(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) The dominant model for interpreting the Johannine Epistles over recent decades has been to locate them in a very specific context, to determine their Sitz im Leben. Of necessity this external world is reconstructed by reference to the texts themselves. Indeed, herein lies the irony; for many interpreters, 1 John, as much as if not more than any other NT letter, can be understood only with reference to a specific context, although it, more than any other NT letter, most lacks any explicit identifiers.1 Author, authence, location, and any indication of date are systematically left anonymous. As often noted, this results in a circular argument - the setting is deduced from the letter and the letter is then interpreted with close reference to the hypothetical situation. More fundamentally, this approach is dependent on a set of prior assumptions about the of the letter: first, that it is inherendy polemical-even if polemic serves a primary pastoral purpose; further, that the key to the polemical occasion is the oblique reference in 2:18 to the antichrists who went out from us but were not of us. These assumptions generate the basic plot: the authence has experienced some form of schism, whether passively or actively as its initiators; the author is seeking to reassure them in the face of the assault on their (deterministic) sense of assurance, but also to retain their loyalty. The problem that divides the two parties is understood as christological and behavioral, although the precise balance between these two aspects is open to debate inasmuch as it depends on interpreting other earlier nonspecific references (e.g., 1:6, 8, 10; 2:4) in the light of 2:18. Once described, it may be illuminated by reference to known christological debates in the early church even if it is not to be identified with any one of them.2 Although attacked at a number of key points, this reading has shown remarkable resilience.3 Thus, subsequent interpreters have rejected the apostolic authorship of the letters, have questioned the common authorship of Gospel and epistles, have redefined the theological position held by Cerinthus, and have doubted whether anything quite so precise can possibly be read into or out of the enigmatic christological statements in 1 and 2 John. Yet commentators have only tinkered with the underlying approach to reading the letters as polemical documents.4 There have been a number of challenges to this model, most notably from more text-centered readings of NT texts.5 These have begun to focus on the argument of the letter, not in relation to some external opponents but in terms of how it works persuasively for the readers of the letter; to that extent they have sought to understand the rhetoric of 1 John. However, where the model has been the type of analysis shaped by the recognized categories and structures of GrecoRoman discourse, results have been meager, at least for an understanding of the letter as a whole as opposed to specific subunits (e.g., 2:12-14). Similarly, discourse analysis cannot be said to have resulted in any substantial advance.6 In large measure the weakness of such approaches is that they attempt to impose on 1 John a type of structural analysis that relies on a linear or matiiematical pattern of logic and argument that the letter notoriously fails to exhibit. The old but apt description of 1 John as a spiral or as a musical piece repeatedly returning to the same theme with subtle variation invites more attention to precisely those movements and returns. I. A RHETORICAL READING OF 1 JOHN It has long been recognized that the Fourth Gospel builds and reinforces a thought world or symbolic universe, and that 1 John, not least in its maintenance of an uncompromising dualism, makes its own contribution to this processregardless of the precise relationship between the two writings. Apart from the probably insoluble question of genre,7 the challenge for the interpreter must be to analyze how what will here be called the rhetorical strategy of 1 John helps to make that tiiought world effective and compelling for those who read the letter. …
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May 1, 2009
D Moody Smith 
Open Access