Introduction

This first letter of John, inseparable from his Gospel, reminds us that the Christian way is nothing less than a divinization: our own.

From all time the Christian ideal has seemed too pale or too narrow for many people. Without directly criticizing the values of Christianity and its benefits to humanity, they saw it as limiting people. We think of all those, like Marx, who affirmed that a real human lib- eration involves a struggle against faith. We think of those who today rely on science to widen the possibilities of life. We again think of all those who, shunning western activism, seek in oriental wisdom a way to the Absolute which they have failed to see in Christian faith.

Even for Christians, the sentimental religion springing from enthusiasm for Jesus, the good Master teaching universal love, often hides an ignorance of the ambitions of faith. For in Jesus it is God himself we want to reach, we are seekers of truth and we want to merge into this truth from which we have come.

John affirms in this first letter: If you have the Son of God you have total truth, you are on the way to authentic love and you are in communion with God himself.

However, perhaps, we are deceiving ourselves when we pretend to be in Christ. This is why John specifies the criteria, the conditions enabling us to verify if we are truly walking in the light and living in Love:
�C In Christ we recognize God himself; yet we must always remember to interiorize his actions, his mission, his way of being human.
�C We believe we have been reborn from God: that does not mean that we are above his commandments, nor that we should neglect daily efforts to be worthy of him.
�C Faith has renewed our knowledge of God. What matters most is to understand his love and, for that, there is no better teaching than that of the cross.

This letter of John seeks to settle many doubts and confusion concerning Christian faith. It was written when ��Gnosticism�� or knowledge was beginning. Gnosticism involved an elaborate system that included many elements, already present in the so-called Asian reli- gions, namely, from the Roman province of Asia, today��s Turkey. Paul had already encoun- tered them some thirty years before (see Captivity Letters) and now John was noticing the expansion of Gnosticism.

The Gospel of John had freed from all ambiguity the faith in Christ, Son of God and divine person, born from God and having returned to God. But Gnostics were always ready to grasp onto beliefs they ran across in order to recast them into their endless tales. Gnostics tried to integrate the person of Jesus into their intellectual dialectics, their conflicts of angels and spiritual powers. Jesus did come from God although he was only a spirit. He only had a human appearance and he did not die for us. Redemption continues to be a process through which divine sparks come out of matter and what matters to them is to know the secrets of these celestial conflicts. Gnostics claimed to be spiritual and yet, while they condemned mar- riage, they did not see anything wrong with sexual freedom.

Therefore, it was necessary to reaffirm that Jesus was fully human: he was the Christ who had come in the flesh. Several times, the letter will refer to the sacrifice and to the blood of Jesus.

Some people think that this letter sought to correct some abusive interpretations that could be given of John��s Gospel. It must have been written around 95�C100.