Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Tue Apr 17, 2018 12:16 pmI currently belong to the vocal minority of people who think that the Johannine epistles, by and large, predate the Johannine gospel. One of the reasons commonly offered for the priority of the gospel is the following triad of verses:
John 13.34: 34 "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another."
1 John 2.7: 7 Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.
2 John [1.]5: 5 And now I ask you, lady, not as writing to you a new commandment, but the one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another.
In the gospel Jesus acknowledges that the love commandment he is giving is a new commandment, while in the epistles the author/elder admits that this love commandment is
not new. Thus, the argument goes, the gospel must have been written first.
But this argument confuses the order of events with the order in which an author writes about those events; just because an author writes both about WWI and about WWII does not mean s/he has written about those two wars
in that order. It is just as easy to write a prequel as it is to write a sequel.
In this case, for example, it is easy to imagine the epistles being written on the basis of church doctrine as found, say, in Matthew 22.37-39 = Mark 12.29-31 = Luke 10.27 and then the gospel later, when the time came to put the love commandment in writing yet again, specifying that it was a new commandment based on the wording of 1 John 2.8 and 2 John [1.]5. Furthermore, the love commandment also finds expression elsewhere in the epistles:
1 John 4.20-21: 20 If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
The pronoun ("him") in verse 21 must refer to God; thus, according to this epistle it was God who issued the love commandment. The epistle comes across as ignorant of Jesus having issued it in the gospel of John, whereas in the synoptics it is actually issued by God the Father in the Hebrew scriptures (Deuteronomy 6.4-5; Leviticus 19.18) and merely quoted by Jesus as something old, not as something new.