Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
1 John 5:1-12, Water, blood and three witnesses
Whoever believes Jesus is the Christ is God's child, and loving the parent means loving the child. Faith overcomes the world. Jesus Christ came by water and blood, not by water only, and three testify, the Spirit, the water and the blood; God's testimony is that he has given eternal life in his Son.
1 John 5:1-12, in every translation this tool compares.
The writer ties faith, love and obedience together: whoever believes Jesus is the Christ is God's child, and loving God means loving his children and keeping his commands. This faith is what overcomes the world. He insists that Jesus came by water and blood, and he names three agreeing witnesses, Spirit, water and blood, whose testimony is that God gives eternal life in his Son. What water and blood stand for is read in more than one way.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/early-false-teachers\/","n":"Early false teachers and splits","s":"Late in the first century a group left the churches John wrote to, taking a different view of Jesus with them. Some may have denied that he was the Messiah; others that he truly became human, as the Docetists and Cerinthus later taught.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/witnesses-and-advocates\/","n":"Witnesses and advocates in court","s":"Jewish law convicted no one on a single witness: it demanded two or three, examined them closely and gave little weight to the word of women. Courts also had accusers and advocates, and Jewish pictures of God's heavenly court gave those roles to Satan and to defenders of Israel.","r":""}
Some scholars think water and blood answer Cerinthus, who reportedly said that the Christ-Spirit came on Jesus at his baptism and left before his death, or Docetists who denied a real death; and since "Instead of blood Greek gods had ichor, which looked like water", some may have taken the water and blood of John 19:34 for a demigod's (the cultural backgrounds notes; Keener; the Zondervan dictionary). Carson, Moo and Morris add, with Marshall, that much known of Cerinthus is absent from the letters. The ESV and CSB Study Bibles take water as Jesus' baptism and blood as his death. Scripture required two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15), and John offers three (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). The words about three witnesses in heaven, in the King James Version at 5:7, are not original: Keener counts three late manuscripts drawn from the Latin Vulgate; Wright and Bird call them "the work of a pious medieval scribe"; Carson, Moo and Morris call them "certainly a gloss", absent from every Greek manuscript earlier than the 1300s apart from two with a much later marginal addition, and from every ancient version.
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on 1 John 5:1, 5:4-5 and 5:6-13
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on 1 John 5:1, 5:6 and 5:7-8
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on 1 John 5:6 and 5:7-8
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 33, The Argument of 1 John, section 10, and note 50
- CSB Study Bible, note on 1 John 5:6
- J. D. Douglas and Merrill C. Tenney, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary, entry John, Gospel of (Purpose)
- D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, ch. 21, 1, 2, 3 John, Purpose and Text
