Welcome to another episode of 30 Minutes in the New Testament.

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Eric, we get to start a new book today. We do indeed. We are diving into First John. We have, of course, gone after John's gospel, but we have not talked about any of the epistles of John. And so this will be interesting to dive into this extremely dense, very thick. And I guess you could call it circular letter. This is a, the letter is

written in, in a somewhat strange way. And what I mean by circular is that John constantly sort of

goes over the same themes again and again and again, but in different ways and with different

language.

It is clearly, just to do a little introductory material before we dive into the letter,

it seems to be pretty clear that there was unanimous agreement that John was the writer of this letter, the same John that wrote the gospel. There's so much overlap between the

kinds of words he uses in his gospel

and his letter here that it makes the most sense. This was all, this is what everybody sort of

in the early church believed. Certainly about this first letter, there wasn't necessarily

agreement about the second and third letter. That's discussion for another time. But the first letter, there really wasn't necessarily agreement about the second and third letter.

That's discussion for another time. But the first letter, there really wasn't much debate about or dispute over. Polycarp, who was a disciple of John, references this letter a number of times

in his writings. And so we have every reason to believe that this is an apostolic letter, which makes it entirely

appropriate for being a New Testament letter and part of the canon. So it was probably written

closer to the end of the first century, but we don't know. I mean, all that stuff is just speculation

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