- Chapters
- 5
- Verses
- 0
- Where it sits
- The Catholic Epistles
What it is
Not a letter in form at all. It opens with a sentence about what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes and our hands have handled — and goes on from there.
It was written after a split. They went out from us, but they were not of us. What the people who left were teaching is clear enough from what is denied: that Christ had really come in the flesh. Against that, the letter keeps returning to two tests, and they turn out to be one — do you confess Christ come in the flesh, and do you love the brother you can actually see.
Known for
4:8 and 4:16, God is love. 1:9. 4:18, perfect love casts out fear.
Where it sits
Traditionally the apostle John, late in the first century, and never disputed in the ancient Church — Eusebius lists it among the acknowledged books. Scholars agree the three Johannine letters share one voice; they divide over whether that voice is the apostle, the separate figure Papias calls John the Elder, or a disciple writing in the Gospel’s tradition, since this letter names no author at all.
One note on the text: a famously Trinitarian wording at 5:7–8, familiar from the King James Bible, is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts. It is a question of manuscript evidence, and it is not in the Greek tradition this text follows.
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