Lecture 1.docx

I was thinking this morning how to open, and I guess one more thing we should do is just look at the syllabus, although presumably you've seen it or you wouldn't be here. But just maybe to emphasize a few matters. There are maybe six, eight, ten purpose statements in 1 John. So if you ask why did Jo...

I was thinking this morning how to open, and I guess one more thing we should do is just look at the syllabus, although presumably you've seen it or you wouldn't be here. But just maybe to emphasize a few matters. There are maybe six, eight, ten purpose statements in 1 John. So if you ask why did John write what he wrote, well, there are a lot of reasons that he states. But certainly one of those reasons is the first one, which comes in verse 4, we write these things so that your joy or our joy may be complete. And he says that in connection with a fellowship, a koinonia, that he says we have with the Father and the Son. Now in that part of 1 John, I take the we to be the apostolic we. It's John and others in his category of whom it could be said what we saw, what we heard, what our hands have handled. regarding the word of life. That was not true generically of the early church. It was true generically of a small group of people called apostles. And so he says, we write so that our joy may be full. We might have the joy of the shared full fellowship of faith in Christ. So that's what I've called what we're doing this week in this rather brief two-hour course. If we had a three-hour course we would do second and third John as well and we could do a third more which would add a lot to the depth of what we're doing but I've tried to keep it more on the lighter side since this is a two-hour course. And I've subtitled it John's Epistolary Testimony. This letter John bearing witness or you could say applying his witness. His witness is summed up in the first few verses, things that he saw and heard and handled. But then his letter is an application of that in a church setting or various church settings among the readership of this letter. So we'll focus. in this course on God and full communion with him as reflected in 1 John and you know throw 2nd and 3rd John in there to some extent and you can't you really can't handle what we're going to be looking at without without thinking robustly about the Gospels in particular the 4th Gospel. Has anybody seen the book? It's a pretty thick book. It's called the Bible Study Concordance of the New Testament. Excuse me, Book Study Concordance of the New Testament. It's edited by Andreas Christenberger and another scholar. And in this reference book, it's got 27 sections because there are 27 books in the New Testament. And it does concordance work on... each of the books of the New Testament. And one of the things that stands out, especially if you preach and you study, or if you're a student and you study New Testament books, you study 1 John and you read commentaries, and they'll all have these theories, okay, what's the setting? What's this book about? And it gets very complicated sometimes, you know, because there are theories, you know, like with Galatia, South Galatia or North Galatia or Colossians. What was the Colossian heresy? Or 1 John. You know, what's the heresy? Who are the secessionists? What's the background? What's the historical setting? But when you, let's just say that what these letters are going to tend to be about is what the writer talks the most about. that kind of sound reasonable? You know that that if you read a letter the thing that the writer says the most or talks about the most is probably weighing the heaviest on the writer's mind. Invariably when you look at New Testament letters the word that occurs the most frequently, I mean far and away, is God. Or a near correlate. God is God. Jesus, Christ, Lord, especially in Paul's writings. Because usually, the majority of the time when Paul uses courios, he's talking about Jesus. Not always, but the majority of the times. I think courios doesn't occur in 1 John, but God occurs a lot. And a lot of courses on 1 John, and a lot of commentaries on 1 John. When you think about it, you hear almost nothing about God. That explains one of the commentaries you're reading. You're reading two commentaries for this class or consulting them. And if you haven't read the introductory material in your two course commentaries, mine looks like this. There are different covers. I think the cover of all your Loo commentaries look like this if you left the dust jacket on. But while I don't expect you to read the whole of both commentaries, I do want you to read the introductory material in both of them. You know, and do it today or tomorrow, so you've got the benefit of the impact. But when you read Stott, you'll at least be reminded aggressively, repeatedly, of Christ and and God and you know, the pastoral calling. and things that should sort of resonate with you as a called and maybe a called and ordained minister. You know, stop should kind of warm your heart as you read him. And Lou is very learned. How many of you have read the introductory material? Anybody read that? Did anything strike you as you were reading it? Okay. that you can comment on? And especially if you read Stott, the contrast is marked. Well, I won't say anything much yet about this. Just to say that as strange as it may sound, to emphasize God in looking at 1 John, sort of takes you out of the mainstream of most commentaries. because most commentaries end up writing so much about us, about humans, about social settings, about theoretical historical backgrounds, or increasingly in our particular historical niche, so much of the Bible now is taken to be about culture. It's all about how they... Thought things, you know in my preaching I've quit normally, I've quit saying Paul said, or Luke wrote, or John writes, I've just quit doing it. I just say the Bible, or scripture, or God. Because I've found that in so many discussions now about what the Bible says, people discount what they don't want to take out of the Bible by saying, well that's just from Paul. the view of the gospel writers. And back then people thought, and then you use that hermeneutical move to discount some aspect of what the scripture says by stressing its human origins. So we're going to focus on God, on the communion with Him that John testifies to, and we're going to go through that in a minute. We're not going to be close to the historical setting. We'll do what we can to affirm it positively. If any of you have seen my miserable commentary on this, at the end of the introductory section, I correlate some of the words in the Jehanim Epistles with words in Revelation 1-3. I've got a chart or two and just talk about how all the patristic data we have. indicate that John along with a lot of other believers left Jerusalem where he was ministering into the sixties and patristic writers said people like John in Jerusalem they have been taught by Jesus you know when you see X, Y, and Z happening, flee! Get out of Jerusalem, there's not going to be one stone left standing on the other and they took that seriously. And so when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem by AD 70, a lot of the apostolic leaders who hadn't already been killed were gone. And John went to Ephesus, and he ministered maybe for as long as 30 years in Ephesus. So when he got exiled to Patmos, it would be natural that the things that the Spirit of Christ spoke to him were to churches that he had oversight of. Like the church at Ephesus or Sardis or Philadelphia, Aulatia, those were all in a close tight circle around the dominant city of Ephesus. When you look at the seven churches and you see the things they're being warned about and you read 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, you can see there are a lot of words and a lot of echoes that make you think, you know, 1 John could be written by a person in a setting where things are going on like we read about in Revelation 1, 2, and 3 with the seven churches of Asia. So, I'm quite open to thinking about the historical setting of 1 John in terms of the 80, maybe 80s, 90s, in that part of the early church. Having said that, we don't have anything about diatrophies or gaius or other figures, few as they are, who are alluded to or mentioned in second and third John. Of course, first John, there's nobody mentioned. We don't have any geographical settings. We don't have a lot of biographical material about anybody. So whatever we think the historical setting was, it has to be pretty spare, sparse, fragmentary. But I don't think that's a loss. because I think what it does, it either encourages to do what a lot of commentators do, which is dogmatize our speculation. Say, well, yeah, we don't have much evidence, but the best evidence that I think we have says that this was the setting, and then you write a whole commentary based on that setting. But nobody is going to agree with you on the setting because there's not enough evidence really to ground it. Or you could say, well maybe in God's wisdom the point of 1st John is not some historical setting or some social setting or some cultural setting. Maybe the point of 1st John is mainly about God. And so maybe we should be looking at God's ways at human folly and then recovery from folly. So it's just sort of if you could... That's one way to define sanctification is our recovering from folly. And then Christ's role in bringing eternal life because that certainly is highlighted in the book. I trust that by the end of the week you will have a better command of Hellenistic Greek through your vocabulary study, enhancement of your grammatical understanding, you're looking at cross references on the other items in your templates. And by the way, when we come back from break, Joe Weaver, are you here? And are you kind of ready to go? Where are you? So you got your template ready? Put it here on the dock camera. And the other person you're going to share duties with are Rafael? And are you ready to go too? Okay, so you know, what you guys will be doing as we put your your page up here and tear it to pieces and ridicule you. No, that's under number one there. From time to time, I'll comment on Johannine Epistles and also just general Johannine Scholarship. Improve communication skills. Some of you have already written your papers. In fact, I hope all of you have written your papers. If you have a hard copy and you need to turn it in at 9 o'clock, you can put it up here. And then the reason that I'm not having lunch with anybody today is I'm hoping to have all your papers graded by tomorrow. Close to ten of you have already gotten your papers back because you submitted them electronically. And then a number of you submitted them last night or three o'clock, four o'clock this morning. I don't know what that was about. Oh, I know what it was about. You didn't want to submit them on the Sabbath. So you waited until your prayer time on Monday morning. At three in the morning you got up to pray and then you sent your paper then. I'll try. I'll try my best to get them all done this afternoon and tonight. so that you'll know what you made by time class starts tomorrow. I hope I'm not up until 3 o'clock myself tonight getting that done. I'm having a better understanding of crux passages because as we go through 1 John, you know, there are problem passages some of which may never be solved in this lifetime, but at least we'll have a better understanding either of what we think the answer is or sometimes, you know, you study and you study and you study and you're on a crux passage And your conclusion is, you know, I'm just not going to preach on this passage. You know, I mean, I'm not going to make it the point of my sermon because I just, you know, I don't want to walk out on a plank that I'm not really sure exactly what the meaning is. So I'm going to preach Christ from something I'm sure about rather than preach my speculations on points about which, you know, good and godly people differ. and then progress toward a philosophy, an apostolic philosophy and practice of ministry, including a more biblical spirituality. The kind of study we do in a seminary setting can be an anomaly. It can be something that, you know, it's like boot camp in the military, then you never do it again.. But what I hope happens often in seminary is that students really become addicted to a level of rigor and a level of focus and concentration so that they really have a bad conscience about teaching and preaching in church when they haven't really checked up what they're talking about. And they really, they have learned to delight in the hard work of preparing to bless God's people. by knowing what you're talking about. A lot of people get really bored in church because they never hear anything that they didn't already know when they came in the doors. And the reason they don't hear anything they don't already know is because the pastors are either so busy or so untrained or so lazy or some combination of the above that they don't dig into anything new to them to say. So sermons are very cut and dried and and boring. And it's an indication often the pastor hasn't done his homework. Well, if we do our homework, not only does it help us to preach in a more interesting fashion, it also renews our souls. I don't know of any other way to renew our souls on a sustained level than the focused study of and contemplation of God's Word. So I hope that things that you do in every class at Masters, but also things you do this week, will move you in that direction. You've done so much work already for this class, because 15% of your grade has already been settled. In fact, 40% has already been settled. Just let me underscore this worksheet bit. I trust everybody's ready, but you've got. This text, and so when we come back, and as our presenters in First John 1, 1 through 5 give us their numbers and things, then that's a big part of your grade. You'll turn in a hard copy. Probably have to be a hard copy unless you're really good. I mean, if you can do it on screen and send me the file, that's okay. But you'll label the parts of speech, you'll make notes, and you'll put a little translation over here, and that's a big part of your grade. So, first John 1, I identified the parts of speech of the Greek as... Man, I wish I had my key. You need to read the numbers. Okay, so how... No, no, just read the numbers across, we'll all check. Okay, so three... 5, 9, 2, 3, 5, 3, 5, 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 10, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 1, 2, 1, 2. see the spacing of this. Now just a note on this, probably in the interest of time, you know, we can see a lot more than you can say. So we don't need your, from you, we don't need your preliminary translation, we don't need unfamiliar vocab, and we don't need unfamiliar verbal analysis. Because, you know, we've all gone through that, or we'll go through it ourselves in the course of coming up with our own translation. So you can go right to your cross reference. Go to your commentary, grammar stuff, your final translation, and your insight. So the cross reference analysis I was only able to access in 826. It was a real blessing to get in there though. This one from the beginning is Yawen. Isaiah 43.13 is where they reference that. That was a rich passage in Isaiah. They had a cross-reference with this first verse. The commentary or grammar interaction? I want to move your sheet up just a little bit so that it's near the top so everybody can see. Okay. So as convoluted as hot A can be that repeated hot, it's it carries over into both blue and stops treatment of the text. They both talk around it and the conversation gets pretty convoluted eventually though they both kind of come to the same conclusion that it's the light. So rather than seeing the word as being Jesus, Luke intends that the word is not a reference to a pre-existent person but to a pre-existent thing signified by the repeated use of the neuter hot. Luke explains this is an objectification and even personification of the word of God. So it's kind of like she's talking well, having roots in the prophetic and creative power of God's word in the scriptures. Stop speaks somewhat ambiguously about the neuter formulation of that which and ultimately passing the meanings of the word of life and peri he concludes that it best encapsulates the incarnate life. That's to say Jesus which is the final conclusion. the grounded insight. Read your translation and then your grounded insight. Okay. Final translation I went with was... That which was from the beginning, what we have heard, what our eyes have seen, what we behold in our hands and concerning the word of life. Okay, you said, what our eyes have seen. In Greek, everybody can look at your retext. It says, that which we have seen with our eyes. Is there some reason you said, changed the we have seen to our eyes have seen? Negligence on my part. Negligence on your part, okay. I thought maybe you had a semantic reason. So the subject of H'orakamon is we, which we have seen with our eyes. Grounded in, say. You say to give that as well? Sure. So these objective claims of scripture, the apostolic testimony, are worthy of all adherence. And as one does so, their voice will join in with the confessional account of the experiential knowledge, which necessarily follows the experience of Christian faith. Okay. Thank you. Propeller, verse 2. I can get used to my Italian accent. 10, 1, 2, 5, 10, 5, 10, 5, 10, 5, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, 3, 5, 9, 1, 2, 10, 5, 3. Cross-reference John, the Gospel of John, verse 4, where there's a connection between what John writes here and there, where Jesus did the work, so he's portrayed as the person whom there is life. This is the connection that there is. Commentary interaction, Stott observes that there is an emphasis on historical manifestation of the eternal Son against the heretics, and I agree with him, it's really clear. We see the phrase eternal life, which was with the Father, so it's clearly Jesus was manifested and seen on earth. And also about you, it is, I agree in a way, because he used the word life in verse 2 as unrelated to verse 1, so not as connected, but in reality there is the phrase world life at the end of the verse, and so he claims that verse 2 is not totally independent because of the repetition of the phrase we have seen from verse 1, so he sees the link between those two verses only due to the word oracame, but not because of the word zoe, which seems inconsistent because we see the word life in verse 2, which is reconnected to the word life in verse 1. Just a couple of points here. First it's a judith, so it's a she, and then also just in terms of your style when you quote Greek, now you did it right. Joe, when you quoted your Greek, you put quotation marks around it. Just as a sort of grammatical point or a format point, you don't have to put quotation marks around this. Because we know you don't write Greek normally, so you're quoting an ancient text. So when you quote ancient text, and for you, let's just say it's going to be Greek, don't put quotation marks around the Greek that you quote. And this is a grav accent, but... and it's a grove accent in the text, but when you quote it absolutely in your term paper or in your notes, then change that grove to an acute accent. Alright. I think that covers it for now....and the life was manifested, and we have seen and we testify and proclaim to you, eternal life was with the Father and was manifested to us. But in Granin's insight, in short here, John's witness to the incarnation of God is very emphasized by the double use of the verb e van erote, at the beginning and at the end of verse 2. So this verse is close to that he pre-existed. Pre-existent, Jesus took the initiative to manifest himself to human beings, such as to the apostles, who can testify about the story of the incarnation of God. Any comment or question about his translation or insight? And he also stayed within five minutes. Of course you have no choice because when you start the five minutes and I start the hourglass. So if you're not done with it, pretty close to five minutes, then I start agitating. But I know this is very quick. It's probably just time for you to get your own numbers down if you haven't done that ahead and to make extra notes. But, you know, we'll get done a little bit after 9.30 and then we'll spend the rest of this hour, you know, I'll say more about these verses and, you know, we can have some Q&A. Verse 3. And I'll put the hourglass here so you can see it. See, we're adding the pressure now as we get a little bit used to it. 3, 5. 10, 5, 5, 10, 3, 10, 10, 3, 2, 5. Let's stop there. Does anybody have any questions about the labeling on that line? Cot. Excuse me? Cot. 3, 5, 10, 5, 5. That ten right in the middle, Kai Hu Min. How did you translate that Kai? Joe? Did you say and? What we have seen and heard told you. Seen. What we have seen, Kai, and have heard, we announce Kai Hu Min. Thank you. You really don't translate it. You put even. Oh, even to you, okay. Then in that case, this chi is a word that can be a conjunction, but even is an adverb. So you want to change that chi to an eight. You've got to watch chi's because sometimes they're going to be eights and sometimes they're going to be tens. In this case it's an eight. So that's one correction. Chi na kai hu meis. In order that even you, same situation, right? So you want to make the chi, whom in? You want to make that 8, 3? And then you want to say, hena is 10, 8, 3. Of course, it could also have been also, perhaps, or 2, or that you 2, but even works. Go ahead, next line. 9, 3, 10, 1, 2, 10, 1, 3, 9, 1, 2, 10, 9, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2. Cross-reference analysis. With John 1-18, Jesus was able to exegete God because he is the only one to possess an intimacy approaching the ontological. My final translation was, that which we have seen and heard we are reporting even to you, in order that even you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is even with the Father, with His Son Jesus Christ. grounded in sight the offer of being closely associated with God and those fellowshipping with him in a relationship of mutual working peace and intimacy is unprecedented and far exceeds all other priorities agenda okay hang on don't take it down yet because There's another Kai complexity. Kai hei kainonia de. You see the de? Now the de, what kind of a conjunction do we call that? Adversive. Well it can be adversive. And if you translate but it is, probably not a lot of people translate it but, in which case it's not adversitive. It's additive, so you're probably going to translate the debt as and. It's a post positive conjunction. It always occurs either second in its clause, or third, or fourth, or here it's one, two, three, here it's fourth. But it can be five or six words in. But wherever a de is, logically in our linguistic patterns, if we're thinking English, it always joins its clause with the previous clause. So this and comes from the de. And this even, The problem, the challenge is how do you translate the chi because the chi there isn't and. The chi can't be and because the de is and. De is the only thing that, and is the only thing that de can be here. So it looks like he got two ands. That first chi should definitely be an eight. There's no question about that because you can't have two conjunctions. The question which we don't have to settle here is how you translate the chi. In principle, you know, even works TOO or also... but just to alert us all that this is a very simple simple words and simple grammar in this sentence, but knowing how to handle those... the chi and the de presents a challenge. And just stylistically, this is rough English, even, even, even. Okay, so probably in your published translation when you make the Joe Weaver New Testament translation someday, you're probably not going to want to put even three times in the same verse. Okay, Rafael, is that how you say your name? Do you say Rafael? Rafael Okay. Turn your hourglass over. Right there? No, your hourglass? Excuse me? No, you're fine. This? Okay. I know you're sealing your own doom with that, but go ahead. 10, 3, 5, 3, 10, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. How come you get such easy ones and he gets such hard ones? You had your quiet time this morning and he didn't I bet. I'm going to read you the first one. John 15, 1, 11. Where Jesus told his followers about the things that we serve through discipleship. And he said the purpose was that they may be, the joy may be in them. And as a result the joy may be complete. It's very similar to what John is writing here. Also there is a second John 12. Where John asserts that his desire is to speak with them face to face. So that his joy may be complete. So please say so. Okay, hang on, hang on. Go back. Can you parse Graffo in for us? Graffo is a present active divinity. First spooker. And then how about Plero Mene? Plero is a perfect participle, middle or passive, feminine, singular, nominative. Okay, and you have to choose middle or passive. Middle. Why do you say middle? I don't know. My translation is maybe complete, so if I would have put maybe perfected, be passive. Okay, and Isada, your final translation goes to? Do you stay with the middle? Yes, yes. Okay. Alright. I was hoping to make an example of you, but I failed because you did your homework. So go ahead with your verse. Okay, commentary, direction. Stop at first and according to his verse, the main focus of the proclamation is fellowship, while the ultimate focus is the completion of joy. And he said that there is a divine word which reads good message, fellowship, and joy. Then I have something else, but I don't think I have time for it. Go ahead. Final translation is... No, no, please, please. Finish the reaction. Yeah, I say... Because I stole some time from you. Yeah, I do not agree with him at this point when he says that Grafman refers to the proclamation. I mean, he says that he refers to the previous verses when he says... When he says... I lost the point. Grafman, when I say that, I think it probably refers to the entire letter when he says, I'm writing these things. I disagree with this, and he points out that there are two examples in 2.26, 5.13, where it is referring to the previous verses. However, there are other examples in 2.3, 2.25, 3.8, and verse 10 where it is referring to what is next, you know, what is writing next. So I think he's referring to the entire letter. And final translation is, and these things we write so that our joy may be complete. And inside, in this verse, the apostle John is giving the reason in a post for writing his letter, his letter. And so his purpose is that his joy may be complete. And so the inside is that his joy is the joy of the pastors to let the believers know, as well as the unbelievers, about the true message of Jesus Christ. That is really our joy, what should motivate us in our adventures and our fellowship. Okay, any quick question? For Raffaella, Raphael, Raphael? In what language? You can ask him in Italian if you want. Alright, Joe, last verse. 10, 5, 3, 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 3, 10, 5, 3, 10, 1, 2, 2, 5, 10, 3, 9, 3. six by three. Anybody want to raise a question about the labeling of any of those words? Scottia? Anybody else do something different with Scottia? About two, it's a noun, right? And you translated it darkness. So right there that Scottia should be two. And u'da mia, it's going to be a matter of interpretation. Some people might call it a pronoun. Other people are going to call it an adjective. Answers to question basically how much. None at all. And what word does u'da mia modify? Scottia. And so, he really by separating Scottia and Udemia, by putting so much distance in between them, he's really stressing none whatsoever. Because you really expect Udemia maybe to be in front of Scottia. Or maybe it could be Scottia, hey, Udemia. But by putting it at the end it's really kind of like hits you in the face at the end of the sentences And you know it's in a way it says the same thing Scottia and auto uke esten their darkness is not in him But when you put Uda Mia at the end, it's none whatsoever remember who means not Who dad not even Mia means one So None whatsoever. No darkness whatsoever. It's very emphatic both by adding the adjective and also by its placement in the sentence. And of course, there's some foreshadowing there because he's about to talk about darkness in terms of sin and liars and the delusion that people are guilty of with respect to the darkness in their souls and in their behavior. Go ahead. Cross reference was with James 1.17, the fathers and tis to bestow blessings, all of which only come from his giving them. The commentary interaction... Can you push your sheet up a little bit so people in the back have a better shot at seeing it? Thank you. Commentary or grammar interaction was with Luke. She defends strongly against any ballistic information arising from the discussion of light and dark, going to the creation account of Genesis to show that by naming it night, God declared his sovereignty over. My final translation. And this is a message which we have heard from him and are announcing to you that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. My grounded insight is that God sees everything clearly and is entirely good, therefore we must confess whatever is dark in us and trust in his goodness to provide an immense. Okay, just don't take it down yet. A couple things. You know, I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit here, Joe. The apostles went about and they preached repentance, right? They preached for people to repent and believe. Did they preach that if they would repent of their sins God's goodness would make amends for them? I mean, was that the gospel message? How did God make amends for their sins? And that's also in 1 John, right? You get to chapter 4, he's the propitiation and maybe it's implied in chapter 2. I just wondered, as I read your grounded insight, whether you were being shaped a little bit by Lou because Lou, I don't know how much you read of her, but she just thinks that... John isn't interested in Jesus at all. You know, I suspect you might think that the Apostle John wrote 1 John. It's getting blue and it might bang into the<|th|> with which he dealt with sin in his son. I mean that's what makes it possible for him to establish righteousness in sinners. He didn't overlook any sins. He punished them all in his son. So it's not just his goodness that makes amends. It's the sacrifice of Christ which makes his goodness possible. He's just and justifier. Because of Christ's death. And then, this is really tricky. I mean, I don't want to be unfair to Lou, because you're trying to be very brief here. But I think most people are going to say you can't get away from dualisms in John's writings. I think maybe what she's trying to say here is that... We don't want to read John as affirming an ontological dualism, which would be like Star Wars. You know, there's the good and there's the evil and they're fighting, you know, Manichaeism or some kind of a view that good and evil are in this eternal struggle against each other. And if that's what she means, then that's fair enough. But there is a moral dualism here. You know, there is evil in the world. It's ontologically not equal with God. God is going to vanquish it. But there really is evil in the cosmos. And there really is goodness and light in God. And those two things are in conflict. And that's reflected in John's language here. So it's very important that we break down when we say, is John dualistic? The question, well, what kind of dualism do you have in mind? Because there's eschatological dualism, there's moral dualism, there's ontological dualism, there's epistemological dualism. There are different kinds of dualisms that may or may not be reflected in 1 John. Any questions that you have? I have a question. Excuse me, going back to Stokea. Why is that a 2 and not a 3? I forgot. Why is that a 2 and not a 3? Because Skotia is a pronoun. Excuse me. 3 is pronoun. Right, and Skotia is a 2, it's a noun. That's why. Yes, sir? The third and last word of ook, you know, is that a particle? Yes, I didn't see that and that's why I say, hey, you know, help me see, because I'm looking at something else. The ook there should either be an 8. which is my preference, or if you put 11, that's okay too. Because a lot of grammars, they define ooo and may as particles. And that's okay. I like to think of them as their function, they negate the verb, you know, add to the verb, they relate to the verb, so that's a definition of an adverb. So, ooh or may, I'd rather see eight, but if you put eleven, that's okay. But six, of course, is a participle, and ooh is not a participle, as you know. Any other questions? And, Rafael, anything you wanted to say about... I have just a question, maybe a question about the first verse, the first relative pronoun, ooh. Is that subject nominative? Technically, it's accusative. What's the subject of the verb ahead? Well, they all go back. He's asking the question. Let me just put the Greek text up here. And it's a very good question. When you look at verse 1, and you look at this complicated sentence, it's a very good question. It's a very good question. It's a very good question. It's a very good question. It's a very good question. It's a very good question. construction, the key is to realize that what he says all through here really is governed by this, we announce to you. So the subject is we, and we announce that which was from the beginning. So this is all functioning as a direct object. Well, they are subordinate clauses, but they're functioning as a nominal direct object. In fact, I translated this after wrestling with it for way too long. I suggested, and you know, I'm not saying that we should have published translations in our pews that say this, but I started out with, we report to you, when I translated this. In other words, with this letter, we report to you too, what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We report what was from the beginning. Something we heard and saw with our eyes. Something we beheld and our hands felt concerning the Word that bestows life. This life was revealed and we have seen and testify and report to you the eternal life that was with the Father and revealed to us. These things we write to you so that your joy may be complete. Some translations, do you have our joy or your joy? In the Trigellus translation, or Trigellus text that you have on your template. So you have haemone? Because there is a textual problem, some versions say, haemone, your joy, may be complete. So it is, everybody agrees it's a complicated syntax. Other questions about these particular verses? As you worked through them or reflected on them? that we write these things. Excuse me. I wrote it in... First four? Yeah. In order that the joy of us might be completed. So it kind of brings them both. Because of seeing that, you know, is it ours or theirs? You know, is it yours or ours? And so I just put us. Well, if it's humone, your joy, then... he is saying, you know, yours and not first of all mine. If he says the joy of us, that is our joy, that could be the we of the writing, the one who writes, meaning John and others in the apostolic college, so to speak. But it could also, it could also here sort of be enlarging to include his readers also. And I'm hoping that we could come clear towards. Just the flow of the discourse here, I think, with our doesn't enable you to exclude the readers. Whereas you put your joy, it does tend to exclude the writer and the apostolic we. Yes sir? In the opening paragraph of 1 John, John is rejecting docketism because he's emphasizing the incarnation because he uses these verbs like we have seen, we have heard, we have touched. Well that's a possibility, that's a theory that people have that that's why he says this. But we always want to bear in mind that that is a historical hypothesis that explains why he uses this language. but he might also have had another reason for using it. For example, it's one thing I had in mind when I said put on your cards, which I haven't read your cards yet, something you saw that you're never going to forget. I don't think most scholars are very impressed by what John saw. I think John was very impressed with the things that he saw in the life of Jesus and they have a self-evident importance and sort of a life-changing impact for whoever really takes them seriously. Even just as historical occurrences, let alone if the Holy Spirit opens your mind and your heart to the implications of the things that John saw and testifies to. Those things... They transform your inner being as well as your understanding of reality. So the point I want to make is not to say no, it's not against dosatism, because I don't know that it's not. But what I want to guard against is reducing what John says here to some polemical motivation. Because then it just feeds into this mentality, you know, there's these people or this school or this community You know, they got into it with this other community. This other community, they didn't think that Jesus really was human. But John's community thought he really was human. So to combat the docetists, they said X, Y, and Z. Maybe, but the self-evident, miraculous nature of why John says those things, why he can say those things, especially if he is the John, if he's John the son of Zebedee and especially if he's the same writer who wrote the fourth gospel, which most scholars deny. You know, Luke completely rejects number one that he's interested in Jesus here and number two that he, that this is about the, she denies it's about the incarnation. And it's not because she isn't aware that there were docetists, it's because like a lot of modern people, she's not impressed by these spiritual realities. Not in the way even that John Stott is. John Stott's very impressed with them. And again, I want to stress, if you don't know if you have the stomach to read Lou, because I'm scaring you off, no, you got to read her, but read Stott because, you know, it gets you off on the right foot. I mean, as I say, Stott will warm your heart because he's a pastor and he knew the Lord and he saw the saving effect of the Lord in people's lives. So he really said, I know what John's talking about here. I know about joy and about love and about life because I preach the word of God. I'm a lifelong pastor. I never got married. I've devoted my life to serving the Lord. And Lou, bless her heart, you know, she's an academician. And she just doesn't, she doesn't see the pastoral side of this. She doesn't see the incarnation in this. So, you may be right, he may write about this against the docetists, but he, whether the docetists lie behind it or not, there's a self-evident, you know, sort of cataclysmic importance in his mind. If he's thinking back to the days that Jesus Walked on earth and he John the son of Zebedee and his hot-headed brother You know how they got so much wrong and How clueless they were and yet, you know how he washed their feet and went to the cross and Was the Savior of the world despite how little they you know understood what he was doing and how poorly they served Jesus and then you know to realize in hindsight who he really was. That's reason enough to put that in there. Yes sir. I just had a question on your translation in verse 4. It looked like you took the haemone here as a kumon or did you take it as a haemone? Only I can remember what I thought. Your joy. I took it as a humong. And the reason I did, if any of you have the ill fortune to provide this commentary, I didn't use it because it's just too much for a two hour class unless that's the only thing you read and I didn't want you to just I thought you'd be better served if you read Stodd and Lew. And the reason I have you read Lew, Lew gives you a lot better idea of how the world reads the Bible. As scholars go, Lou is fairly conservative and says a lot of good and helpful things from an academic point of view. But you're not going to get a lot of theology in Lou. You're probably going to miss the Christian message in John's letter. That sort of flat thing. sociological reading of this portion of scripture. If people in the modern world, in our world today, if they, if you wanna call it postmodern, if they read the Bible at all, they're probably gonna read it a lot more like Lou does. And you know, it's very important that we understand how people read the Bible, who don't think like we do. So, you know, Lou, give you an example. But just, you know, for your information. You know, this is the Nessi-Ala text, and so, you know, we call this the apparatus, right? And so these all refer to variants in the Greek manuscripts. And I didn't count them, but there are, I'm going to guess, between 700 and 1000. I don't know, I haven't counted them. But in this commentary, I explained every one of these variants. So if you do any work with textual variance, I don't think anybody was ever that sick that they wrote a commentary and explained every variant in an essay along text. But I did it because I know first year students, second year students, they read First John and their teachers say, read the apparatus. But in most cases nobody's ever explained the apparatus in a comprehensive way. So I explained it. And this is my explanation of 1-4. Did John write, hei chara heimon our joy or hei chara humon your joy? The problem here involves iticism. A scribal error arising from seven different vowels or diphthongs that might have been pronounced the same in Greek, resulting in mistakes when scribes copied by dictation. I refer here to Metzger's book on the text of the New Testament. Once again the difference is not great for interpretive purposes. I mean nobody's going to notice, you know, in a sermon, our joy your joy. External evidence is somewhat in favor of our joy. And by external I mean when you look at the several hundred basically about a hundred eighty manuscripts ancient copies of first John exist about a hundred eighty and some of them say yours and some of them say ours and as I just said there are seven different vowels or diphthongs that were said roughly the same way as other vowels or diphthongs in ancient Greek and a lot of times when scribes copied it was just like this you have a bunch of slaves and they had a reader and the reader would read and people would copy by dictation and listen to this humon, hamon humon, hamon. You know if you're half asleep and it's cold and you know you're hungry and you know you need to go to the restroom and stuff like that you're not listening real closely or you're getting old and deaf like I am it's easy to confuse that sound and that's one reason why probably in the manuscript traditions some have the ida there and some have the ipsalon. External evidence is in favor of our joy within the Johani Corpus 1624 has Jesus urging his disciples to make petitions so that your joy may be complete but in 2nd John 12 we find the phrase in order that our joy may be complete where however there is textual divergence. And I've got to know on that. So on internal grounds too, no definite Johannine trend can be discerned. You know Jesus says one thing, John writes another thing. The writer identifies so fully with his readers and shares what he has come to know with them so completely that he could clearly have wished his apostolic joy to be theirs and thus write our But he sees his adressis as being sufficiently separate from the apostolic circle, and sufficiently beset by the distinctive challenges they face, that it is also not hard to imagine that he might have written, your joy, as Dobson says, arguing on the basis of John's use of emphatic personal pronouns. which Greek manuscripts they think record what John actually wrote at this point. And by the way, this is the most frequent quasi-significant textual problem in Greek New Testament manuscripts. This particular oscillation in the manuscripts between hey and who in the genitive plural of the personal pronoun. It's the one that you're going to encounter the most if you have an NIV or an ESV and the whole footnote some say our Or some say your you're going to see more of that than anything else because it was the biggest Item that you know describes that hard time nailing down Got time for maybe maybe one more question. Yes The apostle John that wrote it, would it be textual similarities between the letters and the gospel? Would it be external evidence like early church fathers? If you were to kind of give your own, why you're convinced it's the same John that wrote the gospel. Well, that's a great question. And it's changed over the decades. because my thinking was one way in the 70s and another way in the 80s and it really struck me in the early 2000s when, I mean this looks technical but when I was writing this commentary this is, this is they call it a handbook edition of the critical apparatus. It's sort of digested for exegetes and for scholars. It's not a it's not a critical edition where you can you can really look at all the hundred and forty manuscripts but in around 2005 or six the UBS came out with the critical edition of the Juhannam Epistles so that you can see all the variants. in all 180 roughly copies of the Greek manuscripts of 1st John. And that means that I could for the first time, because here they only give you a small sampling, let's see, in Scyptio. All this stuff here is about, it's a summary of what the title of 1st John is in the ancient Greek manuscripts. And I won't go through it all, but you can see Epistle Catholic of the Holy Apostle John. Or John the Evangelist, or John the Theologian and Apostle. Epistle A. So there are a lot of different variations. And then when you get to the end of 1st John, in this edition. They don't really, they don't have it. I mean, again, you think this is really technical, but they're really simplifying this because most of the ancient Greek manuscripts, they put the title at the end in a subscription. And so when about 2005 or six, I could see, and in my commentary I've got maybe 20 different or 15 different titles for 1 John. There were actually 50 or 60 different variations in how John was titled. But there's no manuscript that doesn't attribute John's letters to John. And on the theory that John didn't write it and nobody knows who wrote it, one of the chances that all these manuscripts and then you go over into... all the Latin versions and the Coptic version, that they all decided that they would attribute it to John even though he didn't write it and nobody knows who did. It was an unknown person who wasn't John. And that's just, that's one line of evidence. But I think historically it's really hard to account for why all of these manuscripts from different parts of the ancient world and different language groups, why they all have John there. Especially second and third. But then more broadly, and when you read Stott, if you read Stott's introduction, he does a fair job at a very basic level showing there just is, there's no alternative. And if you really want to get into this, look at the book by C.E. Hill, Charles Hill, The Johannine Corpus. I'll say early church, might be second century, but the Johannine Corpus in the early church. C.E. Hill. If you have academic interests, it's the most important book written in the last quarter century on the study of John. Because he shows, and he's been reviewed very favorably. He shows that Johannine studies since the middle of the 20th century were built on a myth. And the myth was that because the Gnostics heavily used John's gospel, that the early Church Fathers stayed away from it because it sounded so Gnostic. And it was really the Gnostics that were the first ones to champion the Gnostics. John's gospel and this high Christology that was in it. And it's almost shocking when you read Hill's book how distorted the scholarship was. It's almost like recent decades they tell you in medicine, I don't know, drink a gallon of water a day. And then finally after 20 years of beating on you to drink a gallon of water a day, they say, you know that's really not healthy. Quit drinking so much water! You're gonna hurt yourself. And they've gone back and forth on salt too. You know, I grew up in a very humid area, and if we didn't take salt pills and potassium, I think we would have died. You'd have such severe muscle cramps. And then they say, well don't eat, don't use salt and potassium. It was a scientific mistake applied to the whole population. Well, that happens in scholarship. And there have been things said in Johannian studies like that there were two Johns. Everybody who goes to, you know, takes a humanities course in college or sometimes even, you know, you go to Bible college or something, and you read commentaries and they make it sound like there were two Johns in the early church. Nobody ever suggested that till the third century. So, I mean, to give you the briefest answer so we can get you ten minutes. You're 10 minutes break, it is. But I know it's what you're after. The one thing that convinced me the most that tradition is probably true, the tradition as Hill says, coming out of the, going back into the end of the first century, there's universal historical attestation that John the son of Zebedee. was the author of the gospel, the revelation, and the three letters. There's no other tradition. And you can date that into the end of the first century. When I was roughly at your point in my studies, I was getting ready to do my MA thesis, and I wanted to do something that would benefit the church and something theological. But the more I was reading, and we had a two year MA and you had to write a thesis and you had to do Greek and Hebrew, it was pretty academic. And I was learning more and more that for every fact and for every documentary empirical claim in the literature, I could find books that said the opposite. And so basically I was really becoming very skeptical. And so I had to pull back from my program of doing something beneficial for the world because I needed to do something for my own soul, in my own mind. And so I said to myself, if I can establish one fact that's theologically significant, historically, I can in good conscience preach the Bible. And at that time I thought I was going to... Maybe go back out to Montana and plant churches or maybe go to Iceland and plant churches. I can't, I can't, you know, in good conscience be teaching and preaching this stuff if it turns out that, you know, the best science says it's, we don't know. So my question was, when did Papias of Hierapolis write? When did Papias of Hierapolis write? Because Papias... Actually, I think Stott's wrong here. He calls it middle of second century. That can't be right. And actually, Lou gets that right. She says he wrote near the end of the first century. I think that's exactly right. He's the one that says, and he's the only way we would know in terms of an early testifier, that Mark wrote down Peter's reminiscences. But the Gospel of Mark basically comes from Peter. That's from Papias. There are a lot of facts like that about the New Testament or New Testament writers that we get from Papias. Well, Papias is dated from 80 to 160. And so I spent half a year of my life trying to track down why scholars have him in about four different generations. And I realized, well, the people that don't like his testimony, they boot him way back into the end of the second century so they can get him out of their hair. But when you look at Eusebius' chronicon, before Eusebius wrote his history, he wrote like a multi-column, just lists of dates. Egyptian history, Roman history, Jewish history, and then Christian history. But when he gets to the reign of Trajan, around 1897, he says, under Christian column, he says, Papias, Ignatius, Polycarp, hearers of the Apostle John, 1897. So, I'm condensing a lot, but basically I'm saying that for what it's worth, I mean, we have what we call the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. And in the end, it's the Holy Spirit I think that convinces us of the truth of the Word of God. But we can't get around the fact that we live in a world in which the Word of God comes through us through historical means. So, it's not just, we're not just fetiists, and especially if you're training for leadership in the church. It's not always going to work to say, well you just got to believe it. And also, it's not that simple. I mean... It is that simple in a way, but for those of us who are leading people and explaining to people and to teach people, we have to be able to do it with a good conscience. We have to be able to look at the arguments and look at the data and know we're not being dishonest. You know, we're not lying through our teeth talking about John writing this when actually we don't know that. I think we do know better that John wrote it than any other alternative. And I'll just say one other thing, because I think this is the most widely spread, undocumented, and also contradictory statement that even evangelical students all learn. We don't know. We're always told that the titles weren't parts of the original manuscripts. Often we're told that by folks that are very critical of the Bible. Well, the titles, you can't say John wrote it because that wasn't part of the original title. But then they'll turn around and say, we don't have the original manuscripts. So how do they know the titles weren't part of the original manuscript? We don't know that. And actually, Martin Hengel argued that the titles were on the Gospels. There's every reason to think that the Gospels did have the names. of their writers on them. But let's just say they didn't. In the first century if they were written by people who followed Jesus would they really have had to have their titles on them? Does John have to say I am John? Let's show his ID card or something like that. Like his W-9 or whatever it is in order to write an epistle. No people knew who it was. So, I'm kind of coming over the map here, but I think there are a lot of good reasons. And again, Stott I think gives a good summary of a lot of patristic considerations, a lot of common sense considerations, a lot of internal evidence considerations. Whoever wrote John's Gospel wrote the epistles too, just stylistically. It's quite obvious. One thing that Lou says that I think simply can't be documented. She says it's easy to imitate John's writing. My question is show me one writing in antiquity that does that. I can't think of any writing that sounds sounds Johannine. I mean that's why we talk about Johannine writings because they all have this certain sort of bent. It's well and good to say, ah, you know, just because you got this... I mean lots of people could write like that. Well, prove it. I don't think it's very easy to write like John. So, I think there's a very distinctive voice in the early church and going back to the AD 90s, I mean that's almost concurrent with when it was written. Doesn't all that sort of like make a pretty strong case that an eyewitness of Jesus named John is probably responsible for these letters.