Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a PhD in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started, we're starting the first epistle of St. John.

So I'm going to do a little introduction.

As anybody who has paged ahead is probably noticed or might just know in general.

Second and third John are both sort of a paragraph each.

So I'm just going to sort of do an intro for all three of the Johannine epistles.

And then we'll sort of move on from there.

And when we get to the end of first john we'll just go straight into

probably a quick succession second and second and third john so in terms of introducing first john

first john is relatively unique.

In most of these intros, I've had to go into all kinds of this and that about dating and who

wrote it.

Not because there was a lot of doubt with a lot of the other epistles and stuff, but just

because there's a lot of modern

scholars who like to muddy the waters to make them seem deep. And so kind of clarifying that,

First John's kind of remarkable in that there's not a ton of dissent, right? Like even 19th century

Germans were like, this is written by the same person who wrote

St. John's Gospel. Right? Like it's when you read it in in Greek, it's sort of painfully obvious

that they were written by the same person. And I say painfully obvious because, as I probably mentioned

in the introduction to the Gospel of John five years ago now, that the Greek's kind of horrible

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