentialist, demythologizing philosophy of hermeneutics, aided by the methodologies of source and redaction criticisms. The dominant approach to Johannine studies for the last few decades perceived difficulties with John’s gospel that were thought to be solved by an elaborate reconstruction of its redactional history with one or more corresponding historical scenarios involving the Johannine community. Scholars such as Martyn, Kysar, and Brown dominated the field in the second half of the twentieth century with their theories for the composition of John’s gospel and letters that focused more on the conjectured issues of the late first-century Johannine community, supposedly expelled from Jewish synagogues, than on the life and teachings of Jesus.1

As an alternative approach, scholars began to apply methods of new literary criticism to John’s gospel, initiated largely by Alan Culpepper in his Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design.2 Literary criticism brought new insights to light about the structure and composition of the gospel, but they still stood next to theories of its redaction and basically followed Bultmann’s approach of considering it story rather than history. By the time the Jesus Seminar, led by Robert Funk, published The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary in the early 1990s, any historical value of John’s gospel had been dismissed by the majority of NT scholars.

Conservative, evangelical scholars, such as D. A. Carson, Leon Morris, Craig Blomberg, and Andreas Köstenberger, continued to defend the historical reliability of a gospel that claimed to be centrally concerned with witnessing to the truth, even while they recognized the literary qualities of this gospel that are clearly different from the Synoptics. By recognizing that truth is not exhausted by historical facts alone, many of the alleged problems of John’s gospel—problems such as dischronologized events, apparent redactional seams, and theological tensions—can be put to rest. These features that explain the significance of the facts might be expected especially in a telling of Jesus’ life that even early Christians recognized as a “spiritual” (Gk. pneumatikon) gospel (Eusebius quoting Clement of Alexander, Hist. eccl., 6.14.7).

The present commentary attempts to position itself by several distinctives:

1. 1. I work from the reasoned assumption that the author of John’s letters either was the same person who authored the Fourth Gospel or was a close associate of that writer. Many of the assumptions of twentieth-century scholarship that led to a conclusion that the author could not have been the apostle John are not shared by this writer.
2. 2. I hold to the thesis that, while the letters must be allowed their own voice, they cannot be properly understood without reference to John’s gospel as the interpretive framework for the metaphors, images, and theology common to both.
3. 3. While I allow that a close associate of the beloved disciple may have put an already essentially complete gospel into its final form, I do not assume an extended compositional history for the Fourth Gospel into which the production of each of the three Johannine letters must be placed. This commentary wishes to distance itself from the more speculative reconstructions of the Johannine community that were based on assumptions of an extensive redactional history of the gospel as the historical background against which the letters are interpreted, and therefore will not systematically engage interpreters whose work has characteristically relied on such reconstructions.
4. 4. The more recent arguments for a nonpolemical reading of 1 John have provided a needed refocus for the intent of the letters, which this commentary shares. While I recognize that the letters were written during a time of schism and confusion in the Johannine churches, no specific reconstruction of the heresy is attempted or assumed. The truths presented in the letters could argue against a variety of christological heresies that may or may not have been forms of Gnosticism, Docetism, or Cerinthianism. There is not sufficient evidence to reconstruct the false teaching with such specificity, and so it seems wisest to refrain from doing so. The letters speak to a variety of false beliefs, many of which are still with us today.