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2. As interpretative of the gospel truth, the epistle evinces a notable purpose to resolve its vital principles into plain terms and to propose many simple but searching tests of truth or falsity in life and faith. These tests, beginning with Hereby we know," or "perceive" (cf. ii, 3, 5; iii, 16, 19, 24; iv, 2, 6, 13), are a very characteristic feature. The keynote of the epistle is love. It is this writer alone, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," of all the New Testament writers, who says plainly that God is love, and who makes the sweeping deduction that he who loves abides in God and God in him (iv, 8, 16), — an assertion that it requires a daring thinker to make. The test of the genuineness of such love is our love for our brother whom we have seen rather than of God whom we have not seen (iv, 20); that is, the completed fellowship for the sake of which the epistle is written. On the indications and tests of this Christian love the author's language is very absolute and emphatic. As if it were the one "word" in which the whole literature of the Bible is concentrated, he commends love as the new commandment, comprising the whole duty of man (ii, 8).

The second and third epistles of John, both very short, are addressed to private persons. To "the elect lady and her children," who are addressed in the second The Other Epistles epistle, he gives his favorite exhortation, "that we love one another" (vs. 5), and warns against countenancing or receiving any deceiver or "antichrist" who walks not in the spirit of this fundamental virtue (vss. 7, 10). Gaius the beloved, who is addressed in the third epistle, is commended for receiving and aiding some itinerant Christian teachers, in contrast to a certain Diotrephes, apparently a domineering layman in the church, who had been morose and inhospitable toward such. Both of these epistles, though addressed to individuals, seem intended also for church counsels; and in both the writer calls himself "the elder."

CHAPTER XII

THE RESURGENCE OF PROPHECY

[Near the end of the first century]

ROPHECY was the most vital and spiritual element

PROPHECY

of the Old Testament literature. It was through the prophets that, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, God spoke "by divers portions and in divers manners to the fathers. We have seen how the literary prophecy took its rise and ran its course in Israel.1 Its era of about three centuries, from near the middle of the eighth to the middle of the fifth century B. C., was involved with that most momentous era of the people's history during which they suffered dissolution as a political state and reinstatement as a church; in which reinstatement the majority of the people were dispersed among the nations while their religious and educational capital remained at Jerusalem. In all this period before the dispersion the main object of prophetic activity, most clearly expressed in the Second Isaiah, was to commit the Jewish race to their ordained destiny as "the Servant of Jehovah," a conscience-bearing and missionary race. Afterward, however, prophecy, in this more specific sense, gradually subsided. The people became more interested in their past than in their future. The lack of prophetic vision, the dearth of the forward look, came to be deeply felt and deplored by the devout. "We see not our signs," mourned one of the psalmists; "there is no more any prophet; neither is there among us any that knoweth how long" (Psa. lxxiv, 9). The missionary zeal had given way to exclusiveness and 1 See Book I, Chapters IV-VI.

racial pride. The age of prophecy had been succeeded by an age of Mosaic legalism, and scribal interpretation, and religious prescription.

Inherited

Elements

But in all the old literary prophecies there was a larger strain of prediction than the immediate crisis or issue demanded. From the specific message with which Apocalyptic he was charged, which dealt with the troubled interests of his time, each prophet looked forward o an epoch of solution far beyond, to some aspect of a coming golden age, or new order of things, when God would bring judgment and deliverance, when a new spiritual covenant would be established, and when God's ultimate purpose in the world would be realized. We see touches of this peculiar strain of prophecy in Joel's picture of the "valley of decision" (Joel iii, 2, 14-17); in Isaiah and Micah's vision of "the mountain of the Lord's house" (Isa. ii, 2-4; Mic. iv, 1-3), and in the apocalyptic songs and chapters which accentuate the several stages of the Vision of Isaiah (Isa. xii; xxiv-xxvii; xxxv); in the vision of the king reigning in righteousness (Isa. xxxii, 1-8); in Jeremiah's era of a new covenant (Jer. xxxi, 31-34; xxxii, 40); in Zechariah's vision of the fate of Jerusalem (Zech. xiv, 1–8); in Ezekiel's vision of waters issuing from the restored sanctuary (Ezek. xlvii, 1–12); and in numerous other passages. The culmination of these is reached in the Second Isaiah's prediction of "new heavens and a new earth" (Isa. lxv, 17–25; lxvi, \ 22, 23). The prophecy of this type is by scholars called apocalyptic, from the Greek word apokalupsis, “a disclosure"; denoting a revelation of something before unknown to men and undiscoverable by mere human intuition.1 Many predictions relating to imminent issues in the national or world-movement of things might be like an intuitive statesmanship interpreting historical and spiritual forces; apocalyptic vision, however, could come only from the mind

1 Cf. above, pp. 513-515.

The

of God, revealing eternal purposes beyond the scope of political or religious history. This apocalyptic element furnishes in all stages of prophecy, as it were a background and far vista, giving prophecy an enduring value when its specific occasion is past and keeping the ultimate hope of Israel alive. While these primitive apocalyptic elements were stored, as it were, at the back of the people's mind as a prophecy yet unfulfilled, they were couched in too broad Quickened and general terms to have a grip on men's Imagination imagination. They were stated, but not pictured; besides, they needed some shock of sharp experience to precipitate them from solution. The apocalyptic visualization, as it appears, was introduced by the Book of Daniel (cir. 165 B.C.), which, written to revive the people's hopes at the time of the Maccabean crisis and persecution, purports to give certain symbolic visions vouchsafed to Daniel in the time of Nebuchadnezzar and his Medo-Persian successors. These visions relate to the coming kingdom of heaven, which was destined to subdue and survive the kingdoms of the earth. They speak also of "One like unto a son of man," to whom "was given dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed" (Dan. vii, 13, 14). To these visions are appended dates, reckoned in cryptic terms, for their fulfillment; which dates, ever since they were given, have roused no end of curiosity and conjecture. The exact nature of the issue, however, is left undefined. "And I heard," says the author, "but I understood not; then said I, 'O, my lord, what shall be the issue of these things?' And he said, 'Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end' (Dan. xii, 8, 9).

With its picturesque and curiosity-provoking symbols, the Book of Daniel liberated to a remarkable degree the

Jewish imagination; giving rise to a flowering of apocalyptic literature, in which was more fancy than sober prophecy. Up till near the destruction of Jerusalem A. D. 70 this species of literature flourished, furnishing a popular imaginative release from the austerities of the law and the potterings of the scribes. There were vivid descriptions of visits to the unseen world, of the doings of angels good and bad, of the spectacular day of judgment, of the all-conquering king, and the like. Out of it all came one useful result, however: a great quickening of the popular imagination and such a concrete expectation of the coming kingdom and its Messiah as previous prophecy had not awakened. It was this expectation, with its crude or fantastic accompaniments, which, as we have seen, Jesus had at his coming to meet and reduce to sanity and correct; while at the same time all that was sound and permanent in it might be retained.

A Prophet, and More

Such is the honorable distinction that Jesus gave to his herald, John the Baptist (Matt. xi, 9). The Christian era, which John came to announce, was rather one of fulfillment than of prophecy. Prophecy's long work was done; and God, who in so many ways and portions had spoken by the prophets, was now speaking by a Son (Heb. i, 1). John was more than a prophet, because he was the messenger of fulfillment.

To give his message, however, he paid little if any attention to the popular apocalyptic, using as he did merely the current terms which answered to the kindled expectation of his time. He harked back rather to the primitive austerities of prophecy imitating Elijah in manner, in whom prophetic methods were typical, and making use of the older ideas of the Second Isaiah and Malachi. On the basis of these he met the popular expectation so far as to announce, "The kingdom is at hand; . . . after me cometh One who is mightier than I" (cf. Matt. iii, 2, 11). Then, identifying Jesus as that Mightier One, he continued to demand the