persecuted. The peril, as it has been put, was not persecution but seduction; it came from within. That, too, Jesus had foreseen. ‘Many false prophets’, he said, ‘will arise, and lead many astray’ (Matthew 24:11). This was a danger of which Paul had warned the leaders of this very church of Ephesus when he made his farewell address to them. ‘I know’, he said, ‘that after I have gone, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. Some even from your own group will come distorting the truth in order to entice the disciples to follow them’ (Acts 20:29–30).
The trouble which 1 John seeks to combat came not from people who were out to destroy the Christian faith but from those who thought they were improving it. It came from people whose aim was to make Christianity intellectually respectable. They knew the intellectual trends and currents of the day, and felt that the time had come for Christianity to come to terms with secular philosophy and contemporary thought.
The Contemporary Philosophy
What, then, was this contemporary thought and philosophy with which the false prophets and mistaken teachers wished to align the Christian faith? Throughout the Greek world, there was a way of thinking to which the general name of Gnosticism is given. The basic belief of all Gnostic thought was that only spirit was good and that matter, the material world, was essentially evil. The Gnostics, therefore, inevitably despised the world since it was matter. In particular, they despised the body, which, being matter, was necessarily evil. Imprisoned within this body was the human spirit. That spirit was a seed of God, who was altogether good. So, the aim of life must be to release this heavenly seed imprisoned in the evil of the body. That could be done only by a secret knowledge and elaborate ritual which only true Gnostics could supply. Here was a train of thought which was written deep into Greek thinking – and which has not even now ceased to exist. Its basis is the conviction that all matter is evil and that spirit alone is good, and that the one real aim in life is to liberate the human spirit from the vile prison house of the body.
The False Teachers
With that in our minds, let us turn to 1 John and gather the evidence as to who these false teachers were and what they taught. They had been within the Church, but they had withdrawn from it. ‘They went out from us, but they did not belong to us’ (1 John 2:19). They were people of influence, for they claimed to be prophets. ‘Many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4:1). Although they had left the Church, they still tried to disseminate their teaching within it and to deceive its members and lead them away from the true faith (1 John 2:26).
The Denial of Jesus’ Messiahship
At least some of these false teachers denied that Jesus was the Messiah. ‘Who is the liar’, demands John, ‘but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?’ (1 John 2:22). It is most likely that these false teachers were not Gnostics in the true sense of the word, but Jews. Things had always been difficult for Jewish Christians, but the events of history made them doubly so. It was very difficult for Jews to come to believe in a crucified Messiah. But suppose they had begun to believe this, their difficulties were by no means finished. The Christians believed that Jesus would return quickly to vindicate his people. Clearly, that would be a hope that would be specially dear to the hearts of the Jews. Then, in AD 70, Jerusalem was captured by the Romans, who were so infuriated with the long intransigence and the suicidal resistance of the Jews that they tore the holy city stone from stone and drew a plough across the middle of it. In view of that, how could the Jews easily accept the hope that Jesus would come and save them? The holy city was desolate; the Jews were dispersed throughout the world. In view of that, how could it be true that the Messiah had come?
The Denial of the Incarnation
There was something even more serious than that. There was false teaching which came directly from an attempt from within the Church to bring Christianity into line with Gnosticism. We must remember the Gnostic point of view that spirit alone was good and matter utterly evil. Given that point of view, any real incarnation is impossible. That is exactly what, centuries later, St Augustine was to point out. Before he became a Christian, he was skilled in the philosophies of the various schools. In the Confessions (8:9), he tells us that somewhere in the writings of the Platonists he had read in one form or another nearly all the things that Christianity says; but there was one great Christian saying which he had never found in any of these works and which no one would ever find – and that saying was: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John 1:14). Since these thinkers believed in the essential evil of matter and therefore the essential evil of the body, that was one thing they could never say.
It is clear that the false teachers against whom John was writing in this First Letter denied the reality of the incarnation and of Jesus’ physical body. ‘Every spirit’, writes John, ‘that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God’ (1 John 4:2–3).
In the early Church, this refusal to admit the reality of the incarnation took, broadly speaking, two forms.
(1) In its more radical and wholesale form, it was called Docetism, which the scholar E. J. Goodspeed suggests might be translated as Seemism. The Greek verb dokein means to seem; and the Docetists taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body. They insisted that he was a purely spiritual being who had nothing but the appearance of having a body. One of the apocryphal books written from this point of view is the Acts of John, which dates from about AD 160. In it, John is made to say that sometimes when he touched Jesus he seemed to meet with a material body, but at other times ‘the substance was immaterial, as if it did not exist at all’, and also that, when Jesus walked, he never left any footprint upon the ground. The simplest form of Docetism is the complete denial that Jesus ever had a physical body.
(2) There was a more subtle, and perhaps more dangerous, variant of this theory connected with the name of Cerinthus. In tradition, John and Cerinthus were sworn enemies. The great early Church historian Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History, 4:14:6) hands down a story which tells how John went to the public bathhouse in Ephesus to bathe. He saw Cerinthus inside and refused even to enter the building. ‘Let us flee,’ he said, ‘lest even the bathhouse fall, because Cerinthus the enemy of truth is within.’ Cerinthus drew a definite distinction between the human Jesus and the divine Christ. He said that Jesus was a man, born in a perfectly natural way. He lived in special obedience to God, and after his baptism the Christ in the shape of a dove descended upon him, from that power which is above all powers, and then he brought news of the Father who up to that point had been unknown. Cerinthus did not stop there. He said that, at the end of Jesus’ life, the Christ again withdrew from him so that the Christ never suffered at all. It was the human Jesus who suffered, died and rose again.
This again comes out in the stories of the apocryphal gospels written under the influence of this point of view. In the Gospel of Peter, written in about AD 130, it is said that Jesus showed no pain upon the cross and that his cry was: ‘My power! My power! Why have you forsaken me?’ It was at that moment that the divine Christ left the human Jesus. The Acts of John go further. They tell how, when the human Jesus was being crucified on Calvary, John was actually talking to the divine Christ in a cave in the hillside and that the Christ said to him: ‘John, to the multitude down below in Jerusalem I am being crucified, and pierced with lances and with reeds, and gall and vinegar are given me to drink. But I am speaking to you, and listen to what I say . . . Nothing, therefore, of the things they will say of me have I suffered’ (Acts of John 97).
We may see from the Letters of Ignatius how widespread this way of thinking was. Ignatius was writing to a group of churches in Asia Minor which must have been much the same as the group to which 1 John was written. When Ignatius wrote, he was a prisoner and was being transported to Rome to be martyred by being flung to the wild animals in the arena. He wrote to the Trallians: ‘Be deaf,
