First Epistle of John - Authorship

Authorship

The Epistle is traditionally held to have been composed by John the Evangelist, at Ephesus, when the writer was in advanced age. The epistle's content, language and conceptual style are very similar to the Gospel of John, 2 John, and 3 John, indicating that they were written by the same author. Indeed, at the end of the 19th century scholar Ernest DeWitt Burton wrote that there could be "no reasonable doubt" that 1 John and the gospel were written by the same author, and Amos Wilder has said that, "Early Christian tradition and the great majority of modern scholars have agreed on the common authorship of these writings, even where the author has not been identified with the apostle John."

However other modern scholars have challenged this position. Though the common authorship of the three epistles is still almost universally accepted, scholars such as Heinrich Julius Holtzmann and C. H. Dodd have maintained that the epistle and the gospel were written by different authors. There are at least two principal arguments for this view. The first is that the epistle often uses a demonstrative pronoun at the beginning of a sentence, then a particle or conjunction, followed by an explanation or definition of the demonstrative at the end of the sentence, a stylistic technique which is not used in the gospel. The second is that the author of the epistle, "uses the conditional sentence in a variety of rhetorical figures which are unknown to the gospel."

There is not unanimous agreement as to when the epistle was written, but some scholars have it as shortly after the completion of the Book of Revelation (which some believe to be 96 A.D.), and have the epistle's writership to be around 98 or 99 A.D.