An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 241: Gaius gets a performance appraisal (3 John 1)

3 John 1
Gaius gets a performance appraisal.

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:

3 John 1
“The elder unto the wellbeloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth.”

This short letter is from John to someone called Gaius, who is apparently a fairly new convert because John tells of how he was overjoyed that Gaius “walkest in the truth”. Gaius does faithfully what he does to brethren and strangers, whatever it is that he does, which John is vague about. He is, however, charitable and it would seem sets a good example to possible converts, at least that’s how I read “whom if thou bring forward on their journey after a godly sort, thou shalt do well”. “Bringing someone forward on their journey” sounds to me like either bringing them into the church, or increasing their understanding of the Christian doctrine (as Paul talk about “children before God”).

John compares Gaius to two other named people. Diotrephes is evidently some fellow Christian but a vain one (“who loveth to have the preeminence among them”) who is setting himself up in competition with John as a church leader, refusing to answer his letters and “prating against us with malicious words”; also turning others out of his church who would have anything to do with “the brethren”, but which I would guess John’s followers. Honestly. This religion is only a few years old and already people are exploiting it. What can you do eh?

By contrast “Demetrius hath good report of all men, and of the truth itself”. We don’t get to learn much more about Demetrius, but he can be trusted, apparently. John also gives what must be the most woolly and useless advice yet – “follow not that which is evil, but that which is good”. Well… yeah. But how do you know which is which? “He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God” is not much help either, that’s basically saying that someone who does good is good, and someone who does bad is bad. We still don’t know which things are “good” and “bad” except for the three basic principles given by John in his last letter to the “elect lady”. Which are also a bit vague, to be honest.

I forgot to mention from 2 John that John signs off, as he does here, by saying that he’s got more to say but will come in person rather than write.

And that’s another one down. I don’t think this one provides any profound insights of wisdom or nuggets of philosophy or theology, but it is an interesting little snippet of the internecine struggles of the early Christian movement.

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