2 John 1:7

ὅτι. Some would make this conjunction introduce the reason for 2 John 1:8 : ‘Because many deceivers have appeared … look to yourselves’. But this is altogether unlike S. John’s simple manner; to say nothing of the very awkward parenthesis which is thus made of οὖτός ἐστιν … ὁ�. ‘For’ or ‘Because’ points backwards to 2 John 1:5-6, not forwards to 2 John 1:8. ‘I am recalling our obligations to mutual love and to obedience of the Divine command, because there are men with whom you and yours come in contact, whose teaching strikes at the root of these obligations’.

πλάνοι. This word reaches the meaning ‘deceivers’ in two ways. 1. ‘Making to wander, leading astray’. 2. ‘Vagabonds’, and hence ‘charlatans’ or ‘impostors’. The former notion is predominant here: these πολλοί are seductores (Vulgate). The word is rare in N.T. S. John uses it nowhere else; but not unfrequently has the cognate πλανᾶν (1 John 1:8; 1 John 2:26; 1 John 3:7, &c.).

ἐξῆλθαν. Are gone forth (see on 1 John 2:19). Here the English perfect idiomatically represents the Greek aorist, unless ἐξῆλθαν refers to a definite occasion, when these deceivers migrated from the communion to which they had belonged. This depends on the meaning of εἰς τὸν κόσμον. The κόσμος may mean either human society, or (in S. John’s usual sense) that which is external to the Church and anti-christian. See on 1 John 2:2. The meaning may be that, like the many antichrists in 1 John 2:18, they went out from the Church into the unchristian world. Possibly the same persons are meant in both Epistles. Irenaeus (A.D. 180) by a slip of memory quotes this passage as from the First Epistle (Haer. III. xvi. 8).

οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες. As R.V., even they that confess not: the many deceivers and those who confess not are the same group, and this is their character,—unbelief and denial of the truth. ‘Confess not’ = deny. Note the μή: ‘all who fail to confess, whoever they may be’; quicunque non profitentur. Winer, 606. In the rendering of ἐρχόμενον that of A.V., ‘that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’, is not quite accurate; nor does R.V., ‘that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh’, seem to be more than a partial correction. Rather, that confess not Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, or possibly, that confess not Jesus as Christ coming in the flesh. See on 1 John 4:2, where the Greek is similar, but with perfect instead of present participle. These deceivers denied not merely the fact of the Incarnation, but its possibility. In both passages A.V. and R.V. translate as if we had the infinitive mood instead of the participle. The difference is, that with the participle the denial is directed against the Person, ‘they deny Jesus’; with the infinitive it is directed against the fact, ‘they deny that He cometh’ or ‘has come’. See Winer, 435. Note that Christ is never said to come into the flesh; but either, as here and 1 John 4:2, to come in the flesh; or, to become flesh (John 1:14). To say that Christ came into the flesh would leave room for saying that the Divine Son was united with Jesus after He was born of Mary; which would be no true Incarnation.

οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ πλ. κ. ὁ�. This is the deceiver and the Antichrist: a good example of inadequate treatment of the Greek article is here found in A.V. (see on 1 John 1:2). Luther is more accurate; ‘Dieser ist der Verführer und der Widerchrist’. The transition from plural to singular (see on 2 John 1:6) may be explained in two ways: 1. The man who acts thus is the deceiver and the Antichrist; 2. These men collectively are the deceiver and the Antichrist. In either case the article means ‘him of whom you have heard’: ‘the deceiver’ in reference to his fellow men; ‘the Antichrist’ in reference to his Redeemer.

This completes the series of condemnatory names which S. John uses in speaking of these false teachers; liars (1 John 2:22), seducers (1 John 2:26), false prophets (1 John 4:1), deceivers (2 John 1:7), antichrists (1 John 2:18; 1 John 2:22; 1 John 4:3; 2 John 1:7). On the Antichrist of S. John see Appendix B.