1.01 - The Two Little Letters
Chapter 1 The Two Little Letters (2 John 1:1; 3 John 1:1)
Nature of the two Notes—The Apostle John’s Correspondence—Private or Public Letters?—Connection between 2 and 3 John—Relation of both to 1 John—Causes of their Survival.
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“The Elder to the Elect Lady and her children.” —2 John 1:1 .
* * * * * * * “The Elder to Gaius the beloved.” —3 John 1:1.
―—―♦——— THE Second and Third Epistles of John are the shortest books, of the Bible. They contain in the Greek less than three hundred words apiece; closely written, each might cover a single sheet of papyrus—to this material the word “paper” (chartes) refers in 2 John 1:12. Together they barely fill a page out of the eight or nine hundred pages of the English Bible. These brief notes, or dispatches, appear to have been thrown off by the Apostle in the ordinary course of his Church-administration, and may have occupied in their composition but a few moments of his time; in all likelihood, he wrote scores of such letters, bearing upon public or private affairs, during his long presidency over the Christian societies of Asia Minor. By a happy providence, these two have been preserved to us out of so much that has perished with the occasion.
Doubt has been entertained, both in ancient and modern times, as to whether these notes should not be ascribed to another “John the Elder,” of whose existence some traces are found in the earliest Church history, rather than to the Apostle of that name; but their close affinity to the First Epistle of John sustains the general tradition as to their authorship and vindicates them for the beloved Apostle. The writer assumes, as matter of course, a unique personal authority, and that in a Church to which he does not belong by residence, such as no post-apostolic Father presumed to arrogate; that St John should have styled himself familiarly “the elder” in writing to his friends and children in the faith, is a thing natural enough and consistent with his temperament. Those scholars may be in the right who conjecture that “the Elder John” of tradition is nothing but a double of the Apostle John.
It was surely their slight and fugitive character, rather than any misgiving about their origin, which excluded these writings from the New Testament of the Syrian Church and led to their being counted in other quarters amongst the antilegomena, or disputed Books of Scripture. They were overshadowed by the First Epistle, beside which they look almost insignificant; and to this fact it is due, as well as to their brevity and the obscurity of their allusions, that the Second and Third Epistles of John were seldom quoted in early times and are comparatively neglected by readers of the Bible.
These are notes snatched from the every-day correspondence of an Apostle. They afford us a glance into the common intercourse that went on between St John and his friends—and enemies (for enemies the Apostle of love certainly had, as the First Epistle shows). They add little or nothing to our knowledge of Johannine doctrine; but they throw a momentary light upon the state of the Churches under St John’s jurisdiction toward the close of the first century and the intercommunion linking them together; they indicate some of the questions which agitated the first Christian societies, and the sort of personalities who figured amongst them. These brief documents lend touches of local colour and personal feeling to the First Epistle, which deals with doctrine and experience in a studiously general way. Taken along with the Apocalyptic Letters to the Seven Churches, they help us, in some sort, to imagine the aged Apostle in “his habit as he lived”—the most retired and abstracted of all the great actors of the New Testament. They serve to illustrate St John’s disposition and methods, and reveal something of the nature and extent of his influence. These scanty lines possess, therefore, a peculiar historical and biographical interest; and their right interpretation is a matter of considerable moment.
The First Epistle of John appears without Address, Salutation, or Farewell Greetings, without personal notes or local allusions of any kind. It is wanting in the ordinary features of a letter, and is in literary form a homily rather than an Epistle. The two notes attached to it supply, to some extent, this defect. They stand in close relation to the major Epistle; they bring to our notice, in a slight but very significant fashion, persons and incidents belonging to the sphere of St John’s ministry about the time when it was written, and cast a vivid illumination upon one spot at least in the wide province over which the venerable Apostle presided and to which his “catholic” Epistle in all probability was addressed. 2 and 3 John therefore furnish, in default of other material, a kind of setting and framework to 1 John. For this reason they are discussed here, by way of Introduction rather than sequel. The Second and Third Epistles of John are not, properly speaking, “private” letters. 3 John bears, indeed, a personal address; but it deals with public matters; and its contents, as the last sentence shows, were intended to reach others besides “Gaius the beloved.” From early times it has been debated whether the “elect lady” of 2 John was a community, or an individual sister in the Church; the former view, held by most recent investigators, is much the more probable. The Apostle appeals to the Church in question, with deep solemnity, as to the “chosen lady” of “the Lord” (see Chapter 3), even as in the Revelation (Revelation 21:2, Revelation 21:9, and Revelation 22:17) he describes the entire Church as “the bride, the Lamb’s wife.” This style of speech was familiar to the Asian Churches from the great passage of St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Ephesians 5:22-33), which hallowed the love of husband and wife by its analogy to the mystic tie uniting the Lord Christ with His people; the same figure is employed in 2 Corinthians 11:2-3, and in John 3:29. Hence in the body of his letter St John uses the singular and plural (thou and you) interchangeably, identifying the Church with its members, the “lady” with her “children”; and there is nothing in the contents of the note specific to the circumstances of a private family. The greater formality and fulness of the salutation of 2 John in comparison with 3 John points also to its larger destination, as addressed to the community and not to a single person. St Paul’s Epistle to Philemon is the one strictly private letter in the New Testament; the difference between that writing and the Second of John every reader can appreciate.
These two should, in fact, be designated “the Pastoral Epistles of John”; they hold amongst his writings a position resembling that of the letters to Timothy and Titus amongst those of St Paul, dealing, though in a slighter way, with questions of Church-order and orthodoxy akin to those which the Apostle of the Gentiles had to regulate at an earlier time in the same district. Nevertheless, and despite the public stamp and purport of the documents, there breathes through both a tenderness of feeling and a personal intimacy which take fit expression in the farewell greeting of 3 John: “The friends salute thee. Salute the friends by name.” Whether addressed to few or many readers, whether designed for the household of faith or the family circle, these leaflets of the Apostle John are true love-letters,—written as from father to children, from friend to friends.
While these Epistles stand apart from the other writings of St John, a close and curious connection is traceable between them. In each at the outset “the elder” writes to those (or to him) whom he “loves in truth”; in each he speaks of himself as “very much rejoiced” (a combination of words unique in the New Testament) by what he has “found” (or “heard”) as to his correspondents “walking in truth”—an expression of Johannine strain, but confined to these two letters. To Gaius, St John repeats this phrase with emphasis: “Greater joy than this I have not, to hear of my children walking in the truth” (1 John 2:1-3), as though Gaius himself belonged to those “children walking in truth” on whom he congratulated the Elect Lady in the previous letter. In both Epistles St John concludes by saying that he “has many things to write” to his friends, which he will not now set down “by paper and ink” (or “ink and pen”), because he “hopes to come to” them (“to see” his dear Gaius “immediately”), —“and mouth to mouth,” he says, “we will talk.” Now he would be a very stiff, stereotyped writer, who should echo himself thus precisely in two informal letters composed at any distance of time from each other. It is true that St John’s theological vocabulary is limited and repetitive; but this is a different matter, and the Epistles are anything but constrained and mechanical. Letters so nearly identical in their setting must have been, one cannot but think, nearly simultaneous in their composition. It was in the course of one and the same visitation that the Apostle John expected to see the “lady” of 2 John and “the beloved Gaius” of 3 John; he writes to both on the eve of his projected tour.
Both letters turn, it must be further observed, on the subject of hospitality; they are concerned with the question of the reception of travellers passing from Church to Church and claiming recognition as Christian teachers or missionaries (2 John 1:7-11, 3 John 1:5-10). The status of such persons was, as we shall see, a critical question in the Primitive Church. The Elect Lady is sternly warned not to “receive into her house” the bearers of false teaching; and Gaius is highly approved for his entertainment of “brethren,” personally “strangers” to him, who “had gone out” on the service of “the name,” by which conduct he has shown himself a “fellow-worker with the truth.” At the same time Diotrephes, who has a predominating voice in Gaius’ Church, is denounced because “he refuses to receive the brethren”—as, in fact, the Apostle declares, “he refuses us”; more than this, “he hinders those who wish” (like Gaius) to receive the accredited itinerants, “and drives them out of the Church.” This state of things, manifestly, was intolerable: the Apostle “hopes to come” to the spot “straightway”; and when he does come, he will reckon with Diotrephes (3 John 1:10, 3 John 1:14). He “has written a few words to the Church” (so Westcott properly renders the first clause of 3 John 1:9), along with this confidential note to Gaius; “but” he is doubtful what reception his public missive may have: “he [Diotrephes] receiveth not us”—does not admit our authority. The Epistle to Gaius is designed to supplement that addressed to the Church, and to provide against its possible failure. The Second Epistle of John is, we conclude, the very letter referred to in3 John 1:9. The more closely we examine the two, the more germane and twin-like they appear. The caution of 2 John and the commendation of 3 John on the matter of hospitality match and fit into each other they would be naturally addressed to the same circle—to a Church which was, for some reason or other, disposed to welcome the wrong kind of guests, to entertain heterodox teachers and to shut the door against orthodox and duly accredited visitors. The action of Diotrephes, who instigated the exclusion of the Apostle’s friends, is not indeed imputed to heretical leanings on his own part; he is taxed with ambition, and with disloyalty to apostolic rule—“loving to be first” and “in mischievous words prating about us” (3 John 1:9-10). Gaius braved this man’s displeasure in keeping an open door for St John’s emissaries, and had laid the Apostle thereby under great obligation; the service thus rendered to “the truth” was the more valuable because at this very time, as we learn from the Second Epistle (in agreement with the First), “deceivers and antichrists” were infesting the Asian field, who would not fail to take advantage of the opening afforded by the factious behaviour of Diotrephes. The Demetrius of 3 John 1:12 is introduced to Gaius, at the end of the note, apparently as bearing this Letter (possibly both letters) with him; the writer tacitly asks on his behalf a continuance of the “well-doing” (3 John 1:5,3 John 1:11) by which Gaius had earned his praise and confidence already. St John makes no reference to the letter-carrier in his “few words to the church”; but prefers to commend him to private and unofficial hospitality, for fear of exposing Demetrius to the rebuff the Church might give him under the malign influence of Diotrephes. All the more was this likely, if the same Church, or some party in it, was in a mind to admit such enemies of the truth as those described in 2 John 1:9-11. Demetrius, very probably, was sent on purpose to combat these deniers of the Incarnation, pending the Apostle’s appearance on the scene.
Thus read, the two writings become virtually parts of a single document. Like companion stereoscopic pictures, by their combination at the right focus they reproduce the situation and present a living whole. The correspondence of the opening and closing sentences of the two Epistles is not accidental, nor to be accounted for by the author’s poverty in epistolary matter; it is due to the fact that he writes the one note directly after the other, in the same vein, in the same mood. 2 John is addressed, in the language of severe admonition combined with the highest appreciation of its Church status, to the body of the endangered Church, which was peculiarly dear to the Apostle; 3 John, in terms of warm encouragement, to a generous-hearted disciple, a beloved and trusted friend of the writer’s, belonging to the same Society, but not, as it appears, holding any official charge within it. The two present, in the main, the opposite sides of the same anxious situation; together, they prepare the way for the Apostle’s approaching visit. This view of the connection of the notes—which, by the way, is adopted by critics of such opposite schools as Theodor Zahn and P. W. Sehmiedel—helps to explain their survival. Forwarded on the same occasion to the same destination, this couple of papyrus leaves were fastened together and kept as the memorial of a notable crisis in the history of the local Church. They served also as a characteristic memento of the revered Apostle, who had thus interposed effectively at a moment when this Church, which had a traitor in the camp, was in danger of being captured by the Gnostic antichrists, at that time everywhere invading the communities of St John’s province in Asia Minor. We may imagine—for we must use our imagination in construing fragments such as these—that the two sheets were attached to the standard copy of John’s First (General) Epistle preserved by the Church in question; and that they passed into circulation from this centre along with the principal Letter. In this way Second and Third John came to be reckoned amongst the seven “catholic” Epistles (James–Jude), because of their association with the “catholic” First of John, although they were themselves of a manifestly local and limited scope.