When was 2 John written?

The similarity of the outer form (especially so at the beginning and end) would not only indicate the same author but also the same time of writing. As the contents presupposes the knowledge of 1 John they have probably been written a little later, that is after 90 AC.

The five books written by the apostle John were all published later than any other writings of Scripture, his gospel considered to be written about A.D. 85, his three epistles about A.D. 90 and Revelation about A.D. 95. His own age would likely be between 85 and 95 during the time of writing, and therefore these books show evidence of a dignity and maturity gained by long experience, yet with no marks of the infirmity of old age. John has been called “the apostle of love,” and his loving admiration of the person of the Son of God is specially evident in his gospel and epistles. However, God chose him to announce the awesome judgments of the Lord Jesus in this book of Revelation. This reminds us that genuine love is not weak and permissive, but faithful and true.

Let us think for a moment of John and the circumstances in which he was found. It is fairly clear from scripture that John was the last survivor of the Apostolic band. He was a young man as a disciple of Christ in Galilee; he was an old man in Patmos. He had seen many changes in the interval, and had suffered many vicissitudes since he first saw the "Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world."

Let us suppose that this vision was granted to John toward the end of the first century. Now think of some of the important events of the first century. Let us for simplicity's sake take it that in the year 30 our Lord was crucified; thirty years after that would be the year 60, when the apostle Paul came to Rome as a prisoner, and all the work of the Spirit of God of which we read in the Acts had then been accomplished. During that period the gospel had gone abroad in its fulness and power all over the known world, and people came into the church of God by myriads. Ten years later, in the year 70, Jerusalem, the city of the great King, the earthly centre of Israel's hopes, was destroyed, and was left a heap of smoking ruins by the Roman army. About the year 90, John, the old apostle, wrote those three tender letters that we still have, full of affection and truth, and applicable to the family of God everywhere and at all times.

About two years, it seems, after those apostles had finished their course, and just before the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, John wrote his epistles. Not only was the Church in ruins, but the holy city and the temple were about to be razed to the ground. How fitting it was that the Spirit of God should move the last surviving apostle to present more saliently than ever before the glories of the incarnate Son, now that "that which was from the beginning" had become so much more evidently the only unchanging resource for the saints! After bestowing upon the Church of God these precious scriptures, the Spirit of God kept silence as to revelation for a space of about thirty years, and then during his banishment in Patmos "the prisoner of the Lord" was inspired to give that great prophecy which is termed "the revelation of Jesus Christ," embracing the history of the professing Church and its judgment - the judgment of Jew and Gentile, the kingdom and glory of Christ and His bride, and, finally, the eternal state. John must have been now over ninety years of age, and his course well-nigh finished. Accordingly, rapidly following the Revelation, the Spirit of God moved him to write the gospel which bears his name, in which Scripture the written word of God was completed. In his gospel John gives us Christ as the eternal Son in the glory of His person, and what He was in His humiliation; in his epistles what He was and is, and in Revelation what He was, is, and will be. Even as to the earth He is seen in this threefold way. (Chap. 1:5.) He was "the faithful witness" in it; He is "the first begotten of the dead" out of it, and He will be "Prince of the kings of the earth" as set over it. But returning to his gospel, we find the Father and the promise of the Father - the Holy Ghost, revealed in a supremely blessed way, the top-stone of divine revelation. May we not say that the gospel of John is the crowning revelation given of God to the Church? and the crown of this crowning revelation is that of which John pre-eminently speaks - the Holy Ghost as the Comforter.

First Peter was probably written before Paul's second imprisonment. Second Peter was certainly written afterwards, and all of Paul's letters were already in circulation when this epistle was penned. Note Peter's own words: "And account that the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction" (2 Pet. 3: 15, 16). It is impossible to understand these verses excepting in the light of the fact that all the Epistles of Paul were already in circulation. Does Peter then tell us that a new dispensation had come in, and that the middle wall between Jew and Gentile having now for the first time been broken down and the one Body formed, the believers to whom he writes, who were of Jewish extraction, are to recognize this new revelation? Not at all. Peter has never heard of any such thing. He puts Paul's writings on the same plane as the other Scriptures, but warns against the danger of misunderstanding, and so wresting them. Long years after all the other apostles had gone home to heaven, we find the aged John still preserved in life and caring for the churches of God. According to apparently reliable Church History, he made his home in Ephesus, and moved about in old age among the other churches mentioned in the first three chapters of the Book of the Revelation, those churches which the Bullingerites declare never existed in the past but are still to arise as Jewish Assemblies in the Great Tribulation! Could anything be much more grotesque? John's Epistles were written, according to the very best authority we have, some time in the last decade of the first century of the Christian era. Weigh this well. Paul had been in heaven for nearly thirty years. John was an inspired apostle, and surely would know, if any one did, of the new revelation and its importance. But we search his letters in vain for the least reference to anything of the kind. In fact, we find the very opposite. False teaching had come in, and he writes to garrison the hearts of the saints against it. In order to do this, he refers them back to that which was from the beginning, namely, to the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and His apostles, as a careful reading of his first Epistle makes abundantly clear. There is not the slightest basis for the thought that a fuller unfolding of truth had been vouchsafed to Paul and others about thirty years after Christ's ascension. It is the message that they had heard from the beginning which he again commends to them. Let us imagine the late Dr. Bullinger, or some of his lesser satellites, living, not in the twentieth century, but in the closing days of the first century of the Christian era. Filled with their ideas of a new revelation given to Paul in prison, can you by any stretch of the imagination think of them writing epistles or treatises in which no reference whatever is made to the supposedly new doctrines? The fact of the matter is that these men today can scarcely open their mouths without speaking of these things. No matter what text they begin to expound, they almost invariably wind up with something about their system of rightly dividing the Word of Truth, and the importance of making the fine distinctions which they imagine they see in the Word. Yet inspired men like Peter and John, and without particularly going into it, we may add Jude, can expound and apply the Truth of God in the fullest possible way without any reference to anything of the kind. What is the only legitimate conclusion? It is that this whole ultra-dispensational system is an idle dream unsupported by the testimony of the inspired writings. Error is never consistent. It always over-emphasizes some point generally unimportant and fails to recognize other things of great importance. Heresy is simply a school of opinion in which something is particularly pressed out of proportion to its logical place. Who would dare to say that this system we have been attempting to refute is not therefore heretical? Mark, I do not mean to class it with what Peter calls "damnable heresies," but it is certainly schismatic, and its votaries constitute a special school of opinion within the professed Church of God , a school that attaches great importance to something which after all is not evident to the vast majority of devoted and godly believers. That the effect of this can only be division and harmful, is not only self-evident, but has been abundantly manifest in many places. The Holy Spirit says, "A man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself" (Titus 3: 10, 11).

Dr. Steele can speak, no doubt, of many counter-balancing things, and the wide evangelization going on may make those hopeful who can forget the centuries that are past. Scripture, for those who are able to read, declares the end from the beginning, and a Laodicea to follow the revivals of Philadelphia. But in all this it may be said, we judge from our own stand-points, and we judge very differently. Be it so, and let us turn back, not forward, and look at incontestable facts as to the primitive Church itself. We shall gain in exactness here by taking the epistles chronologically, although they embrace but a history — apart from those of the apostle John, — of about fifteen years (A.D. 54-68.) Small time, it will be thought, for declension. The Revelation epistles are considered to come twenty-eight years after this (A.D. 95-96.) John's own epistles may come a short time before this. Of Jude's we have no date.

But the worst evils pressed now on all sides. Satan, not content with corrupting, was now denying the truth by those who once professed it. Hence the urgent call to assert it plainly and act faithfully more than ever. "Because many misleaders went forth" (not exactly "entered," as in the Rec. Text and the A.V.) "into the world." They had once been in the church, and they went forth to pursue their unhallowed work of defying God's word and denying the Son. "Entered the world" in no way expresses the fact, nor has it any just sense. They left the Christian confessors when duped by Satan to deny the truth of Christ. They bear the awful character of misleaders "that confess not Jesus Christ coming in flesh." "This is the misleader and the antichrist." In the Epistle of Jude the deadly evil was from such being within, though they set themselves up apart there; but the Epistles of John contemplate a later day, "a last hour," when they went out to resist as open antagonists. One that enters the church of God, and takes his part for a while in it as a Christian, goes out a great deal worse than when he, however bad, came in. He now hates the truth, and those who cleave to it. It becomes his active business to mislead the saints, defame the truth, and deny Christ.

It ought to strike any careful reader of Scripture as remarkable, that we have an apostolic epistle avowedly addressed to a lady and her children. Considering the reserve of the apostles and the unusual character of such an address, surely we ought to inquire why the Holy Spirit here departs from His ordinary way, and the more so as the first Epistle of John is so expressly general and large; for it is addressed, if to any, to the whole family of God. It has no local association, nothing personal in the usual sense of what is individual, that is to say, belonging to specified persons. 1 John is so open as to take in every member of God's family wherever they may be, more so than any other save perhaps the Epistle of Jude. Yet the same John, and it would seem at a subsequent time, was led by the Holy Spirit to address one individual, and this not a man but a woman and her children too. Later still he writes to a man in his Third Epistle, and we may readily see the propriety both of this and of the topic there handled for his good and ours. His name is given, but in the Second Epistle before us the lady is addressed as such without indicating her name, wherein we may perceive a delicate suitableness. Although no doubt the lady's need was met, nevertheless she was spared needless pain and publicity, whilst an Epistle inspired and of the utmost value was meant for saints then and at all times.

In the course of the Epistles, the Apostle warns us against antichrist and false prophets, and speaks of the time in which he wrote as being characteristically the “last hour”. We may thus conclude that the Epistles were probably the latest writings of the New Testament, and that, when the Apostle wrote, the ruin of the Church in responsibility had already commenced.

The epistle of Jude, coming apparently shortly after this, carries it further. Here the men of the second epistle of Peter are already crept into the Christian ranks, and their course is traced to full apostasy, and judgment at the coming of the Lord. John's epistles come a good while later. There are now many antichrists, by which we know it is the last time. He marks them out for rejection.