The Johannine Community

 From a course I am auditing on Bethel Seminary on the Letters of John

Reflections on the Johannine Community

The Letters of John represent an important component of the literature that comprised what scholarly tradition refers to as the Johannine community, which includes the Gospel of John and perhaps Revelation.  By-passing the latter text, Burge refers to this as a “Johannine school or community or circle” (1) rooted in various locations around Ephesus. Despite differences in focus, the Gospel and the Letters share a common dualistic world view—that of either being inside the beloved community, rooted in the spirit and Incarnation of Christ, and bathed in God’s love, or that of being outside the community, consigned to darkness, whether that be the blindness of the Synagogue (the narrative body of the Gospel of John) or that of the so called, proto-Gnostic, “secessionists” (1, 2 Letters of John) who, in radicalizing the spiritual and material realm, refused to identify the Christ with Jesus in the flesh.  In this, as far as can be drawn from the extant evidence, the opponents of 1 John rejected both the Incarnation and the atonement—the “blood,” in the terminology of 1 John. As reflected in the Gospel, the “darkness, persecution, and turmoil” (Burge Location 386, Kindle) portrayed in the text stemmed from an external source, extremely sharp conflict with the synagogue, as particularly heightened in John 8:31-58.

 By contrast, especially in 1 John, “the once unified congregation,” (Ibid.) (assuming that was the actual state of affairs) began to tear apart from within) over “the proper acknowledgement of [the person] of Jesus” on the relationship to his earthly existence in the flesh (1 John 4:2) and “in his relationship to God as Father and in his mission” (Lieu 9). This was in regard to the Incarnation and atonement, as reflected in the theological high points of the Gospel, and to the significance of his teachings,  as well as the signs, as reflected throughout much of narrative body of the Gospel.

 In terms of working out some of the relationships between the Gospel and the Letters, the focus of their respective antagonistic diatribes may offer gist for some intriguing speculation, though it needs to be acknowledged that the relative silence of the sources remains an ongoing interpretive problem.  The literature points to a Greek and Jewish ethnic mix within the Johannine community, though that leaves open why the Gospel emphasized the Synagogue Jews while 1 and 2 John referenced the proto-Gnostics. Was that a matter of historical time (about a 10-15-year difference between the earlier Gospel and the later Letters?).  Was this a matter of divergence of location of the specific communities within the various Johannine circles?  

 Perhaps in some circles, the relationship between the claims of the Christ camp and the Pharisees were uppermost, most evidently an external foe, though I wonder if there was a muted internal threat—a Jewish analogue to the proto-Gnostics—in the Gospel reflected in the character of Nicodemus as perhaps an interior Jewish-Christian voice that played some significant role throughout the Gospel. Thus, could the writer of 1 and 2 John have had a particular localized focus where the proto-Gnostic challenge to the faith of the saints, at least to the writer and his immediate circle (the “I” and the “we” of 1 John) became the salient matter? I raise the relationship between the Gospel and the Letters because the primary antagonist of each points to the potential audiences each is seeking to address, even as the difference between the two leaves open many intriguing questions.

 The challenge becomes an increasingly intertextual one if one accepts the suggestion by Burge and Lieu that there may be a redactional relationship between the two bodies of texts. On this view, various stories of Jesus were circulating among the Johannine community, many of which ultimately comprised the narrative core of the Gospel.  Eventually the Prologue (1:1-14) and Farewell Discourses (14-17) were added, both of which included a stronger emphasis on the incarnation (Jesus in the flesh). These additions gave the Gospel of John the canonical legitimacy to argue against any appropriation of this Gospel by the various schools of Gnostic thought that were circulating around the first several centuries before the formal adaption of the Incarnation and the Trinity at the various church counsels of the 4^th and 5^th centuries. On this interpretation, these texts were added to the Gospel in response to the tensions experienced by those within the immediate circle of the writer of 1 and 2 John. Thus, the shift in the antagonistic foe from an external enemy reflected in the Gospel’s portrayal of “the Jews” to that of an internal enemy reflected in the secessionist, proto-Gnostics required, as reflected within 1 John, an emphasis on the Incarnation and atonement, were redacted into the later editing of the Gospel of John.

 Sources:

Burge, Gary, M. John, Letters of. In Martin, Davids. Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments. Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2010.

Burge, Gary M. The New Application Commentary: Letters of John. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998. Kindle

Lieu, Judith, I, II, and III John: A Commentary. Westminster: John Knox Press, 2008.