1 John: Love, and a Church Split in Two

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It names no author. Tradition credits my apostle John, the same John said to have written the fourth gospel. Most scholars think it came from the same community as the Gospel of John, and perhaps from the same school of teachers, but not from my friend John himself.

When: Probably around 100, some years after the Gospel of John.

Written for: The community behind John’s gospel, just after a split. Some members had left over what to believe about me. The writer wanted those who stayed to be sure of their faith and to love one another.

What it remembers of me: That I came in the flesh (4:2), and that people saw me with their eyes and touched me with their hands (1:1). That I gave a new commandment, to love one another. And that I laid down his life for us (3:16).

How close it stays to me: Close on love shown in deed and on sharing with the needy. Far on enemies.

If you only read three chapters: 1 John 1, 1 John 3 and 1 John 4.

Words to Know

Antichrist — a word that appears only in the letters of John, nowhere else in the Bible. Here it means people who had left the community and denied that I came in a human body.

In the flesh — in a real human body, with real blood.

Fellowship — in Greek, koinōnia, sharing a common life.

Atoning sacrifice — the World English Bible’s words for what this letter calls my death. Older Bibles say propitiation.

The Book in Brief

The writer begins by saying that he and others heard, saw and touched the Word of life, and that he is writing so that their joy may be complete. He says that God is light. Anyone who walks in the light is honest about sin, and God forgives those who confess it. If anyone does sin, Jesus Christ, the righteous, is our Counselor with the Father.

Chapter 2 says that the one who knows God keeps his commandments, above all the commandment to love a brother or sister. It warns against loving the world. It says that many antichrists have appeared, and that they went out from the community. Chapter 3 tells the readers that they are God’s children, and that they must love one another, not only in words but in deed.

Chapter 4 tells them to test every spirit, and says that the spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Then it says that God is love, and that whoever says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar.

Chapter 5 says that faith overcomes the world, and that God has given us eternal life in his Son. The writer says he has written so that his readers may know they have this life. The letter ends with a word about prayer, and a warning to keep away from idols.

This is the book that says God is love. It was written to a church that had just split in two.

Beloved, let’s love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love (1 John 4:7–8).

Those are some of the most beautiful words in your Bible. You should know the circumstances in which they were written. The people who wrote them had just watched part of their community walk out the door.

Not really a letter

The book is called a letter, but it has no greeting and no signature, no names and no news. It reads more like a sermon, or a pastor’s message read aloud to a hurt congregation.

It opens with a sentence that sounds like the start of John’s gospel, and it insists on the body. That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we saw, and our hands touched, concerning the Word of life (1 John 1:1).

Heard. Seen. Touched. Why does the writer press so hard on that? Most likely because some people had begun to teach that I did not really have a body.

Go deeperHow this letter and John’s gospel belong together

Read the first lines of 1 John beside the first lines of John’s gospel, and the family likeness is plain. Both begin with the beginning, with the Word, with life. Both speak of light and darkness, love and truth, and of remaining in God. Most scholars think the gospel and the letters came out of the same circle of teachers, though they argue about whether one person wrote them all.¹

The likeness is not total. In the gospel I promise to send another Counselor (John 14:16). The Greek word is paraklētos, and the gospel uses it four times, always for the Holy Spirit. In 1 John it appears once, and it means me: we have a Counselor with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous (1 John 2:1). Those five uses are the only ones in the whole New Testament.²

The letter was also read early. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the church at Philippi in the first half of the 100s and repeated its test almost word for word: whoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an antichrist. Eusebius says that Papias, a bishop of about the same time, made use of this letter. And around 180 Irenaeus quoted its warning about antichrists, and the warning in 2 John, as the words of John, the Lord’s disciple.³

They went out from us

They went out from us, but they didn’t belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have continued with us (1 John 2:19).

That is a sentence written after a split. A group had left. The letter tells you what they believed by telling you what they denied. Every spirit who doesn’t confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God (1 John 4:3).

There were teachers in that age, and more of them in the next, who could not accept that God would take on a body that ate, sweated, bled and died. They said I only seemed to be human. The idea is called docetism, from the Greek word for seem. Around the year 110, the bishop Ignatius was still fighting it, insisting that I was truly born, truly ate and drank, truly was crucified.¹

I was truly all of those things. I was hungry in the desert. I was tired at a well. I wept for a friend. I was afraid in a garden. If anyone tells you that I only seemed to be a man, this letter is on my side.

Go deeperWhat the people who left believed

The letter tells us what the people who left denied. It does not tell us what they taught. We have none of their own writings, only one side of the argument.

Here are the clues. They denied that Jesus is the Christ (1 John 2:22). They would not say that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:2). And the writer insists on something odd: This is he who came by water and blood … not with the water only, but with the water and the blood (1 John 5:6). Many readers take the water to mean my baptism and the blood my death. If so, the writer is answering someone who said that I was the Christ at the river but not on the cross.

That sounds like a teacher named Cerinthus, who taught in Asia at about the same time. Irenaeus, writing around 180, says that Cerinthus taught that Jesus was an ordinary man, the son of Joseph, and that the Christ came down on him at his baptism like a dove and left him before he died.¹ Irenaeus also says that John wrote his gospel to answer Cerinthus.⁴ Whether Cerinthus was the man this letter fights, nobody can prove.

Some scholars see a different quarrel. Raymond Brown suggested that both sides had grown up on the gospel of John, and that the ones who left pressed its picture of me as the heavenly Son so far that my life in a body seemed to matter little.¹ If so, this was not a church against outsiders. It was a family quarrel over how to read the same book.

The antichrists

This is where the word antichrist first appears. Read what it actually means here.

Little children, these are the end times, and as you heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen (1 John 2:18). Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist (1 John 2:22).

The antichrists in this letter are not a world ruler at the end of history, with a mark and a number. They are many, and they are already here. They are former members of the congregation who had left over what to believe about me.⁵

Later Christians took this word, which appears in only two short letters, and fused it with the beast of Revelation, the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians and the little horn in Daniel, to build a single figure, the Antichrist, who has been assigned a new face in every century. The letter that invented the word would not recognize him.

God is love

Now the heart of the book. Read chapter 4 straight through.

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:10–11).

No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God remains in us (1 John 4:12).

God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him (1 John 4:16).

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).

And the line that leaves no room to hide: If a man says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? (1 John 4:20).

That is the whole of my teaching on the subject, said as well as anyone has ever said it. On the night before I died, John’s gospel remembers me telling my friends, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also love one another (John 13:34). This letter takes that commandment and makes it the test of everything. You know God if you love. If you do not love, you do not know God, whatever you say you believe.

Love in deed

And the letter will not let love stay a feeling.

But whoever has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, then closes his heart of compassion against him, how does God’s love remain in him? My little children, let’s not love in word only, or with the tongue only, but in deed and truth (1 John 3:17–18).

Love is a meal. Love is a coat. Love is rent paid for someone who cannot pay it. My brother James said the same thing about faith. The letters of John say it about love.

Love for whom?

But read closely, and you will see the limit of this letter.

The love it commands is love for the brothers, for the members of the community. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers (1 John 3:14). The people who left are called liars, deceivers and antichrists.

I asked for more than that. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies (Matthew 5:43–44). My Father, I said, makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45).

This letter was written by wounded people, holding together what was left of a church after a bitter split. Their love turned inward, toward the ones who stayed. I understand why. But even the letter that says God is love had trouble loving the people who walked out. Most churches since have had the same trouble.

Without sin?

The letter also has a puzzle about sin.

In chapter 1 it says, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves … If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins (1 John 1:8–9). In chapter 3 it says, Whoever is born of God doesn’t commit sin … he can’t sin, because he is born of God (1 John 3:9).

Readers have struggled to fit those together for centuries. Many think the writer was fighting on two fronts at once, against people who claimed they had no sin and against people who said that sin did not matter. The first verse is the one I would keep beside your bed. Everyone sins. Everyone can be forgiven.

The verse that was added

There is one more thing you should know about this letter, because it is one of the most famous changes ever made to the text of the New Testament.

If you open a King James Bible to chapter 5, you will read: For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one (1 John 5:7, King James Version).

That sentence is not in any Greek manuscript of the letter for well over a thousand years. It first appears in Latin, around the end of the 300s, and seems to have begun as a note in the margin explaining the verse. It crept into Latin Bibles from there.⁶

When the scholar Erasmus printed his Greek New Testament in 1516, he left it out, because he could not find it in any Greek manuscript. Critics attacked him for leaving out the Trinity. By his third edition, in 1522, a Greek manuscript containing it had turned up in England, apparently produced recently, and he put it in. From his text it went into the King James Version of 1611, and millions of people learned it as scripture. It is called the Johannine Comma.⁶

The World English Bible, like almost every modern Bible, does not have it. It reads simply, For there are three who testify: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and the three agree as one (1 John 5:7–8).

Whatever you believe about God, it should not rest on a sentence that someone added to the Bible.

Go deeperWhat happened to the added verse

The story of that verse did not end in 1611.

Nobody knows exactly where it came from. One guess is that it grew out of the verse that is really there. The Spirit, the water and the blood agree as one (1 John 5:8), and some early readers took those three as signs of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. About 250, Cyprian, a bishop in North Africa, wrote that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit it is written, “And the three are one.” Scholars still argue about whether Cyprian knew the added sentence or was only reading the real verse that way.⁷

Isaac Newton wrote on the Bible as well as on physics. In 1690 he sent a long private paper to a friend arguing that the verse was a later insertion. It was printed only after he died.⁸

For some churches the question was not a matter of scholarship. In 1897 the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church ruled that Catholic scholars could not safely deny that the verse was genuine. That ruling was relaxed in the early twentieth century, and the revised Latin Bible approved for Catholic use in 1979 leaves the verse out.⁹

The doctrine of the Trinity does not need the verse. The creeds of 325 and 381 were written without it. As far as anyone can tell, the verse began as a note by someone who loved the doctrine and wanted a sentence that said it plainly.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 John 3:17–18, then 1 John 4:20–21.

You will find: love defined as helping a brother in need, and a man who says he loves God while hating his brother called a liar.

Then compare 1 John 5:7–8 in the World English Bible or any modern Bible with a King James Bible. See what was added.

The Short Version

• 1 John comes from the same community as the Gospel of John. It names no author.
• It was written after a split, against people who said I did not really have a body.
• Its antichrists are many, and they are former church members, not a ruler at the end of time.
• It says God is love, and that love means helping the brother in need, in deed and truth.
• The famous Trinity verse in older Bibles, the Johannine Comma, was added in Latin and is not in the Greek.