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The Ancient World Behind the Text: Ideas
The customs, offices and ideas a first reader knew without being told, what each meant then, and the nearest thing you already know.
Light and darkness
Jewish writers, the Dead Sea Scrolls above all, divided people into children of light and children of darkness, and pictured the present age as darkness that the coming age of light would end. John, Paul and Jesus use the same contrast.
We say someone was kept in the dark, or that the truth came to light. In the Bible light goes with God, knowledge and goodness, and darkness with ignorance and wrong. In Jesus' day some Jewish groups pushed the picture further. The people behind the Dead Sea Scrolls called themselves the children of light and everyone outside the children of darkness, and they expected a last battle in which light would win. They also spoke of a spirit of truth and a spirit of error at work in people. John uses much of the same language, and the sources are careful about how far he shares the Scrolls' outlook.
Jewish texts, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, used light and darkness to set the followers of righteousness against those of sin. From Scripture they held that God is wholly righteous (Psalm 92:15). The Scrolls named the two camps children of light and children of darkness, and sometimes called the faithful the children of God's truth. Wright and Bird describe the War Scroll as a liturgy of "an end-time battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness". After Pompey took Jerusalem, they add, some Jews cast Rome as "the power of darkness ranged against the children of light". Many Jewish traditions pictured the present age as ruled mostly by darkness and the age to come as light's triumph. In the Scrolls light was predestined to win. The Scrolls went further and made every act the work of a spirit of truth or a spirit of error. Outside them the rabbis taught a similar doctrine of two impulses. Keener calls the Testament of Judah 20 the closest parallel to two spirits, but it is often suspected of Christian additions, so the question is not settled. In the Old Testament light stands for both knowledge and purity, and walking in darkness meant the danger of stumbling. Paul pairs day with light and night with darkness as common images for good and evil, and children of meant people marked by something. Wright and Bird read John's contrast as an overlap of light and darkness in a world where the age to come has begun while the old age goes on. They find the labels apocalyptic and dualism too many-sided to help.
An analogy: a film that lights its heroes and leaves its villains in shadow. The audience can tell who stands on which side from the lighting alone, before anyone speaks a line.
Because light and darkness already named the two sides of good and evil, Jesus can urge his hearers to become children of light in John 12:36 without explaining the phrase, and Paul can tell the Thessalonians that they are children of the day in 1 Thessalonians 5:5. 1 John 1:5 builds its first test on the claim that God is light, with no darkness in him at all.
Not a matter of fixed casting. In a film the lighting is set before the scene and never changes. John calls his hearers to walk in the light and become children of light. Keener and the cultural backgrounds notes stress that he stops short of the Scrolls' view that every act is fixed by one spirit or the other.
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- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on 1 John 1:5, 1:6, 2:7-8, 3:19 and 4:4-6, on John 1:5 and 12:35-36, and on 1 Thessalonians 5:4-5
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on 1 John 1:5, 2:8, 3:19 and 4:6
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on 1 John 1:5-10 and 2:8
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 5, on Pompey's capture of Jerusalem; ch. 6, caption to the War Scroll (1QM); and ch. 33, 1, 2, and 3 John in the Big Picture, with note 58
