From Bart Ehrman’s Blog Posts:
1 John in a Nutshell, September 11, 2025.
His 50-word summary – I John addresses a problem involving group of Christians (whom he calls “antichrists”) who had split from the church over a difference of belief, claiming that Christ did not come “in the flesh” and that they themselves had no sin – undercutting, for the author, the essence of the Christian message.
From the intro – This short, five-chapter book is normally called a “letter” even though it does not have the standard features of an ancient piece of correspondence. Normally (not just in the New Testament, but in the ancient world generally) personal correspondence used several standard conventions (just as today you might write a letter to your IRS agent and begin with Dear Mr. Elliott, even if you are not endeared to him at all: it’s a convention).
2 John and 3 John in a Single Nutshell
His 50-word summary: 2 and 3 John are letters by an author called the “elder,” the first addressed to a community and the other to one of its prominent members, warning against believers who preach a false understanding of Christ and who refuse to welcome Christian travelers because they disagree with their views.
Bart addresses the “false understanding. “There are clues within the letters themselves concerning the historical context that prompted the author to produce them. We have already discussed the (in the previous post) the serious rift that appears to have occurred in the community, with a group of church members splitting from the rest over the question of whether Christ was fully human or not. The separationists maintained he was fully divine and therefore did not actually come “in the flesh.” The rest of the community, and the author, vehemently disagree.”
See the very good article by Hugo Mendez: Did the Johannine Community Exist?
Hugo Méndez hmendez@email.unc.edu , Volume 42, Issue 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/0142064X19890490
Extracts follow:
Abstract
This article challenges the historical existence of the ‘Johannine community’ – a hypothesized group of ancient churches sharing a distinctive theological outlook. Scholars posit such a community to explain the similarities of John to 1, 2 and 3 John as well as the epistles’ witness to a network of churches. Against this view, this article calls attention to evidence of literary contact between the four texts and the presence of dubious authorial claims in each. Taken together, these features cast John, 1 John, 2 John and 3 John as unreliable bases for historical reconstruction, whose implied audiences and situations are probably fabrications. The article proceeds to develop a new history of the Johannine texts. Those texts represent a chain of literary forgeries, in which authors of different extractions cast and recast a single invented character – an eyewitness to Jesus’ life – as the mouthpiece of different theological viewpoints.
Verbal Similarities
Since literary borrowing entails the reuse of language, its most obvious evidence is similarity of expression. With respect to the Johannines, ‘it is difficult to find … works more similar in expression’.8 At least 37 expressions (phrasal or clausal strings) are highly characteristic of the Johannines and present in at least John and 1 John. Of these, 26 appear nowhere else in the NT.9 These expressions include: [See article for table]
John and 1 John
John and 1 John share two peculiar structural features. The first is the use of a stylistic prologue or proem at the beginning of the text (Jn 1.1-18; 1 Jn 1.1-4). The presence of these passages is surprising enough; they are not required by the genre of either text (narrative gospel/bios[?] and tractate). More to the point, these passages ‘though by no means identical … stand together against anything else in the NT, sharing a large number of common features in a short space’ (Painter 2002: 69)
John and 3 John
We might not expect points of contact between the gospel and 3 John, seeing as the latter text is small enough to fit on a single papyrus sheet and adheres tightly to a standard epistolary form. And yet, one such point of contact exists. Both texts include an affidavit, in which the narrator testifies to a fact and affirms the truth of his testimony. That these two affidavits are also very close in wording leaves ‘no doubt’ of ‘a relationship between these texts’ (Klauck 1992: 19)
1 John and 2 John
1 John and 2 John contain nearly identical material – the latter being an abridgment of the former. This close relationship is crystallized at a single formal parallel. In both texts, the narrator directly addresses his readers and declares that he is ‘writing’ a ‘new commandment’, while simultaneously insisting that this commandment is, in fact, one they have ‘heard’ ‘from the beginning’:
2 and 3 John
No Johannine scholar questions a genetic relationship between 2 and 3 John – by far the most similar texts in the collection. Both documents are (a) roughly the same length, (b) addressed by the same sender (‘the Elder’), (c) introduced with prescripts that agree nearly verbatim (2 Jn 1; 3 Jn 1) and (d) concluded by formulaic apologies for the letter’s brevity, with a stated intention to visit (2 Jn 12-13; 3 Jn 13-15). Either both are works of a common author, or one is modeled on the other.
An Invented Author
Although the gospel constructs its implied author as an eyewitness to Jesus, we have every reason to doubt this claim. Even if the gospel preserves ‘primitive, undeveloped material’ of historical value (Anderson 2009: 382), that material accounts for only a fraction of its contents. A larger percentage of the text is of suspect historicity, including entire discourses whose style, tone and contents differ so radically from the sayings of Jesus preserved in Paul and the Synoptics as to indicate ‘creativity … on a large scale’ (Lincoln 2007: 187). That these discourses are the author’s fabrications is clear from the fact that ‘when Jesus, the literary character, speaks, he speaks the language of the author and his narrator’ (Culpepper 1983: 40). In certain passages, ‘it is impossible to tell when Jesus … stops speaking … and when or if the narrator speaks’, most notably 3.13-21, 31-36 (Culpepper 1983: 41). In short, Jesus’ voice has been commandeered by the author, who makes him the mouthpiece of an intricate system of ideas foreign to the Synoptics, including the need to be ‘born from above’, ‘abide’ in God, and ‘walk in the light’.
