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The second challenge is determining the best understanding of statements like "no one who is born of God sins," [1 John 3:9] or a phrase like "the sin unto death," [1 John 5:16] or a literary feature like the abrupt and dark final warning against idols. The prose is simple in terms of rudimentary vocabulary. But the depth of reflection these simple clauses fairly force upon the reader is daunting to break down and draw out.

How has computer technology contributed to our understanding of 1-3 John?

One can also do word analyses and various grammatical and syntactical searches of the New Testament or related writings with a speed, ease, and comprehensiveness previously undreamt of. Ease of access to reference works eliminates tedious book hunting and page turning. A downside is that every decade we move farther into computer technology, the greater the danger becomes that younger scholars will lack the hands-on intimacy with the text that pen and paper demanded, and the ingrained, deeply intuitive grasp of the text that a trained memory can arrive at. Voluminous information easily accessible can not only obscure but actually stunt creative and historically responsible scholarship.

Your commentary draws upon recent scholarship but also reaches back to Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. How did their reflections shape your work?

Augustine rarely reflects what I would call great exegesis. But he still says much that is riveting and germane to John's epistles as well as to the human condition in the world and before God. Luther and Calvin are simply seminal expositors whose work has stood the test of time. You stumble on a great insight in a commentary published in the 1990s, only to discover later that Calvin said it better and at length centuries ago. That is not to deny, of course, that the Reformers had their limitations and blind spots.

You write in your introduction to 1 John in the ESV Study Bible: "The rhetoric of 1 John is challenging. John rarely sustains a clear line of argument for more than a few lines or verses. He wanders from subject to subject, unencumbered by any discernible outline." How, then, should we alter out reading approach when we move from Paul's more organized epistles to 1 John?

John's epistles make tolerable sense if read against the backdrop, first of all, of John's Gospel, and prior to that, the Old Testament. The Johannine epistles witness to the Johannine Messiah, Jesus the Christ. Once that Gospel-Epistles corpus is absorbed for what it is, it is not too hard to see that Paul is like John in that he testifies to Jesus. But he is unlike John both in his background and conditioning prior to meeting Christ, and then in his literary and intellectual giftedness. In addition, Paul was a missionary in ways that to our knowledge John never was.

How do we know if John had early Gnosticism in mind when he wrote 1 John?

It's hard to rule out that he could have had some exposure to what later came to be called Gnosticism. But if he did, he didn't obsess in drawing it out into the open. His stress and concern lay much more along the positive and productive lines of affirming the truth of Christian teaching, the imperatives of Christian ethics, and the richness of Christian relationality—God's love received, reciprocated, and expressed toward others.

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September (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52