Who were the opponents in 1 John?

I've just taken delivery of the commentary on 1-3 John by Colin Kruse, published in the Pillar series by IVP.

One of the questions that any student of 1 John has to ask is who the opponents are. There apear to be some false teachers infiltrating the church, but who were they and what did they teach?

In this regard, Kruse is a breath of fresh air.

Reconstructing their teaching

The first thing he does is try to do some careful "mirror reading" from the text of 1 John to work out all the features of their teaching. He comes up with 6 assertions (although I'm not quite clear how the 1st and 6th differ), and defends each very carefully from the text. He calls the teachers "secessionists" because the appear to have left the church John writes to (1 John 2:19), and yet are still trying to influence those in that church (1 John 2:26). Here are his summaries of those 6:

1. The secessionists claim to know God, but "the author regarded these claims as spurious because the behaviour of the secessionists belied their claims."
2. They claimed to be sinless.
3. "The secessionists denied that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, cmoe in the flesh"
4. "The secessionists denid that Jesus came by blood, that is, the importance of Jesus' atoning death."
5. "The secessionists' relationship with the believers remaining in the author's community was not marked by love which Christ himself enjoined upon his disciples."
6. "While the secessionists claimed 'to have no sin,' the author clearly implies that their behaviour was marked by wrongdoing. He implies that they continued in sin and did not do what is right."

Causes within their own church community

The next thing Kruse does is to look at some attempts by modern authors to find possible causes within the church John wrote to for the secessionists making these disastrously wrong moves. Perhaps they misunderstood John's gospel, and / or perhaps they did not have the background in Judaism to understand the gospel of Christ correctly. Frankly, it's hard to say, and it doesn't much matter:

"It does seem clear that, whatever the influences that affected them were, they all led to a deemphasising of the incarnation and vicarious death of Christ and a concomitant deemphasising of the commands of Christ, especially the commnd to love one another."

Links to other early Christian heresies

Finally he gets to where every other writer seems to start. (It's this order that makes him such a refreshing read). Might there be any other known heresies from the first two centuries that resemble what John is countering, and that could explain how the secessionists came to embrace their ideas?

He looks at 3 possibilities.

• First, Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, tackles the beliefs of a man named Cerinthus. We know from Polycarp (Bishop of Smyrna, cited by Irenaeus) that John the apostle both knew and opposed Cerinthus. That makes the idea that Cerinthus was behind the heresies of 1 John quite attractive, especially because he and John were contemporaries. (Most of the other suggestions for well-known heresies were actually from the second century, and have to be read back into John's lifespan). The trouble is: There is zero evidence for Cerinthus himself being involved in the community John writes to, and the heresies don't really match at all.
• Second, how about Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who wrote a few times about some docetics (Jesus wasn't really human - he just appeared to be) shortly before his martyrdom in Rome. He died in 107, so the dates aren't way out. The teachings do match up wtih the heresies on 1 John much better. It has to be said, though that the heresies countered by Ignatius and by John aren't quite the same, and a strong feature of Ignatius' opponents was their Jewish background - there's no hint of that in 1 John. [My note: Or is there?...]
• Third, how about the second-century Gnostics, Basilides and Valentinus, as we meet them again in Against Heresies? One key feature of their teaching was the wish to separate God out from the work of creating, and there's no parallel to that in 1 John.

And so he concludes:

"Of all the candidates for the source of influence affecting the secessionists, the teaching of the opponents of Ignatius comes closest to what we can know of the secessionist views. But as already noted, there are other features which seem to militate against a one-to-one idenficiation, especially the close association of Ignatius's opponents with Judaism. Schnackenburg's conclusion is hard to improve upon:

""The heresy which occasioned 1 and 2 John cannot be parallel with any other manifestation of heresy known from that era. Yet it has affinities with more than one such movement. They all play down the historic person of Jesus Chrsit as the unique and true savior. They all deny the way of salvation thorugh his flesh and blood. In their precise christological interpretation of the the figure of Jesus, these dangerous heretics dissolving as they did the substance of the Christian faith, evidently went off in different directions. This can be seen by comparing the views of Cerinthus with those of the docetists in the letters of Ignatius, whose precise teaching, however, remains obscure. The chrisology of the antichrists in the Johannine epistles also can no longer be described with certainty or precision. But it is one example of that pseudo-Christian tendency which is manifested in gnosticism and was such a threat to the church.""

That is all most helpful. It means we allow what we know from elsewhere to shed some light on John's letter, but we don't end up forcing the letter through a grid to make it fit. First and foremost, we allow 1 John to speak for itself.