A commentary on the Epistles of St. John - The Preterist Archive

INTRODUCTION. 9
tions of mental decay, and the weakness of old age,
that if St. John were the author, he necessarily must
have written it when very old, and, at all events, after
the destruction of Jerusalem ; but that the epistle
has quite the air of being composed before the de-
struction of that city. In the contrary case John
would, nay, must of necessity somewhere in the
epistle have mentioned it, specially in ii. 18, where
he speaks of the sßyßryj (Jjoa, which, according to the
notion of the Apostles, was most intimately connect-
ed with the destruction of the holy city,—a riddle
which only can be satisfactorily solved, by supposing
that a more modern author, an imitator of St. John,
composed the epistle, probably a century after the
age of St. John."
This argument is founded on a quadruple error.'^*
In the first place, it is not true that the epistle is des-
titute ofall characteristic individuality and personality
only it is rather hinted at than expressly and distinctly
brought out,—a trait by which the form of the Catholic
epistles in general, and the manner of St. John
in particular, differs from the form of the Pauline
epistles. The peculiar mould and fashion of the
Pauline epistles is, accordingly, not to be established
as a critical standard for the Catholic epistles> and
least of all for the Epistle of St. John. This, how-
ever, is what Lange has evidently done. The indi-
viduality and personality of the epistle rather dis-
21 See what has been stated agtiinst it by Fritzsche in Henkes
JMuseum, ^^ol. III. Part 1 ; Welcker in his Philol. Exeget.
Clavis to the N. T., Vol. II. Divis. 2, p. 115, sqq. ; and
Bertholdt's Introduction, Vol. VI. § 701.
;