Griffith suggests that John writes a pastoral rather than a polemical letter, one designed to shore up the identity of his church and prevent further apostasy. John achieves this by insisting on faithfulness in the confession of Jesus as Messiah, by an exhortation to communal love, and by a warning to avoid idols. Like many ancient letters, John ends with a summary of his main themes, including the exhortation to avoid idols. For Jews and early Christians, Griffith says, “idolatry”... Read more

Terry Griffith argues in his Keep Yourselves from Idols that the odd closing exhortation of 1 John (“little children, guard yourselves from idols”) holds the key to the book as a whole. He also argues that the “Jewish matrix of Johannine tradition has been significantly underplayed.” For the last couple of centuries, 1 John has been read as a response to doceticizing or gnosticizing movements within the early, with the specifics of the debate being filled out by reference to... Read more

Malcolm Coombes (http://www.bct.edu.au/Arche/Coombes.pdf) notes that John clusters words together, often in threes, throughout his first epistle. “Teach,” for instance, occurs only three times in the letter, all in 1 John 2:26-27. John uses “devil” “only four times: three times in the subunit 3:7–8 and once in the adjacent subunit 3:9–10. Similarly the adjective [ alethinos ] (‘true’) is used only four times in 1 John, three of which are used repetitively in subunit 5:20–21. The use of three forms of... Read more

In a 1956 JBL article on John’s gospel, one Pierson Parker makes the intriguing statement that 1 John makes almost as much sense read backward as it does read forward. This is evidence that the letter’s contents are “disconnected” and that the letter reads like “an old man’s anxious exhortations to his flock.” Perhaps it’s evidence of something else, not an old man’s anxiety, but his cunning, his deliberate construction of a letter that reads forwards, backwards, and from the... Read more