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Jude--Contend for the Faith

When I was young, I had a tiny bit of experience with rock climbing on more than one occasion. And the very first occasion happened in Zermatt, Switzerland, the home of the Matterhorn. I was barely a teenager, and for some reason, my parents thought it would be a good idea to send their not-very-athletic-son out with an experienced mountain climbing guide. I guess my parents thought that I should be challenged to move a bit out of my comfort zone.   Well, this big mountain of a man, with long, black beard, took me out hiking to some location outside of the village of Zermatt, and he taught me the basics of rock climbing. We were scaling little, tiny rocks, mind you, not mountains. But at the end of the day, the guide said to me, in his broken English, “You come back next year, and I take you up the Matterhorn. Those rocks are the same as these. There’s just more of them.” Thankfully, we didn’t go back to Zermatt the next summer and I never had to see that scary mountain man again. The
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3 John--Truth & Love

  AUTHOR   The Third Letter of John begins, “The elder to Gaius the beloved, whom I love in truth.”   As with 2 John, the author of this letter identifies himself simply as “the elder”.   There is both internal evidence and external evidence that leads scholars to associate this letter with 1 John and 2 John as well as with the Gospel of John and Revelation. The internal evidence consists of a common language. As we saw in 1 John and 2 John, love and truth were dominant topics. So also, here in 3 John, those topics are introduced from the get-go.    Pastor David Jackman summarizes the external evidence for the authorship of this letter…   From the earliest times the letter has been attributed to John the apostle, but not without debate. The early evidence is sparse, though the Muratorian Canon, a fragmentary list of New Testament books known at Rome about AD 200, certainly includes the first two letters. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 175—c. 195), quotes from 2 John, but Eusebius (c. 26
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2 John--Abide

  AUTHOR   New Testament scholar, Raymond Brown, once wrote the following about this letter… “This work, which was known already in the mid-second century, began to be treated as canonical Scripture toward the end of the second century when it was accepted as a writing of John, son of Zebedee.”    However, 2 John does not claim to be written by John, the disciple of Jesus. Rather, the author simply calls himself “the Presbyter” which many English versions translate as “the elder”. As far as we know, this letter did not receive the title “The Second Letter of John” until the fourth century.   The word “presbyter” could simply mean an old man. People in the first century thought of old age as beginning at about 40. “Presbyter” was also an official office in the early church. From this Greek word we get our more modern word “Presbyterian” which refers to a type of church ruled by elders. However, the author of this letter is not just “an elder” of a local church. He writes with authority
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