Theopedia

Second Epistle of John

“Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.”

— 2 John 9 (ESV)

Overview

2 John is a general epistle of the New Testament, one of the three letters traditionally attributed to the apostle John. At only thirteen verses, it is among the shortest books in the Bible, matched in brevity only by 3 John.1 Written as a brief personal letter rather than a treatise, it addresses the same concern found at greater length in 1 John: the danger posed by false teachers who deny that Jesus Christ came in the flesh (2 John 7).

Author and Date

The letter identifies its author only as “the elder” (2 John 1). Ancient testimony connects this designation to the apostle John, the same man who avoided naming himself in his Gospel and first epistle, choosing instead titles like “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”1 Origen and Eusebius both counted 2 John among the New Testament’s disputed writings, yet its external attestation to apostolic authorship is substantial, including Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Jerome; the brevity of the letter, rather than any real doubt about its content, accounts for its comparatively thin early citation.1 Tradition places its composition from Ephesus in Asia Minor, where John is said to have spent his old age, alongside 1 John and Revelation.2

Historical and Literary Context

John addresses the letter to “the elect lady and her children” (2 John 1), language some commentators have taken as a literal woman and her family and others as a figurative address to a local church and its members. Boyce treats the identification as genuinely uncertain, noting that the phrase’s application to a church “is doubtful” on the Greek text alone.3 Whichever reading is correct, the letter’s occasion is plain: traveling teachers who denied that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh were seeking hospitality and a hearing among John’s correspondents (2 John 7, 10). This was the same error John had already opposed in his first epistle, an early form of Docetism holding that the Son of God possessed only an apparent, not a real, body.2 John writes to warn the recipient against extending the same welcome to these teachers that would be due a true minister of Christ.

Structure

The letter divides into two brief parts:

  • Greeting and commendation for walking in truth, with a call to love and to watchfulness against deceivers (1-11)
  • Closing and farewell (12-13)

Major Themes

Walking in truth and love. John commends the recipient’s children for walking in truth and asks not for a new commandment but for the one held “from the beginning,” that believers love one another and walk according to God’s commandments (2 John 4-6). Truth and love are bound together rather than opposed: love is defined as obedience to what Christ has commanded, not as a sentiment detached from doctrine.

The denial of Christ’s incarnation. John identifies “many deceivers” who “confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” as “the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7). Hodge reads this alongside 1 John 2:18-22 and 4:3 as one of the New Testament’s own uses of the term “antichrist” for anyone who denies the reality of the incarnation, not only for a single end-times figure.4 Whoever goes beyond “the teaching of Christ” on this point “does not have God,” while whoever abides in it “has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 9).

Warning against supporting false teachers. John’s sharpest instruction follows directly from the doctrinal warning: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works” (2 John 10-11). Strauch reads this as establishing a real, personal responsibility: extending hospitality or public welcome to a false teacher is not neutral courtesy but shared participation in that teacher’s error.5

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 500. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Barrows, 498-499. ↩ ↩2

  3. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 345. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 3:809. ↩

  5. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 19, “1 Timothy 5:21-25–A Call to Courageous Obedience and Helps for Appointing Qualified Elders,” 197-206. ↩