The reasons u'iven for this view of the bp. are such a.s the following :— The circumstances, the forms of thought, and the condition of the Church which aiipear in it, it is said, point to a later pcno<l than the apostolic. Dillerent critics hx on dillerent thint's in sui>port of this contention. Some hx umn the doctrine of the L"gos as they suppose it to be expressed here (Bretschneider); of which it is enough to say that in Hebrew thcnght and in (.reek there was a soil prepared for it before the ch.se of the 1st cent, at any rate. Others ar<;ue from the acquaintance whicli it betrays with Docetic error. But it is too much to assert that that type of error does not emerge till the i.ost-aj.ostotic age, and the particular form in view here is. as we liave seen, like the .loctrine attrihute.l to Cennthus. Others (Hih'enfcld, etc.) reason from its reference to Gnostic doctrine. Hut while the riper an<l more complicated forms of Gnostieimn helonR to a lat«r
time, it is not made historically good that there was not or could not he at the earlier date Gnostic ideas of a simpler and mure rudiinentarv kind, and it is acknowledged (e.g. by Hilgenfeld) that it is only an undeveloped form that appears in this Epistle. But hesides that, it has to be said that the things in the Ep. which are supposed to betray the inlluence of Gnostic thought are not sullicient for the purpose. Of the doctrine ascribed to the ' Antichrists' we have already spoken. But much is made of the use of the terms airipixa. and xpfff^o, and of the idea that we should only love and not fear God. But the terms atrippia and Yp(<rMa have a totally different application here from what they have in the far-fetched and iiniiracticahle speculations of the Gnostic sects. Nor do we require to go to Gnostic sources for their origin. They have their explanation in the ideivs of Uevelation— the one in the OT idea of an anointing, the other in the NT idea of a birth or a being /icgollen of God. And that there should be, not''tlie fear that hath torment, hut pure love to God, is surely a most Christian idea.
It is further argued that the Ep. cannot be an apo.stolic cuniposition, liecause it shows the presence of Montanistic doctrine (I'lanck, Baur). Traces of Montanism are thought to be found especially in what is said of the moral condi- tion of the believer, of the uncliim, and of sins 'not unto d<'ath' and 'a sin unto death.' With respect to the first, the Ep. speaks, it is true, of the moral condition of the believer in its ideal perfection. But it is not an absolute sinlessness that it ascribes to him, nor does it speak of his perfection at all in the Montanist way. For the ! Montanists claimed a spiritual perfection above other Christians. The idea of the rhri.mi or ' iinc- ! tion,' as it appears here, is as little Montanistic as it is Gnostic. It rests upon biblical ideas and I biblical employments of the act of anointing with oil. Neither does the distinction between two kinds of sin necessarily bear the sense which Baur puts upon it. Even if we were to grant this, it 1 would not carry the late date with it. Hilgenfeld 1 has pointed out that the idea of special mortal sins is found in the Pcrindi Petri, a. part of the pseudo-
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Clementine literature, and, in his opinion, it is therefore earlier than Montanism. Much more, too, would surely have been made of the doctrine of the Paraclete, i'f the Ep. had been written by a Montanist or under Montanistic inllueiices. Other arguments adverse to its apostolic origin and its connexion with John the evangeli.st are of even less importance. The brevity of the reference to the false teachers and the limited refutation of them have been held to be inconsistent with the claims preferred on behalf of the Epistle. But this is to overlook tlie melliod of the Ep., which is to present the truth, ami to do that authoritatively, rather than to expose error. The va'-ueness of the introduction, and the want of anything in it to iilcniify the writer with John tln' ajiostle, are also addiKcd. Uut it isc\i3tomary with St. .lohn not to name himself directly, and "the author as-sociates himself at least with "the eyewitnes.ses of Christ's life, and speaks all through in a tone belitting one conscious of apostolic dignity.
Once more the apostolic authorship is contested on the ground that the Ei>. is so ilillerent from the Apocalypse. This is, of course, an important argu- ment with those of the Tiihingen school, and it is perhaps liest put by those of that school who, like Hilgenfeld. hold' the Ep. to he older than the Gosi)cl. The Apoc. being by .lohn the aiK.stle, j the remarkable way in which it differs from the Ep. in language and conception makes it impossible, it is argued, for the latter to 1>« hy I the same hand. The dill'erences, indeed, are grea*'
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JOHN, EPISTLES OF
JOHN, EPISTLES OF
and extend not only to vocabulary, grammar, and phraseology, but to attitude, spirit, and idea. They may be explained so far, however, by dill'erence in circumstance, time of composition, subject, and so far also by the fact that the one writmg is an Ep., while the other belongs to the peculiar order of apocalyptic literature which has a form and a method of its own. The dill'erence in idea, too, is in important cases much less than tlie Tiibingen critics are inclined to make it. There is no such antagonism, e.g. , as thev .suppose between the God of \^Tatn in the Apoc. ana the God of love in the Ep., or between the view of the divine righteousness as judging e\'il in the Apoc. and the view of the same righteousness as forj^iving sin in the Epistle. That there are many points of affinity, too, between Gospel, Ep., and Anoc, is admitted by critics like Hilgenfeld. But tlie question of the Apoc. is one by itself. See art. Revelation (Book of).