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Many beginning Greek students start by reading 1 John. What does the book's simple language tell us about the author, his aims, and his audience?

He was content to be plainspoken. His literary gifts were by some measures modest. For example, he doesn't use the flashy vocabulary of a literary artist like Luke, probably because he didn't possess active command of such a breadth of terms and expressions. His audience was the target not only of his discomfiting warnings and correction but also of his fatherly love and loyalty. He wrote for the sake of their joy and their assurance of eternal life. A major benefit of the simple prose is that readers can hardly mistake the writer's deep conviction that they are the objects of the true God's love, grace, and mercy. John's simple style, and the substance he conveys with it, are suggestive of an intense, sagacious, endearing personality with a comely mystical air about him. This by no means proves, but is consistent with, his traditional identification as the Beloved Disciple.

Collin Hansen is a CT editor at large and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists.

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September (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52