Who did not confess “Jesus Christ coming in flesh” and why?

I don’t want to make this an issue about trinitarianism; it is to my mind simply a matter of literary-historical perspective. Seriously. But what was the author of the Johannine letters—let’s call him John—getting at when he warned that “many deceivers went out into the world, those not confessing Jesus Christ coming in flesh” (2 Jn. 7*)?

He is concerned about the harmful influence of certain “false prophets” or secessionists who were once associated with the core Johannine fellowship: “They went out from us but they were not from us, for if they were from us, they would have remained always with us” (1 Jn. 2:19*; 4:1). On the face of it, it appears that these people denied the incarnation: the coming of Jesus in flesh, in that sense. The pre-existent divine Jesus only seemed to have become human—a heresy that became known as docetism. So, for example, Smalley:

The heterodoxy lamented in the present v involved to some extent a denial of the Incarnation…; and it therefore seems reasonable to suppose that the continuing disintegration of John’s circle… was brought about by the increasing dominance of secessionists with a docetically inclined estimate of the person of Jesus….1

I think this assumption betrays the misleading perspective of the modern interpreter. We take it for granted that the story about Jesus begins with the Gospels, which vividly present his ministry on the ground in Palestine, and becomes from Acts 1 onwards the account of the witness of the apostolic communities to the heavenly existence and future rule of the risen Lord.

The pre-existence of the exalted Christ

But I make the point in In the form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul that Jesus was proclaimed by Paul to Jews and gentiles in Asia Minor and around the Aegean as an invisible person in heaven, encountered in the Spirit.

Under such circumstances, any real question of pre-existence must have to do with his problematic Jewish backstory. So I argue that the first stanza of the encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 explains the shocking transition from charismatic wonder-worker, who appeared to the Greek mind as one “in the form of a god,” to the degraded victim of Roman crucifixion: Jesus had refused the opportunity to gain a God-equal rule over the nations of the Greek-Roman world. The available narratives make the supposition of divine pre-existence not merely superfluous but a hindrance, obscuring the dilemma that was at the heart of Jesus’ prophetic-messianic career.

So now I’m wondering whether the same twist of perspective arises with John’s contention about “Jesus Christ coming in flesh.”

• In the first letter, John begins by asserting the continuity of witness between the “beginning” and the apostolic community: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…” (1 Jn. 1:1). The “beginning” does not precede that hands on engagement with the person of Jesus in Palestine; it is that engagement, and it is important because of the “blood of Jesus,” who is the “propitiation for our sins” (1:7; 2:2).
• This fits with the argument about the word becoming flesh “in the beginning” at the time of Jesus’ baptism.
• When John says that the “fathers” in the community “know the one (who is) from the beginning” (1 Jn. 2:13, 14), he is asserting a knowledge of the Jesus who was seen and touched in Palestine—the “word of life” which became “incarnate,” let us say, in the ministry of Jesus and which now abides in them.
• “Antichrists” went out to sow confusion, but John say that the “children” to whom he writes “have the anointing from the Holy One, and you all have known” the truth about the Son who was “in the beginning” (1 Jn. 2:18-25). To confess the Father and the Son is then, it seems, to acknowledge the relationship that began with the baptism of the “Son of God” (Jn. 1:29-34).
• The spirit of the “antichrist” refuses to confess “Jesus Christ having come in flesh” (1 Jn. 4:2-3*). The “coming” is the coming of Jesus to his own people (Jn. 1:11). It was “in the flesh” in contrast to the present heavenly existence of the Son.
• Is this a reference to the incarnation: “In this the love of God was made manifest (ephanerōthē) among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…” (1 Jn. 4:9)—a sending from outside into the world? John is speaking as one of the disciples who witnessed Jesus in the flesh (“was made manifest among us”); they “have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as saviour of the world” (4:14). John the Baptist said: “for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed (phanerōthēi) to Israel” (Jn. 1:31). The sending in itself requires no transcendent origin: it is quite normal for God to send prophets and saviours to Israel; and “into the world” may only mean that the only Son was sent to face hostility and rejection. But that obviously needs more thought.
• Another way of expressing the true confession is to believe that “Jesus is the messiah… the Son of God” (1 Jn. 5:1, 5), which takes us back only as far as Jesus’ baptism and his identification as the one who would take away the sin of the world (Jn. 1:29-34).
• He is “the one having come through water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water only, but by the water and by the blood” (1 Jn. 5:6*). What marks out the coming of Jesus is not his birth; it is his baptism and his death. (Again, I make the point that there is no reference to the birth of Jesus in John’s Prologue; the narrative setting is Jesus’ baptism.) From John’s perspective—and, for that matter, from Paul’s—these events determine the scope of the necessary, earthly backstory to the proclamation about and experience of the Lord or Son of God in heaven. So he argues that the testimony of the Spirit through the apostolic community in John’s present agrees with the testimony of the baptism and the death: the earthly career of the one sent, in the first place, to Israel matters; it cannot be discounted.
• The spirit of the anti-Christ, then, is a spirit which does not confess that Jesus is Israel’s messiah, which severs the historical connection between the exalted Lord and the story of Israel.

On the other hand…

That has been a reading of John through a Pauline lens, as though the problem was to connect the invisible heavenly Lord with the visible and tangible, earthly, Jewish prophet-messiah. But there is another way of thinking about the matter.

At the beginning of the first letter, John insists that the proclamation concerned Jesus who previously lived and died in Palestine. He desires his readers to have “fellowship with us,” with the core Johannine community, and he then states that “our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn. 1:3). Does he mean to contrast the rather emphatic “our fellowship” (hē koinōnia… hē hēmetera) with the fellowship of a group that affirms the Father but does not affirm or confess or acknowledge the Son?

Similarly, in the second letter, he writes that the person who abides in “the teaching of the Christ”—the one baptised and acknowledged as the Son of God—“has both the Father and the Son” (2 Jn. 9). Is the implication again that the deceivers and false prophets, operating in the spirit of the anti-messiah, do not have the Son at all?

The seriousness of the matter is apparent from the remarks in the Gospel about the expulsion of those who confessed Jesus as the messiah from the synagogues (Jn. 9:22; 12:42).

The confession that Jesus Christ came to Israel would still contrast with his heavenly post-existence rather than with a hypothetical pre-existence. The emphasis on “in flesh” may still reflect the perspective of John and his followers that the heavenly Son of God, whom they proclaim, formerly existed as a Jewish man, who was baptised by John and who died on the cross.

What distinguished the deceivers, who went out, from John and those stayed was the fact that they did not confess that Jesus was the messiah who came in the flesh, it did not define them as a religious community. Their fellowship was only with the Father. Confession is a charismatic action, it is what you do in community, in the context of worship: “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 Jn. 4:2-3).

The deceivers have reverted, in effect, to the Judaism condemned so roundly in John’s Gospel. They are not docetists, they are denialists.

Just wondering for now….

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  Stephen S. Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John (1993), 327.