of God. This danger, which threatened Jewish Christians piimarily, must have ati'ected the whole body. The prominence of the Jewish controversy in the Fourth Gospel is now generally recognized. It is less prominent in the Epistle, but there is no essential difference of situation.
At the same time it is only one element in the situation. A. Wurm {Die Irrlehrer im 1. Johan- nesbrief, 1903) is not justified in deducing from the words of 2^ the exclusively Jewish character of the false teaching combated. The aiithor cer- tainly deduces the fact that the opponents ' have not the Father ' from their false Christologj'. It does not follow, however, that he and his op- ponents were at one in their doctrine of the Father. He could not have written as he has unless they claimed to ' have the Father ' ; but they may have claimed it in a different sense from that of orthodox Christians. The passage is more easily explained if we suppose that the writer has in view a claim to a superior knowledge of the Father imparted to a few ' spiritual ' natures, unattainable by the ordinary Christian. All true knowledge of the Father comes through Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. By rejecting the truth about Jesus they forfeited all claim to knowledge of the Father.
(2) Gnosticism. — There is no clear evidence in the Epistles of the fully developed Gnostic systems of the 2nd century. There are, for instance, many simpler explanations of the use of awip^a avrov in 3" than Pfleiderer's hj'pothesis that it refers to the system of Basilides. But undoubtedly Gnostic ideas are an important element in the mental circumstances of the writer and his age. The burden of his message is that God is Light (1^), and the reiteration of this in negative form is probably aimed at the view that the Father of all is un- knowable or that knowledge of Him is the monopoly of a 'pneumatic' minority. The Gnostic claim, real or supposed, that the irvev/xaTiKoi are superior to the obligations of the Moral Law is roughly handled. And the insistence with which intellectual claims are met by the challenge to fulfil the Chris- tian duty of love and its obligations is significant. The confession demanded of ' Jesus Christ come in flesh ' is a protest against the Gnostic doctrine of the impossibility of real union between the spiritual seed and flesh. And at tlie same time the writer's sympathy with Gnostic ideas is obvious. Here as elsewhere, he is always reminding his ' children ' that they are old enough to refuse the evil and to choose the good.
Gnostic ideas afford no criterion for dating the Epistles of John. It is, of course, a perversion of history to assume that Gnostic ideas first came into contact with Christianity when Christians began to think in terms of Greek philosophy, towards the middle of the 2nd century. The movement is Oriental rather than Greek, and far older in date. But its reflexion in these Epistles is a patent fact.
(3) Docetism. — It is customary to speak of the Johannine Epistles, and also of the Gospel, as anti- Docetic (cf. Schmiedel [EBi s.v. 'John, Son of Zebedee,'§ 57], Moflatt {LNT, 1911, p. 586]). If the term is used popularly of all teaching Avhich denied or subverted the reality of the Incarnation, this is true. ' The Word was made Flesh,' ' Jesus Christ came in flesh,' are the watchwords of Gospel and Epistles. But there is no real trace in these writings of Docetism in the stricter sense of the term, i.e. the teaching denounced by Ignatius (Smyrn. 2 ft".; cf. Trail. 10 f.), which assigned a purely phantasmal body to the Lord. And it i* probable that in the development of christological thought theories of pure Docetism are a later stage than the assumption of a temporary connexion between a Heavenly Power and the real manhood
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of Jesus of Nazareth (cf., however, Lightfoot and Plleiderer).
(4) Cerinthianism. — We have seen that the writer has to deal with dangers which threaten from several quarters. As the Epistle proceeds, his attack becomes more direct, and the christological passage in eh. 5 contains clearer reference to one definite form of error — the denial that Jesus, the Son of God, came by ' blood' as well as by ' water,' i.e. that the Sufferings and Death of Jesus were as essential a note of His Messianic work as the Baptism by John. This suits the teaching of Cerinthus as described by Irenpeus (c. Hcer. I. XX vi. 1) : ' jiost baptismum descendisse in eum ab ea principalitate quae est super omnia Christum hgura columbse et tunc annunciasse incognitum patrem, et uirtutes perfecisse, in fine autem reuolasse iterura Christum de lesu, et lesum passum esse et resurrexisse, Christum autem impassibilem per- seuerasse, existentem spiritalem.' The traditional view that cli. 5 contains a reference to Cerinthian- ism has been held by the majority of scholars of all scliools who have dealt with the Epistle. This view has been seriously challenged especially by Wurm (op. cit.) and Clemen (ZNTW vi. [1905] 271 ff.) on the ground that 2-* excludes Cerinthian- ism, as it implies that the writer and his opponents are conscious of no difference of view in their doc- trine of the Father. If the suggestion made above (§ 2 (1)) that that passage gains in point if the opponents claimed a superior ' having the Father ' to that of ordinary Christians, the objection falls to the ground. The limits of this article preclude a general discussion of our knowledge of Cerinth- ianism. The present writer has discussed it at length in his Johannine Epistles (ICC, 1912), p. xlvtt".). There are good reasons for thinking that Hippolytus in his Syntagma ascribed to Cerinthus the view that the Spirit (not the Christ) descended on Jesus at the Baptism. If so, this gives additional force to tlie description in S**'- of the proper function of the Spirit. It would seem that Cerinthus con- tinued these Judaizing and Gnostic tendencies wliich the author of these Epistles regarded as most dangerous. But ' many Antichrists had come to be' even if Cerinthus is most prominently in his thoughts.