were also toned and shaped by the peculiar conditions of the Church and of the religious thought of his time. The conflict of Christianity was no longer with Judaistic error ; no longer between the Gospel and the Law; between circumcision and uncireumcision ; but with an essentially heathen Gnosticism which appealed to the Church with the claim of a profound insight into Christianity, and sought to wrest the Gospel to its own service. It has already been remarked that the aim of the fourth Gospel was not distinctively polemic. John was impelled to write by the pressure upon his own soul of the truth “God manifest in the flesh,” rather than by the aggres- sions of heresy ; but none the less the utterances of a Cerin- thus * lent sharpness to the lines of the Apostle’s portrait of the Son of Man, and no more impressive answer to such teaching could have been given than John furnished in the words of the Lord himself concerning His own pre-existence and eternal Godhead, and in His testimony that the Father has created all things through the Word. (See i. 3, 14, 33, 34, 49; iii. 13, 14; v. 23, 26; vi. 51, 62; viii. 58 ; Kili. 23 sqq.; xvii. 1, 2, 16, 19; xviii. 6, 11, 37.)
It is generally conceded that the first Epistle was written at Ephesus. In the Latin Church the opinion prevailed that it was primarily addressed to the Parthians ; but ecclesiastical tradition knows of no mission of John to the Parthians, St. Thomas being supposed to have carried the Gospel to them.
Its exact destination, however, is of little consequence. “Its coloring is moral rather than local.” It is a unique picture of a Christian society, the only medium of the Spirit’s work among
* Cerinthus taught that the world was not made by the supreme God, but by another and remote power which is over the universe. Jesus was not born of the Virgin by miraculous conception, but was the Son of Joseph and Mary by natural generation, though specially endowed with justice and wisdom. After the baptism of Jesus the Christ descended upon Him in the form of a dove, from that sovereign power which is over all things. He then an- nounced the unknown Father and wrought miracles; but toward the end of His ministry the Christ departed from Jesus, and Jesus suffered and rose from the dead, while the Christ remained impassible as a spiritual being.