The Epistles of John

The three Epistles of John are short writings closely bound to the Fourth Gospel in language and thought: the First, a homiletic letter written into a crisis of secession over the reality of the Incarnation; and the Second and Third, the briefest books of the New Testament, written by “the Elder” to a church and to a man named Gaius. This file sets out their occasion, structure, authorship, and the famous textual problem of the Comma Johanneum.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

A Family of Three

The three Epistles ascribed to John share the vocabulary and antitheses of the Fourth Gospel — light and darkness, truth and lie, love and hatred, life and death, the world and God, abiding and going out. The First Epistle, the longest, has no epistolary opening or closing and reads more as a written homily or circular tract than a personal letter; the Second and Third are genuine short letters, each about the length of a single papyrus sheet, opening “The elder to…” (2 John 1; 3 John 1). The Church has received all three as the work of John the Theologian, and the Orthodox canon includes them among the seven Catholic (or “General”) Epistles (on the canon, see Holy Scripture). Their reception was somewhat uneven in the early centuries: 1 John was universally accepted from the second century (it is cited by Polycarp and used by Irenaeus, AH 3.16.5), while 2 and 3 John were among Eusebius’s antilegomena, the “disputed” books accepted by most but questioned by some (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25; trans. NPNF II/1).

The Crisis Behind the First Epistle

The First Epistle is written into a concrete and painful situation: a group has seceded from the community. “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). The Elder calls these seceders “antichrists” and “false prophets” (1 John 2:18; 4:1), and the doctrinal fault-line is precisely Christological: “every spirit 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); “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?” (1 John 2:22). The seceders appear to have denied the full reality of the Incarnation — an early form of the Docetism that the same Asian Church confronted in Ignatius of Antioch (see St. Ignatius of Antioch) and that some scholars connect with the teaching of Cerinthus, whom Irenaeus links to John at Ephesus (AH 3.3.4). Against this, the Epistle opens with an emphatic appeal to physical, eyewitness contact with the Incarnate Word: “that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1).

The Tests of Fellowship

Out of this crisis the Epistle develops a set of “tests” by which the genuine children of God may be discerned from the secessionists and by which believers may have assurance. These tests are doctrinal, moral, and relational, and they interlock: right confession of the Incarnate Christ (1 John 4:2–3; 5:1), keeping the commandments and walking in the light (1 John 1:6–7; 2:3–6), and above all love of the brethren (1 John 2:9–11; 3:14; 4:7–8, 20–21). “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14). The Epistle moves in spirals rather than a linear argument, returning again and again to these themes, which is why it reads as meditation rather than treatise. Its purpose is stated near its end: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13) — a purpose parallel to the Gospel’s own (John 20:31). The theology of love that crowns the Epistle is treated in its own files (see Love and Truth and God Is Love).

The Two Short Letters

The Second Epistle is addressed “to the elect lady and her children” (2 John 1) — most likely a local church personified, though some read an individual woman — and warns against receiving traveling teachers who “do not abide in the teaching of Christ” and “do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7, 9–10). It distills the First Epistle’s double concern into thirteen verses: love one another (2 John 5) and hold the apostolic confession (2 John 7–9). The Third Epistle is addressed to a certain Gaius and concerns a concrete church-political conflict: a man named Diotrephes, “who likes to put himself first,” refuses to welcome the Elder’s emissaries and even expels those who would receive them (3 John 9–10), while Demetrius is commended (3 John 12). These two letters are precious precisely for their ordinariness: they show “the Elder” governing real congregations, exercising authority, and contending over hospitality and reception of teachers, in the same Asian world where the corpus took shape.

The Elder and the Authorship

The Second and Third Epistles name their author only as “the elder” (ho presbyteros), and this title has become a focus of the broader “Johannine question” (see The Johannine Question). Eusebius’s reading of Papias’s “John the elder” as a distinct person (Eusebius, HE 3.39.5–6) gave some ancients a candidate other than the Apostle for these two letters, which is part of why they were antilegomena (HE 3.25). The Orthodox tradition, however, receives all three Epistles as the work of John the Theologian, and the close kinship of their style and thought with both 1 John and the Gospel is the strongest internal argument for a single author. [Disputed: the authorship of the Epistles is debated. The Orthodox tradition, with much ancient testimony, ascribes all three to the Apostle John. Eusebius (HE 3.25) lists 2 and 3 John among the disputed books and elsewhere (HE 3.39) leaves open their attribution to "the elder John"; modern scholars are divided, many (e.g., Brown, *The Epistles of John*, AB 30, 1982) assigning the Gospel and Epistles to related but distinct hands within a "Johannine school," others defending common authorship.]

The Comma Johanneum

The First Epistle is the site of the most famous textual problem in the New Testament. In the Latin Vulgate tradition and in the Textus Receptus underlying the King James Version, 1 John 5:7–8 reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth…” The italicized “heavenly witnesses” clause is the Comma Johanneum. [Disputed: the *Comma Johanneum* (the "three heavenly witnesses" at 1 John 5:7) is absent from all Greek manuscripts before the late Middle Ages, from the earliest versions, and from the Greek Fathers who never cite it in the Trinitarian controversies where it would have been decisive; it is judged a Latin gloss, not part of the original text, by the standard critical editions (Metzger, *A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament*, 2nd ed., 1994; Nestle-Aland). The Byzantine and Orthodox Greek text of 1 John does not contain it, and the Church's Trinitarian faith in no way depends on it.] The genuine text reads simply, “there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree” (1 John 5:7–8) — a reference to the witness borne to Christ, not an explicit Trinitarian formula. The point for an Orthodox reader is that the Church’s Trinitarian dogma rests on the whole of revelation and the conciliar tradition, not on a disputed verse.

References

The First, Second, and Third Epistles of John (cited by chapter and verse).
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.25; 3.39. Trans. NPNF Series II, Vol. 1.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.3.4; 3.16.5. Trans. ANF Vol. 1.
Brown, Raymond E. The Epistles of John. Anchor Bible 30. Garden City: Doubleday, 1982.
Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994 (on 1 John 5:7–8, the Comma Johanneum).
Westcott, B. F. The Epistles of St. John. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1883.