An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 240: The Antichrist – more like a “Nigerian Prince” than Damien from The Omen (2 John 1)

2 John 1
The Antichrist – more like a “Nigerian Prince” than Damien from The Omen.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

2 John 1
“The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth; and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth”

There are now a short series of single-chapter books, which will be a nice breeze through the remaining new testament until Revelations.

This letter is written to an “elect lady” and in it John covers much the same ground as he did in 1 John – that only those who Christian properly are proper Christians. The ways of a proper Christian, according to John here, are that “that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another”, but also “this is love, that we walk after his commandments” and that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”.

Those who deny the last premise are “a deceiver and an antichrist” and if somebody that “abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God”. John warns the “elect lady” not to admit such people into her house. In other words, the “antichrists” are not some terrible demonic beast but merely preachers teaching a different doctrine (an incorrect one from John’s viewpoint), and this letter is like one of those letters you get from your bank warning you about phishing scams.

It’s not clear who the “elect lady” could be, there are no clues in the letter, but she’s evidently in a position to pass this information on to her “children”, who could be biological or spiritual. Either way, she’s evidently respected in the church and seems to go against Paul and Timothy’s injunctions about letting women speak or teach. Once again it makes those verses seem like a later addition, except that whoever did so really didn’t do a very good job of searching through for possible contradictions.

And that’s it for 2 John. It doesn’t say much more than he did in 1 John so I wonder at its inclusion, but it’s a bit more personal and so still quite interesting.

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