We continue on in our sermon series in 1 John. There's not enough space in a sermon or this blog to cover all the details of the Johannine Letters. I would recommend you pick up Letters to the Church by Karen Jobes for some of those background pieces of information.
An important part of the background material on any letters in the New Testament is who wrote it. When you look at the letters of John, there are several theories of authorship related to these three short books. First, you should take note that, unlike the Pauline Letters, John's letters carry absolutely zero authorship claims. The closest you get is that 2 and 3 John claim to be written by "The Elder," but this is a title and not a name.
Our options for authorship are the traditional view that John the Apostle, author of the Gospel of John, wrote these letters. He's not named in named as the author of any of these letters, but longstanding church traditions identify him as the author. We, of course, cannot prove it. This tradition is generally held, it does not really have any significant counter-evidence. It's more a matter of questioning whether or not the lack of evidence is enough to drive us to a different view.
The second view, which does have a fairly solid following, is that there is another early church leader named John who wrote the letters, but he's not the same guy as the Apostle John. This theory separates "John the Apostle" from "John the Elder."
This comes from a comparison of grammar and vocabulary between the Gospel and the letters. Some scholars interpret the differences between 1 John and 2/3 John as showing that the author of the first letter is not the author of the other 2.
The last viewpoint of significance is that the letters are written much later, after the 1st century, and attributed to John by a group of disciples who trace their heritage back to John. That holds sway in some academic circles, but there are some manuscripts of these letters that do not allow them to be composed much later than 150 AD.
Why does the authorship matter?
Well, 1 John starts off talking about being an eyewitness to Jesus. If John the Apostle wrote it, he's an eyewitness to Jesus and many other things. If it's written by an anonymous group some fifty years later, that's another matter entirely.
The authorship issues also connect with date issues: when are 1, 2, and 3 John written? They are probably not written in the same year as each other, though 2 and 3 have some similarities that suggest they were written close together.
The timing of the writing then helps us understand what issues may have prompted John to write. It also tells us whether he's writing to churches that possibly have written Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke in hand, or maybe have received letters from Paul.
Information like this does not dictate the meaning of the text, but it helps us as we strive to understand what's happening in the text.
