especially in the matter of brotherlj' love. But there is -lotliing to indicate that those addressca were in a peculiarly <langerous or faulty condition, or that the moral life liad sunk very low among them. The Ep. is not one of reproof. It is rather written umlcr the sense that writer and readers are living in 'the la.st time," and that the Coming of the Lord is expected. Its particular occa.-'ion, therefore, may rather be sought in what it swys of the appearance of certain fal.se teachers, ni which event the writer sees the token of ' the last time.' Who were those errorists that are here si)()ken of as 'Antichrists'? To this (juestion many dill'erent answers have been given. Some of them may be at once dismissed as too large and indelinite. To say, e.g. (with Bleek), that the men in view are Christi'ins, men who had lost their faith or had pr.actised it unworthily, or that they are men who had fallen into Antinoniian licence, is inconsistent both with the fact tliat the 'Antichrists' are described as outside the Cliurch, and with the kind of fault that is attributed to them here. Further, if Antinoniian error liad been specially in view, we should have expected (so Neander), not such a declaration as ' Every one that doeth sin, doeth also lawlessness ; and sin is la^^lessness' (S* IIV), but rather 'Every one that doeth lawlessness, doeth also sin ; and law- lessness is sin.' To say that they were Jpavs (Lotller), or that they were Ehionitc.i, is equally wide of the mark, nothing being found to imply that the error in question was merely a denial of the Messiahship of Jesus, or a reduction of Christ to the rank of a second Mo.ses. There is as little to support the idea that the Ep. has in view more than one class of errorists, Ebionites and Sabians (Storr), or Ebionite and Doeetic teachers (Sander). It is more reasonable to identify them with Doeetic teachers of the Gnostic type. They are described as denying that 'Jesus is the Christ,' as denying ' the Fattier and the Son ' (2'-''-'- '^■'), and as confessing ' not Jesus ' (4^). They are con- trasted with those who are of the spirit that 'confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh' (4-) ; and, toward the close of the Ep., thou^'h they are not mentioned, the note that, is still insisted on is belief 'that Jesus is the Christ' (5'). These terms do not carry us to the p.articular refinenicnts of (Jnosticism that are connected with the name of BasUides, as some think (I'fleiderer). There is no point of contact with the strange Basilidean theories of a tripartite sonship, the division of the world into the Ogdoad and the Hebdomad, and the destiny of Jesus to be the 'first-fruits of the sorting of the things confused.' Nor is there any real analogy b<;tween tlie doctrine of the Son in the Ep. and tiie vague speculations of these Gnostics about the descent of a light from the Hebdomad upon Jesus the Son of Mary at the Annunciation. There might seem mure, perhajis, that resembles the Valentinian doctrine, in wliich the idea of aw^pixara has a large and prominent place. But the Christology of the Ep. is far removed from any one or all of the three views of the origin of Jesus which are ascribed to Valentinus by IrenaMis (i. 11. 15, etc. ). The terms point to something more specific, however, than the ordinarj' Doeetic doc- trine which liore that our Lord had only an appnr- cut body all through His life on earth, and until His Ascension. They best suit the teachings of the Gnostic Cerinthus, in which Oriental, Jewish, and Christian ideas seem to have been mixed up, and which distinguished between the man 'Jesus' and 'Chrifst' the heavenlj' Being, and affirmed that 'the Christ' united Himself \\nth 'Jesus' only at the baptism of the latter, and continued with Him only till His Passion. Beyond this the terms do not seem to warrant ns to go. It \t
JOHN, EPISTLES OF
JOHN, EPISTLES OF 7Si
probably too much to say {e.g. with Holtzniann) that tlie error in view all through the Ln. is the dualistic form of Gnosis which was Chnstologicall v Uocetic and practically Antinonuan, or (with Lipsius, etc.) that both Docetisra and Antinomi- anism are intend.-d. It is doubtful whether we can say {e.g. with Weiss, Harnack, etc. ) that the hp. is directed also against men within the Church who misunderstood and perverted St. Paul's doctrine. Such statements as ' he tliat doeth rightej
Ducn statemc..., ^ ... »-»- ■ .^.iteou.sncfls is
righteous' (3'), are not enough to bear the weight of such inferences.
7 Authorship.— W\\o, then, is the author of an En which speaks of a form of Gnostic doctrine like that associated with the name of the tra- ditional opponent of the Apostle .lohn in his old age' The general answer, as has been said, has been: the Apostle John himself. This was the almost universal belief of the early Church, the exceptions being few, of small account, and easily understood. The sect of the Alogi may have rejected the Ep., as they did the Gospel and the Apocalypse. But the statement m Epiplianius (Acer. tom. i. c. 34) amounts only to a perhaps, and the rejection, if it was the fact, would have been, as in the case of the Gospel, for doctrinal reasons. Marcion, we know, refused it a place in his very limited Canon; hut his exclusion of it and of so much else in the NT turned, not upon the question of historical testimony, but on that of harmony with his own special views. At a much later period an obscure statement is made by Cosinas Tndicopleustes in the 6th cent. (Tnpngr. tAm<. I vii ) to the ell'ect that some maintained that all the Catholic Epp. were written by presbyters, not , by apostles. And Leontius of Byzantium (conir i Nestor, et Eutych. iii. 14) .speaks of Theodore of ; Mopsuestia as 'abrogating' the Ep. of James and the other Catholic Epp.—' Epistolam Jacobi et alias deinceps aliorum catholicas abrogat et anti- Quat ' This is all. And so the case stood, as far as we know, till late in the 16th cent., when Joseph Scali"er declared all three Epp. not to be by the apostle. Then S. G. Lan^e, with strange taste, pronounced the first unworthy of an apostle, though he felt the force of the historical testimony for its apostolic origin. Others tried to prove it to be the w-ork of a Jewish Christian author and aC.nostic reviser (Clau<lius), or ascribed it to the presbyter John (Bretschneider, Paulus). But the severest assault made upon the Eii. in ancient or in modern times is that of Baur and his school. I he 1 uhingen criticism has not been at one in all thmgs. borne of its adherents have held the Gospel and the I'.p. to be by the same author (K. R. Kostlin, Georgii) ; others have hold them to be by dillerent hands (Baur, Hilgenfeld, etc.). But the school has been at one in denying the apostolic origin of the bp., and in a.scribing it to a writer of the 2nd cent.