In yesterday’s study, we concluded with John Stott’s insightful question: “Is it possible, that a man of such prominence, who exercised such authority and wrote three Epistles which are included in the New Testament canon, should have left no more trace of himself in history than one dubious reference by Papias?”
We may wish to answer that such may indeed be possible, as an outside though highly unlikely chance. But it is not probable. Consequently, we rest on sound ground when we perceive the importance and widespread authority of the author to be that of none other than John, the son of Zebedee, whom we understand from other sources to have lived in Ephesus and to have died there at a great age. Moreover, we may even understand his unusual employment of the title “elder.” For if, as Papias would indicate, he may have outlasted all the other apostles, then he could quite properly have designated himself as “the elder” in a unique sense, thereby indicating that he was the last of those apostles who had seen the Lord and had been commissioned by Him to bear an authoritative testimony.
When the question of authorship is approached in this manner, that is, from the perspective of the authorship of the two smallest books, it is evident that light is thrown upon the question of the authorship of the other books as well. In this matter the four books (not to mention the Revelation) are tied together. If one begins with the authorship of the Gospel and 1 John and defends those books as being by John the apostle, it is possible to argue that the shorter and less original books are by another writer (perhaps “the elder John” as distinguished from the apostle John) who merely imitated the style of his master. However, if one begins with the smaller books and argues that they are Johannine, as has been attempted here, then the theory of a diverse authorship is hardly credible.
Brooke, who, however, argues only for a common authorship and not necessarily for the authorship of the books by John the apostle, puts the matter well:
The longer and the more carefully the Johannine literature is studied, the more clearly one point seems to stand out. The most obviously genuine of the writings are the two shorter Epistles, and they are the least original. To believe that an author, or authors, capable of producing the Gospel, or even the First Epistle, modeled their style and teaching on the two smaller Epistles is a strain upon credulity which is almost past bearing. Are we not moving along lines of greater probability if we venture to suppose that a leader who had spent his life in teaching the contents of the Gospel, at last wrote it down that those whom he had taught, and others, might believe, and believing might have life in His name; that after some years he felt that the message of the Gospel had not produced the effect on their lives and creed which he had expected, and that he therefore made the appeal of the First Epistle… At the same time or at a later period he may have had to deal with the special circumstances of his hearers and their intellectual and spiritual capacity have determined the form and the substance of his appeal.”1
If to this is added the view that the most likely person to have done all this is John the apostle, it seems to this writer that this is an excellent argument from which a conclusion can be drawn.
1A. E. Brooke, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Johannine Epistles (London: T. and T. Clark, 1912), lxxviii.
