This will be the final post in my thread on the Gospel and Letters of John. Here I will reflect further on what we can about the epistles and the context out of which they emerged. If you want to read more, check out my chapter in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction....   In that chapter I explain how views similar to those found in these Johannine writings eventually contributed to what we now call Gnosticism.  (That, of course, is a whole *other* story.)  As always, at the end of the chapter in my book, I give suggestions for further reading. ******************************************************** At this stage you may have recognized one of the difficulties of this kind of contextual analysis [i.e. that I explained in the previous chapter] It is very hard for the historian to know for a fact that the Johannine secessionists actually taught that it was unimportant to love one another and to keep God’s commandments. The problem is that the only source we have for the secessionists’ views is the author of [...]

I can now describe and explain the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John.  1 John has always been one of my favorite books of the New Testament, and only takes a few minutes to read; the final two are incredibly short, less than a page each.  Think about reading them! The author never gives us his name.  But because the books aer so similar in theme and writing style to the Fourth Gospel – whose author from antiquity was thought to be Jesus’ disciple John -- these letters were also assigned to him.  Critical scholars today almost entirely think that the author was not the *same* person as the author of the Gospel, and was almost certainly not John the Son of Zebedee.  he probably was, though, an author living in the same community, at a later time, with a similar point of view. Here is how I explain what these letters are by situating them in a historical context in light of what was happening in the author's community.  Again, this is taken [...]

OK, we return now to some of the books in the New Testament attributed to "John."  I have talked at some length about the Gospel of John and the community that appears to lie behind it.  I now move to the three epistles of John, found among the "catholic" or "general" epistles near the end of the New Testament.  (When I was at Princeton Seminary, one day I went into the men's room and over the three urinals, in sequence, someone had written, as graffiti, 1 John; 2 John; 3 John.  I guess it was a seminary joke....). All of this is in preparation for a series of blog posts being written for us by my colleague Hugo Mendez, in which he will argue *against* the idea of a Johannine community.   (!) Before talking directly about these three letters, I need to explain one of the most common ways scholars analyze epistolary literature in the NT (i.e. the books that started out as actual *letters* -- written by a Christian author to a community or [...]

I continue now with my discussion of whether the book of James was actually written, as it implicitly claims, by the historical James, the brother of Jesus.  The issue is much bigger than whether James could write (a topic I discussed in my earlier posts).  Are the issues/concerns/interests of this book at all consonant with what we know about James himself?   The question is rarely asked, but it's absolutely key. Here is what I say in my book about it: ********************************************************************* Other arguments support the claim that James the brother of Jesus almost certainly did not write the letter.  Of key importance is the fact that precisely what we know about James of Jerusalem otherwise is what we do not find in this letter.   The earliest accounts of James – one of them from a contemporary – indicate that he was especially known as an advocate for the view that Jewish followers of Jesus should maintain their Jewish identity by following the Jewish Law.  This seems to be the clear indication of Gal. 2:12 in [...]