Article Sidebar
Published:
Sep 26, 2021Keywords:
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
The author of 1 John uses the multiple references to his ‘writing’ as a mechanism to establish different affects and effects
Dirk G. van der Merwe
Abstract
In 1 John, the author refers several times explicitly to himself (also once in the plural, 1:4) for writing (γράφειν) certain things with the following purposes in mind, (that, ἵνα): ‘our joy may be complete’ (1:4); ‘you may not sin’ (2:1); and ‘you may know that you have eternal life’ (5:13). In 2:26, he implicitly states that he has also written ‘these things’ (ταῦτα) that (ἵνα) they might be victorious over the deceivers. This is the only book in the New Testament where such a high frequency of an author’s reference to his own writing occurs. In 1 John it is used as part of a fixed phrase (ταῦτα γράφω/ἔγραψα ὑµῖν ἵνα) in the author’s rhetoric. This essay focusses on the primary and secondary objectives for writing 1 John per se, and on conceivable lived experiences fostered by the fixed phrase ‘ταῦτα γράφω ὑµῖν ἵνα’ [I am writing these things to you so that …], as well as the mechanisms the author used to unleash these lived experiences linked with these fixed phrases. The following aspects determine the structure of this essay: the author’s objectives, the expectancy of his writing, the credibility of his writing and the mechanisms the author used through which lived experiences could have been fostered to influence and convince his readers that Jesus is the Son of God.
