New Testament · General Letters
God is light, God is love, tests of life written so that you may know you have it.
Not really a letter, since it has no greeting, no named sender, and no farewell, but a sustained meditation written in the simplest vocabulary in the New Testament and about the hardest things in it. John writes in stark contrasts, light and darkness, truth and lie, love and hate, apparently in response to people who had left the community claiming a superior spirituality and denying that Christ had come in the flesh. Against that he insists on what was heard and seen and touched. The letter is famous for the sentence that God is love, and it is worth noticing what surrounds it: an insistence that love is a thing done rather than felt, and a set of tests for whether anyone actually has it.
If you remember one thing
Written so that you may know that you have eternal life. It gives three recurring tests: belief about Jesus, obedience, and love for one another.
“God is love.”
1 John 4:8
1 John 3:9
No one born of God practises sin, set beside 1:8 saying that anyone claiming to be without sin is a liar. Reconciling the two is one of the classic problems of the letter.
1 John 5:7-8
The Comma Johanneum, a trinitarian sentence present in the King James and absent from every early Greek manuscript. Modern translations omit or footnote it, and its history is worth knowing.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
Adam and Eve's firstborn, a farmer, whose offering was not accepted while his brother's was. The text never explains why, which is part of its difficulty. God warns him that sin is crouching at the door and must be mastered, and he kills Abel in a field anyway.
A fisherman called with his brother James, part of the inner three, and traditionally the author of the fourth Gospel, three letters, and Revelation. The Gospel calls him the disciple Jesus loved and places him at the cross, entrusted with Jesus' mother.
A quiz for 1 John is on the workbench. In the meantime, the games for the judges, the kings, and the prophets are open.
