8. Muratori's fragment on the canon states, "Two Epistles of John are held to be in Catholic Scripture."

9. The Epistle is found in the Peschito, or ancient Syriac version, whose canon in the Catholic Epistles is so short.

10. Origen, beginning the sentence, "Why should I speak of John, who lay upon the breast of Jesus" and proceeding as cited in. the Introd. to the Apocalypse, § i. par. 12, says, "Moreover he has left an Epistle of very few lines: perhaps also a second and a third, -for all do not confess these to be genuine: but both are not a hundred lines in length." And he continually cites the Epistle as St. John's: e.g. 'Our God is a consuming fire:' but in John He is light; for God,' says he, 'is light, and darkness in Him is none.'

11. Dionysius of Alexandria, the scholar of Origen, recognizes the genuineness of the Gospel and Epistle as being written by the Apostle John, by the very form of his argument against the genuineness of the Apocalypse. For (see his reasoning at length in the Introduction to the Revelation, § i. par. 48) he tries to prove that it was not written by St. John, on account of its diversity in language and style from the Gospel and Epistle: and distinctly cites the words of our Epistle as those of the Evangelist: "The Evangelist did not even prefix his name to the Catholic Epistle, but without waste of words began from the mystery itself of the divine manifestation: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes.'

12. Eusebius says, "Of the writings of John, in addition to the Gospel, the former of the Epistles is confessed undoubtedly both by those now living, and by the ancients." And again, having enumerated the four Gospels and Acts and the Epistles of Paul, he says, "In order after which we must definitely place the current former Epistle of John."

13. After the time of Eusebius, general consent pronounced the same verdict. We may terminate the series of testimonies with that of Jerome, who in his catalogue of Ecclesiastical writers says of St. John, "He wrote also one Epistle, of which the opening is, 'That which was from the beginning, &c.,' which is received by all ecclesiastical and learned men."

14. The first remarkable contradiction to this combination of testimony is found in the writings of Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the sixth. century. He ventures to assert, that none of the earlier Christian writers who have treated of the canon, makes any mention of the Catholic Epistles as canonical: "For most persons hold them not to be written by the Apostles, but by some other simpler men among the elders." He then proceeds in a somewhat confused way to state that Irenæus does mention

1 Peter and 1 John, as apostolic, "but others do not even acknowledge them as coming from Apostles, but from the elders: for a first, and second, and third of John have been written, making evident shew of being the work of one person." But it is evident from the chain of testimonies given above, that Cosmas can have been but ill informed on the subject.

15. It is probable that the Alogi, mentioned by Epiphanius as rejecting the Gospel and Apocalypse, included the Epistles in this rejection. Still Epiphanius does not assert it; he only says, "Perhaps also the Epistles; for they agree in sense with the Gospel and the Apocalypse." But their repudiation of the Epistle would be of no account.

16. Its rejection by Marcion is of equally little consequence. He excluded from the canon all the writings of St. John, as not suiting his views.

17. Lücke closes his review of ancient authorities, which I have followed and expanded, by saying, "Incontestably then our Epistle must be numbered among those canonical books which are most strongly upheld by ecclesiastical tradition."

18. But the genuineness of the Epistle rests not, as already observed, on external testimony alone. It must remain an acknowledged fact, until either the Gospel is proved not to be St. John's, or the similarity between the two is shewn to be only apparent. Lücke has well observed, that neither Gospel nor Epistle can be said to be an imitation : both are original, but both the product of the same mind: so that considered only in this point of view, we might well doubt which was written first.

19. However, its genuineness has been controverted in modern times. First we have a rash and characteristic saying of Jos. Scaliger's: "The three Epistles of John are not by John the Apostle." The first who deliberately and on assigned grounds took the same side, was S. Gottlieb Lange who, strange to say, receiving the Gospel and the Apocalypse, yet rejected the Epistle.

20. His argument, as reported by Lücke, is as follows: The entire failure in the Epistle of any individual, personal, and local notices, betrays an author unacquainted with the personal circumstances of the Apostle, and those of the churches where he taught. The close correspondence of the Epistle with the Gospel in thought and expression begets a suspicion that some careful imitator of John wrote the Epistle. Lastly, the Epistle, as compared with the Gospel, shews such evident signs of enfeeblement of spirit by old age, that if it is to be ascribed to John, it must have been written at the extreme end of his life, after the destruction of Jerusalem; whereas, from no allusion being made to that event even in such a passage as ch. ii. 18, the Epistle makes a shew of having been written before it. The only solution in

Lange's estimation is that some imitator wrote it, as St. John's, it may be a century after his time.

21. To this Lücke replies that Lange is in fourfold error. For 1, it is not true that the Epistle contains no individual and personal notices. These it is true are rather hinted at and implied than brought to the surface: a characteristic, not only of a catholic epistle as distinguished from one locally addressed, but also of the style of St. John as distinguished from that of St. Paul. As to the fact, the Writer designates himself by implication as an apostle, and seems to allude to his Gospel in ch. i. 1—4: in ch. ii. 1, 18, he implies an intimate relation between himself and his readers: in ch. ii. 12-14, he distinguishes his readers according to their ages: in ch. ii. 18, 19, iv. 1-3, the false teachers are pointed at in a way which shews that both Writer and readers knew more about them: and the warning, ch. v. 21, has a local character, and reminds the readers of something well known to them.

above remarked, that there is The Epistle is in no respect Such a person would have

22. Secondly, it is entirely denied, as the slightest trace of slavish imitation. the work of an imitator of the Gospel. elaborated every point of similarity, and omitted no notice of the personal and local circumstances of the Apostle would have probably misunderstood and exaggerated St. John's peculiarities of style and thought. All such attempts to put off one man's writing for that of another carry in them the elements of failure as against a searching criticism. But how different is all we find in this Epistle. By how wide a gap is it separated from the writings of Ignatius, Clement, Barnabas, Polycarp. Apparently close as it is upon them in point of time, what a totally different spirit breathes in it. This Epistle written after them, written among them, would be indeed the rarest of exceptional cases-an unimaginable anachronism, a veritable "hysteron proteron."

23. Thirdly it is certainly the strangest criticism, to speak of the weakness of old age in the Epistle. If this could be identified as really being so, it would be the strongest proof of authenticity. For it is altogether inconceivable, that an imitator could have had the power or the purpose to write as John might have written in his old age, But where are the traces of this second childishness? We are told, in the repetitions, in the want of order, in the uniformity. Certainly there is an appearance of tautology in the style: more perhaps than in the Gospel. Erasmus, in the dedication of his paraphrase of St. John's Gospel, characterizes the style of the Gospel as a "kind of speech. so interwoven as it were with points of connexion mutually cohering consisting sometimes of contraries, sometimes of things like, sometimes of the same things again repeated,-that each member of the argument

so enters and takes it up as that the end of a former part is also the beginning of that which follows." The same style prevails in the Epistle. It is not however an infirmity of age, but a peculiarity, which might belong to extreme youth just as well.

24. The greater amount of repetition in the Epistle arises from its being more hortatory and tender in character. And it may also be attributed to its more Hebraistic form, in which it differs from the Grecian and dialectic style of St. Paul: abounding in parallels and apparent arguings in a circle. The epistolary form would account for the want of strict arrangement in order, which would hardly be observed. by the youngest any more than by the oldest writer.

25. And the appearance of uniformity, partly accounted for by the oneness of subject and simplicity of spirit, is often produced by want of deep enough penetration of the sense to discover the real differences in passages which seem to express the same. Besides, even granting these marks of old age, what argument would they furnish against the genuineness? St. John was quite old enough at and after the siege of Jerusalem for such to have shewn themselves: so that this objection must be dealt with on other grounds, and does not affect our present question.

26. Fourthly, it is quite a mistake to suppose that if the Epistle was written after the destruction of Jerusalem, that event must necessarily have been intimated in ch. ii. 18. It cannot be proved, nor does it seem likely from the notices of the coming of the Lord in the Gospel, that St. John connected the "last hour" with the destruction of Jerusalem. It does not seem likely that, writing to Christians of Asia Minor, who probably from the first had a wider view of our Lord's prophecy of the end, he should have felt bound to make a corrective allusion to the event, even supposing he himself had once identified it with the time of the end. They would not require to be told, why the universal triumph of Christianity had not followed it, seeing they probably never expected it to do so.

27. So that Lange's objections, which I have reported freely from Lücke, as being highly illustrative of the character of the Epistle, certainly do not succeed in impugning the verdict of antiquity, or the evidence furnished by the Epistle itself.

28. The objections brought by Bretschneider, formed on the doctrine of the logos (Word), and the antidocetic tendency manifest both in the Epistle and the Gospel, and betraying both as works of the second century, have also been shewn by Lücke to be untenable. The doctrine of the Word, though formally enounced by St. John only, is in fact that of St. Paul in Col. i. 15 ff., and that of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews i. 1 ff., and was unquestionably prepared for Christian use long before, in the Alexandrine Jewish theology. And though Docetism

itself may have been the growth of the second century, yet the germs of it, which are opposed in this Epistle, were apparent long before. groundless assumption of Bretschneider is, that seeing the three Epistles are by the same hand, and the writer of the second and third, where there was no ground for concealing himself, calls himself "the elder" (" presbyter"),—the first Epistle, where, wishing to be taken for the Apostle, he does not name himself, is also by John the Presbyter. The answer to which is, that we can by no means consent to the assumption that the so-called Presbyter John was the author of the second and third Epistles: see the Introduction to 2 and 3 John, § i. 2, 12 ff.

29. The objections brought against our Epistle by the modern Tübingen school are dealt with at considerable length by Düsterdieck. It is not my purpose to enter on them here. For mere English readers, it would require an introduction far longer than that which Düsterdieck has devoted to it, at all to enable them to appreciate the nature of those objections and the postulates from which they spring. And when I inform such English readers that the first of those postulates is the denial of a personal God, they will probably not feel that they have lost much by not having the refutation of the objections laid before them. Should any regret it, they may find some of them briefly noticed in Dr. Davidson's Introduction, vol. iii. pp. 454 ff.: and they will there see how feeble and futile they are.

30. Whether then we approach the question of the authorship of this Epistle (and its consequent canonicity) from the side of external testimony, or of internal evidence, we are alike convinced that its claim to have been written by the Evangelist St. John, and to its place in the canon of Scripture, is fully substantiated.

SECTION II.

FOR WHAT READERS IT WAS WRITTEN.

1. This question, in the case of our Epistle, might be very easily and briefly dealt with, were it not for one apparent mistake, which complicates it.

In Augustine we read, " Agreeable to this opinion is also that which is said by John in the Epistle to the Parthians;" and then follows 1 John iii. 2. This appears to be the only place in Augustine's writings where he thus characterizes it. The inscription "to the Parthians" has found its way into some of the Benedictine editions in the title of the Tractates on the Epistle: but it seems not to have been originally there. It has been repeated by some of the Latin fathers.

2. Some, but very few writers, have assumed as a fact that the Epistle VOL. II. PART II.-279

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