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INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST LETTER OF JOHN

A Personal Letter and its Background

The First Letter of John is called a letter, but it has no opening address nor closing greetings such as the letters of Paul have. And yet no one can read it without feeling its intensely personal character. Beyond all doubt, the man who wrote it had in his mind’s eye a definite situation and a definite group of people. Both the form and the personal character of 1 John will be explained if we think of it as what someone has called ‘a loving and anxious sermon’, written by a pastor who loved his people, and sent out to the various churches over which he had charge.

Any such letter is produced by an actual situation apart from which it cannot be fully understood. If we wish to understand 1 John, we have first of all to try to reconstruct the situation which produced it, remembering that it was written in Ephesus a little after AD 100.

The Falling Away

By AD 100, certain things had almost inevitably happened within the Church, especially in a place like Ephesus.

(1) Many were now second- or even third-generation Christians. The thrill of the first days had, to some extent at least, passed away. In ‘The Prelude’, Wordsworth said of one of the great moments of modern history:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

In the first days of Christianity, there was a glory and a splendour; but now Christianity had become a thing of habit, ‘traditional, half-hearted, nominal’. People had grown used to it, and something of the wonder had been lost. Jesus knew human nature, and he had said: ‘The love of many will grow cold’ (Matthew 24:12). John was writing at a time when, for some at least, the first thrill had gone and the flame of devotion had died to a flicker.

(2) One result was that there were members of the Church who found that the standards which Christianity demanded were becoming a burden and who were tired of making the effort. They did not want to be saints in the New Testament sense of the term. The New Testament word for saint is hagios, which is also commonly translated as holy. Its basic meaning is different. The Temple was hagios because it was different from other buildings; the Sabbath was hagios because it was different from other days; the Jewish nation was hagios because it was different from other nations; and Christians were called to be hagios because they were called to be different from other men and women. There was always a distinct division between Christians and the world. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus says: ‘If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you’ (John 15:19). ‘I have given them your word,’ said Jesus in his prayer to God, ‘and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world’ (John 17:14).

All of this involved an ethical demand. It demanded a new standard of moral purity, a new kindness, a new service, a new forgiveness – and it was difficult. And, once the first thrill and enthusiasm were gone, it became harder and harder to stand out against the world and to refuse to conform to the generally accepted standards and practices of the age.

(3) It is to be noted that 1 John shows no signs that the church to which it was written was being persecuted. The peril, as it has been put, was not persecution but seduction; it came from within. That, too, Jesus had foreseen. ‘Many false prophets’, he said, ‘will arise, and lead many astray’ (Matthew 24:11). This was a danger of which Paul had warned the leaders of this very church of Ephesus when he made his farewell address to them. ‘I know’, he said, ‘that after I have gone, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Some even from your own group will come distorting the truth in order to entice the disciples to follow them’ (Acts 20:29–30).

The trouble which 1 John seeks to combat came not from people who were out to destroy the Christian faith but from those who thought they were improving it. It came from people whose aim was to make Christianity intellectually respectable. They knew the intellectual trends and currents of the day, and felt that the time had come for Christianity to come to terms with secular philosophy and contemporary thought.

The Contemporary Philosophy

What, then, was this contemporary thought and philosophy with which the false prophets and mistaken teachers wished to align the Christian faith? Throughout the Greek world, there was a way of thinking to which the general name of Gnosticism is given. The basic belief of all Gnostic thought was that only spirit was good and that matter, the material world, was essentially evil. The Gnostics, therefore, inevitably despised the world since it was matter. In particular, they despised the body, which, being matter, was necessarily evil. Imprisoned within this body was the human spirit. That spirit was a seed of God, who was altogether good. So, the aim of life must be to release this heavenly seed imprisoned in the evil of the body. That could be done only by a secret knowledge and elaborate ritual which only true Gnostics could supply. Here was a train of thought which was written deep into Greek thinking – and which has not even now ceased to exist. Its basis is the conviction that all matter is evil and that spirit alone is good, and that the one real aim in life is to liberate the human spirit from the vile prison house of the body.

The False Teachers

With that in our minds, let us turn to 1 John and gather the evidence as to who these false teachers were and what they taught. They had been within the Church, but they had withdrawn from it. ‘They went out from us, but they did not belong to us’ (1 John 2:19). They were people of influence, for they claimed to be prophets. ‘Many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4:1). Although they had left the Church, they still tried to disseminate their teaching within it and to deceive its members and lead them away from the true faith (1 John 2:26).

The Denial of Jesus’ Messiahship

At least some of these false teachers denied that Jesus was the Messiah. ‘Who is the liar’, demands John, ‘but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?’ (1 John 2:22). It is most likely that these false teachers were not Gnostics in the true sense of the word, but Jews. Things had always been difficult for Jewish Christians, but the events of history made them doubly so. It was very difficult for Jews to come to believe in a crucified Messiah. But suppose they had begun to believe this, their difficulties were by no means finished. The Christians believed that Jesus would return quickly to vindicate his people. Clearly, that would be a hope that would be specially dear to the hearts of the Jews. Then, in AD 70, Jerusalem was captured by the Romans, who were so infuriated with the long intransigence and the suicidal resistance of the Jews that they tore the holy city stone from stone and drew a plough across the middle of it. In view of that, how could the Jews easily accept the hope that Jesus would come and save them? The holy city was desolate; the Jews were dispersed throughout the world. In view of that, how could it be true that the Messiah had come?

The Denial of the Incarnation

There was something even more serious than that. There was false teaching which came directly from an attempt from within the Church to bring Christianity into line with Gnosticism. We must remember the Gnostic point of view that spirit alone was good and matter utterly evil. Given that point of view, any real incarnation is impossible. That is exactly what, centuries later, St Augustine was to point out. Before he became a Christian, he was skilled in the philosophies of the various schools. In the Confessions (8:9), he tells us that somewhere in the writings of the Platonists he had read in one form or another nearly all the things that Christianity says; but there was one great Christian saying which he had never found in any of these works and which no one would ever find – and that saying was: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14). Since these thinkers believed in the essential evil of matter and therefore the essential evil of the body, that was one thing they could never say.

It is clear that the false teachers against whom John was writing in this First Letter denied the reality of the incarnation and of Jesus’ physical body. ‘Every spirit’, writes John, ‘that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God’ (1 John 4:2–3).

In the early Church, this refusal to admit the reality of the incarnation took, broadly speaking, two forms.

(1) In its more radical and wholesale form, it was called Docetism, which the scholar E. J. Goodspeed suggests might be translated as Seemism. The Greek verb dokein means to seem; and the Docetists taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body. They insisted that he was a purely spiritual being who had nothing but the appearance of having a body. One of the apocryphal books written from this point of view is the Acts of John, which dates from about AD 160. In it, John is made to say that sometimes when he touched Jesus he seemed to meet with a material body, but at other times ‘the substance was immaterial, as if it did not exist at all’, and also that, when Jesus walked, he never left any footprint upon the ground. The simplest form of Docetism is the complete denial that Jesus ever had a physical body.

(2) There was a more subtle, and perhaps more dangerous, variant of this theory connected with the name of Cerinthus. In tradition, John and Cerinthus were sworn enemies. The great early Church historian Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, 4:14:6) hands down a story which tells how John went to the public bathhouse in Ephesus to bathe. He saw Cerinthus inside and refused even to enter the building. ‘Let us flee,’ he said, ‘lest even the bathhouse fall, because Cerinthus the enemy of truth is within.’ Cerinthus drew a definite distinction between the human Jesus and the divine Christ. He said that Jesus was a man, born in a perfectly natural way. He lived in special obedience to God, and after his baptism the Christ in the shape of a dove descended upon him, from that power which is above all powers, and then he brought news of the Father who up to that point had been unknown. Cerinthus did not stop there. He said that, at the end of Jesus’ life, the Christ again withdrew from him so that the Christ never suffered at all. It was the human Jesus who suffered, died and rose again.

This again comes out in the stories of the apocryphal gospels written under the influence of this point of view. In the Gospel of Peter, written in about AD 130, it is said that Jesus showed no pain upon the cross and that his cry was: ‘My power! My power! Why have you forsaken me?’ It was at that moment that the divine Christ left the human Jesus. The Acts of John go further. They tell how, when the human Jesus was being crucified on Calvary, John was actually talking to the divine Christ in a cave in the hillside and that the Christ said to him: ‘John, to the multitude down below in Jerusalem I am being crucified, and pierced with lances and with reeds, and gall and vinegar are given me to drink. But I am speaking to you, and listen to what I say . . . Nothing, therefore, of the things they will say of me have I suffered’ (Acts of John 97).

We may see from the Letters of Ignatius how widespread this way of thinking was. Ignatius was writing to a group of churches in Asia Minor which must have been much the same as the group to which 1 John was written. When Ignatius wrote, he was a prisoner and was being transported to Rome to be martyred by being flung to the wild animals in the arena. He wrote to the Trallians: ‘Be deaf, therefore, when anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David and Mary, who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died . . . who also was truly raised from the dead . . . But if, as some affirm, who are without God – that is, who are unbelievers – his suffering was only a semblance . . . why am I a prisoner?’ (Ignatius, To the Trallians, 9–10). To the Christians at Smyrna, he wrote: ‘For he suffered all these things for us that we might attain salvation, and he truly suffered even as he also truly raised himself, not as some unbelievers say that his passion was merely in semblance’ (To the Smyrnaeans, 2). Polycarp, writing to the Philippians, used John’s very words: ‘For everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an anti-Christ’ (To the Philippians, 7:1).

This teaching of Cerinthus is also rebuked in 1 John. John writes of Jesus: ‘This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood’ (1 John 5:6). The point of that verse is that the Gnostic teachers would have agreed that the divine Christ came by water, that is, at the baptism of Jesus; but they would have denied that he came by blood, that is, by the cross, for they insisted that the divine Christ left the human Jesus before his crucifixion.

The great danger of this heresy is that it comes from what can only be called a mistaken reverence. It is afraid to ascribe to Jesus full humanity. It regards it as irreverent to think that he had a truly physical body. It is a heresy which is by no means dead but is still held today, usually quite unconsciously, by many devout Christians. But it must be remembered, as John so clearly saw, that our salvation was dependent on the full identification of Jesus Christ with us. As one of the great early Church fathers unforgettably put it, ‘He became what we are to make us what he is.’

This Gnostic belief had certain practical consequences in the lives of those who held it.

(1) The Gnostic attitude to matter and to all created things produced a certain attitude to the body and the things to do with the body. That attitude might take any one of three different forms.

(a) It might take the form of self-denial, with fasting and celibacy and rigid control, even deliberate ill-treatment, of the body. The view that celibacy is better than marriage and that sex is sinful goes back to Gnostic influence and belief – and this is a view which still lingers on in certain quarters. There is no trace of that view in this letter.

(b) It might take the form of an assertion that the body did not matter and that, therefore, its appetites might be satisfied without restraint. Since the body was in any event evil, it made no difference what was done with it. There are echoes of this in this letter. John condemns as liars all who say that they know God and yet do not keep God’s commandments; those who say that they abide in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked (1 John 1:6, 2:4–6). There were clearly Gnostics in these communities who claimed special knowledge of God but whose conduct was a long way from the demands of the Christian ethic.

In certain quarters, this Gnostic belief went even further. Gnostics were people who had gnōsis, knowledge. Some held that real Gnostics must, therefore, know the best as well as the worst and must enter into every experience of life at its highest or at its deepest level, as the case may be. It might almost be said that such people held that it was an obligation to sin. There is a reference to this kind of belief in the letter to Thyatira in the book of Revelation, where the risen Christ refers to those who have known ‘the deep things of Satan’ (Revelation 2:24). And it may well be that John is referring to these people when he insists that ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5). These particular Gnostics would have held that there was in God not only blazing light but also deep darkness – and that an individual must penetrate both. It is easy to see the disastrous consequences of such a belief.

(c) There was a third kind of Gnostic belief. True Gnostics regarded themselves as spiritual people in every sense, as having shed all the material things of life and released their spirits from the bondage of matter. Such Gnostics held that they were so spiritual that they were above and beyond sin and had reached spiritual perfection. It is to them that John refers when he speaks of those who deceive themselves by saying that they have no sin (1 John 1:8–10).

Whichever of these three forms Gnostic belief took, its ethical consequences were perilous in the extreme; and it is clear that the last two forms were to be found in the society to which John wrote.

(2) Further, this Gnosticism resulted in an attitude to men and women which inevitably destroyed Christian fellowship. We have seen that Gnostics aimed at the release of the spirit from the prison house of the evil body by means of an elaborate and mysterious knowledge. Clearly, such a knowledge was not for everyone. Ordinary people were too involved in the everyday life and work of the world ever to have time for the study and discipline necessary; and, even if they had had the time, many were intellectually incapable of grasping the involved speculations of Gnostic theosophy and so-called philosophy.

This produced an inevitable result. It divided people into two classes – those who were capable of a really spiritual life, and those who were not. In the ancient world, every individual was thought of as consisting of three parts. There was the sōma, the body, the physical part. There was the psuchē, which is often translated as soul; but we must be careful, because it does not mean what we mean by soul. To the Greeks, the psuchē was the principle of physical life. Everything which had physical life had psuchē. Psuchē was the life principle which human beings shared with all living creatures. Finally, there was the pneuma, the spirit; and it was the spirit which was possessed only by human beings and which made them kin to God.

The aim of Gnosticism was the release of the pneuma from the sōma; but that release could be won only by long and arduous study which only the intellectuals who had time on their hands could ever undertake. The Gnostics, therefore, divided people into two classes – the psuchikoi, who could never advance beyond the principle of physical life and never attain to anything else than what was to all intents and purposes animal living; and the pneumatikoi, who were truly spiritual and truly akin to God.

The result was clear. The Gnostics produced a spiritual aristocracy who looked with contempt and even hatred on lesser mortals. The pneumatikoi regarded the psuchikoi as contemptible, earthbound creatures who could never know what real religion was. The consequence was obviously the annihilation of Christian fellowship. That is why John insists throughout his letter that the true test of Christianity is love for one another. If we really are walking in the light, we have fellowship with one another (1:7). Whoever claims to be in the light and hates a fellow Christian is in fact in darkness (2:9–11). The proof that we have passed from dark to light is that we love each other (3:14–17). The marks of Christianity are belief in Christ and love for one another (3:23). God is love, and whoever does not love does not know God at all (4:7–8). Because God loved us, we ought to love each other; it is when we love each other that God dwells in us (4:10–12). The commandment is that those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also, and those who say they love God and at the same time hate their brothers and sisters are branded as liars (4:20–1). The Gnostics, to put it bluntly, would have said that the mark of true religion is contempt for ordinary men and women; John insists in every chapter that the mark of true religion is love for everyone.

Here, then, is a picture of these Gnostic heretics. They talked of being born of God, of walking in the light, of having no sin, of dwelling in God, of knowing God. These were their catchphrases. They had no intention of destroying the Church and the faith; by their way of thinking, they were going to cleanse the Church of dead wood and make Christianity an intellectually respectable philosophy, fit to stand beside the great systems of the day. But the effect of their teaching was to deny the incarnation, to eliminate the Christian ethic and to make fellowship within the Church impossible. It is little wonder that John seeks, with such fervent pastoral devotion, to defend the churches he loved from such an insidious attack from within. This was a threat far more perilous than any persecution from outside; the very existence of the Christian faith was at stake.

The Message of John

The First Letter of John is a short letter, and we cannot look within it for a systematic exposition of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, it will be of the greatest interest to examine the basic underlying beliefs with which John confronts those threatening to wreck the Christian faith.

The Object of Writing

John’s object in writing is twofold; yet the two aspects are one and the same. He writes that the joy of his people may be completed (1:4), and that they may not sin (2:1). He sees clearly that, however attractive the wrong way may be, it is not in its nature to bring happiness. To bring his people joy and to preserve them from sin are one and the same thing.

The Idea of God

John has two great things to say about God. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (1:5). God is love, and that made him love us before we loved him, and made him send his Son as a remedy for our sins (4:7–10, 16). John’s conviction is that God is self-revealing and self-giving. He is light, and not darkness; he is love, and not hate.

The Idea of Jesus

Because the main attack of the false teachers was on the person of Christ, this letter, which is concerned to answer them, is specially rich and helpful in what it has to say about him.

(1) Jesus is the one who was from the beginning (1:1, 2:14). When we are confronted with Jesus, we are confronted with the eternal.

(2) Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus is the Son of God, and for John it is essential to be convinced of that (4:15, 5:5). The relationship of Jesus to God is unique, and in him is seen God’s ever-seeking and ever-forgiving heart.

(3) Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah (2:22, 5:1). That again, for him, is an essential article of belief. It may seem that here we come into a region of ideas which is much narrower and, in fact, specifically Jewish. But there is something essential here. To say that Jesus is from the beginning and that he is the Son of God is to preserve his connection with eternity; to say that he is the Messiah is to preserve his connection with history. It is to see his coming as the event towards which God’s plan, working itself out in his chosen people, was moving.

(4) Jesus was most truly and fully human. To deny that Jesus came in the flesh is to be moved by the spirit of antichrist (4:2–3). It is John’s witness that Jesus was so truly human that he himself had known and touched him with his own hands (1:1–3). No writer in the New Testament holds with greater intensity the full reality of the incarnation. Not only did Jesus become a man, he also suffered for men and women. It was by water and blood that he came (5:6); and he laid down his life for us (3:16).

(5) The coming of Jesus, his incarnation, his life, his death, his resurrection and his ascension all combine to deal with human sin. Jesus was without sin (3:5); and human beings are essentially sinners, even though in our arrogance we may claim to be without sin (1:8–10); and yet the sinless one came to take away the sin of sinning humanity (3:5). In regard to our sin, Jesus is two things.

(a) He is our advocate with the Father (2:1). The word is paraklētos. A paraklētos is someone who is called in to help. The word could be used of a physician; it was often used of a witness called in to give evidence in favour of someone on trial, or of a defending lawyer called in to defend someone accused of an offence. Jesus pleads our case with God; he, the sinless one, is the defender of sinning men and women.

(b) But Jesus is more than that. Twice, John calls him the expiation for our sins (2:2, 4:10). When we sin, the relationship which should exist between us and God is broken. An expiatory sacrifice is one which restores that relationship; or, rather, it is a sacrifice through which that relationship is restored. It is an atoning sacrifice, a sacrifice which once again puts us at one with God. So, through what Jesus was and did, the relationship between God and all people, broken by sin, is restored. Jesus does not only plead the case of sinners; he sets them at one with God. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin (1:7).

(6) As a result of all this, through Jesus Christ, all who believe have life (4:9, 5:11–12). This is true in a double sense. Believers have life in the sense that they are saved from death; and they have life in the sense that living has ceased to be mere existence and has become life in its fullest sense.

(7) All this may be summed up by saying that Jesus is the Saviour of the world (4:14). Here, we have something which has to be set out in full. ‘The Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world’ (4:14). We have already talked of Jesus as pleading our case before God. If we were to leave that without addition, it might be argued that God wished to condemn human beings and was deflected from his dire purpose by the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But that is not so, because, for John, as for every writer in the New Testament, the whole initiative lay with God. It was God who sent his Son to be the Saviour of men and women.

Within the short span of this letter, the wonder and the glory and the grace of Christ are most fully set out.

The Spirit

In this letter, John has less to say about the Spirit; for his highest teaching about the Spirit, we must turn back to the Fourth Gospel. It may be said that, in 1 John, the function of the Spirit is in some sense to be the liaison between God and his people. It is the Spirit who makes us conscious that there is within us the abiding presence of God through Jesus Christ (3:24, 4:13). We may say that it is the Spirit who enables us to grasp the precious fellowship with God which is being offered to us.

The World

The world within which Christians live is hostile; it is a world without God. It does not know Christians, because it did not know Christ (3:1). It hates Christians, just as it hated Christ (3:13). The false teachers are from the world and not from God, and it is because they speak its language that the world is ready to hear them and accept them (4:4–5). In a sweeping statement, John says that the whole world is in the power of the evil one (5:19). It is for that reason that Christians have to overcome it, and their weapon in the struggle with the world is faith (5:4).

Hostile as the world is, it is doomed. The world and all its desires are passing away (2:17). That, indeed, is why it is folly to give one’s heart to the world; the world is coming to an end. Although Christians live in a hostile world which is passing away, there is no need for despair and fear. The darkness is past; the true light now shines (2:8). God in Christ has broken into time; the new age has come. It is not yet fully brought to fruition, but the consummation is sure.

Christians live in an evil and a hostile world, but they possess the means to overcome it; and, when the destined end of the world comes, they will be safe, because they already possess that which makes them members of the new community in the new age.

The Fellowship of the Church

John does more than move in the high realms of theology; he has certain most practical things to say about the Christian Church and the Christian life. No New Testament writer stresses more consistently or more strenuously the necessity of Christian fellowship. Christians, John was convinced, are not only bound to God; they are also bound to each other. When we walk in the light, we have fellowship with each other (1:7). Those who claim to walk in the light but who hate their brothers and sisters are in reality walking in darkness; those who love their brothers and sisters are the ones who are in the light (2:9–11). The proof that people have passed from darkness to light is the fact that they love one another. To hate a fellow human being is in essence to be a murderer, as Cain was. If we are able out of our own wealth to help another’s poverty and do not do so, it is ridiculous for us to claim that the love of God dwells in us. The essence of religion is to believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and to love one another (3:11–17, 3:23). God is love; and, therefore, those who love are kin to God. God has loved us, and that is the best reason for loving each other (4:7–12). If we say that we love God and at the same time hate another person, we are liars. The command is that all who love God must love others too (4:20–1).

It was John’s conviction that the only way in which anyone can prove love for God is by loving other people, and that that love must be not only a sentimental emotion but also a dynamic towards practical help.

Christian Righteousness

No New Testament writer makes a stronger ethical demand than John, or more strongly condemns a so-called religion which fails to produce ethical action. God is righteous, and the life of everyone who knows him must reflect his righteousness (2:29). Whoever abides in Christ, and is born of God, does not sin; whoever does not do right is not of God (3:3–10); and the characteristic of this righteousness is that it translates into love for other people (3:10–11). We show our love to God and to others by keeping God’s commandments (5:2). Whoever is born of God does not sin (5:18).

For John, knowledge of God and obedience to him must always go hand in hand. It is by keeping his commandments that we prove that we really do know God. Those who say that they know him and who do not keep his commandments are liars (2:3–5).

It is, in fact, this obedience which is the basis of effective prayer. We receive what we ask from God because we keep his commandments and do what is pleasing in his sight (3:22).

The two marks which characterize genuine Christianity are love for one another and obedience to the revealed commandments of God.

The Destination of the Letter

There are certain baffling problems with regard to the letter’s destination. The letter itself gives us no clue as to where it was sent. Tradition strongly connects it with Asia Minor, and especially with Ephesus, where, according to tradition, John lived for many years. But there are certain other odd facts which somehow have to be explained.

The sixth-century Roman historian Cassiodorus says that the First Letter of John was titled Ad Parthos, ‘To the Parthians’; and St Augustine has a series of ten tractates written on the Epistle of John ad Parthos. One Geneva manuscript complicates the matter still further by titling the letter Ad Sparthos. There is no such word as Sparthos. There are two possible explanations of this impossible title. (1) Just possibly, what is meant is Ad Sparsos, which would mean ‘to the Christians scattered abroad’. (2) In Greek, Ad Parthos would be Pros Parthous. Now, in the early manuscripts, there was no space between the words, and they were all written in capital letters, so that the title would run PROSPARTHOUS. A scribe writing to dictation could quite easily put that down as PROSSPARTHOUS, especially if he did not know what the title meant. Ad Sparthos can be eliminated as a mere mistake.

But where did ‘To the Parthians’ come from? There is one possible explanation. The Second Letter of John does tell us of its destination; it is written to The elect lady and her children (2 John 1). Let us turn to the end of 1 Peter. The Authorized Version has: ‘The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you’ (1 Peter 5:13). The phrase the church that is is printed in the Authorized Version in italics. This, of course, means that it has no equivalent in the Greek, which has, in fact, no actual mention of a church at all. This the Revised Standard Version accurately indicates: ‘She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen [elect], sends you greetings.’ As far as the Greek goes, it would be perfectly possible, and indeed natural, to take that as referring not to a church but to a lady. That is precisely what certain of the scholars in the very early Church did. Now, we find the elect lady again in 2 John. It was easy to identify the two elect ladies and to assume that 2 John was also written to Babylon. The natural title for the inhabitants of Babylon was Parthians, and hence we have the explanation of the title.

The process went even further. The Greek for the elect lady is hē elektē. We have already seen that the early manuscripts were written all in capital letters; and it would be just possible to take Elektē not as an adjective meaning elect but as a proper name, Elekta. This is, in fact, what the second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria may have done, for we have information that he said that the Johannine letters were written to a certain Babylonian lady, Elekta by name, and to her children.

So, it may well be that the title Ad Parthos arose from a series of misunderstandings. The elect one in 1 Peter is quite certainly the Church, as the Authorized Version rightly saw. James Moffatt translates: ‘Your sister church in Babylon, elect like yourselves, salutes you.’ Further, it is almost certain that, in any event, Babylon there stands for Rome, which the early writers identified with Babylon, the great prostitute, drunk with the blood of the saints (cf. Revelation 17:5). The title Ad Parthos has a most interesting history; but clearly it arose from a simple misunderstanding.

There is one further complication. Clement of Alexandria referred to John’s letters as ‘written to virgins’. On the face of it, that is improbable, for it would not be a specially relevant title for them. How could that idea come about? The Greek would be Pros Parthenous, which closely resembles Pros Parthous; and, it so happens, John was regularly called Ho Parthenos, the Virgin, because he never married and because of the purity of his life. This further title must have come from a confusion between Ad Parthos and Ho Parthenos.

This is a case where we may take it that tradition is right and all the ingenious theories mistaken. We may take it that these letters were written in Ephesus and to the surrounding churches in Asia Minor. When John wrote, it would certainly be to the district for which he had oversight – and that was Ephesus and the surrounding territory. He is never mentioned in connection with Babylon.

In Defence of the Faith

John wrote his great letter to meet a threatening situation and in defence of the faith. The heresies which he attacked are by no means altogether echoes of what Wordsworth, in his poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’, called ‘old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago’. They are still beneath the surface, and sometimes they even still raise their heads. To study his letter will confirm us in the true faith and enable us to have a defence against anything that would seduce us from it.