ious texts that John expected that
the resurrection would be limited to faithful Christians, just as
the more rigid of the Pharisees confined it to the righteous Jews.
"Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye
have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day."

37 See the able and impartial discussion of John's belief on this
subject contained in Lucke's Commentary on the First Epistle of
John, i. 18-28.

To force this figure into a literal meaning is a mistake; for in
the preceding chapter it is expressly said that "They that have
done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; they
that have done evil unto the resurrection of condemnation." Both
shall rise to be judged; but as we conceive the most probable
sense of the phrases the good shall be received to heaven, the bad
shall be remanded to the under world. "Has no life in him" of
course cannot mean is absolutely dead, annihilated, but means has
not faith and virtue, the elements of blessedness, the
qualifications for heaven. The particular figurative use of words
in these texts may be illustrated by parallel idioms from Philo,
who says, "Of the living some are dead; on the contrary, the dead
live. For those lost from the life of virtue are dead, though they
reach the extreme of old age; while the good, though they are
disjoined from the body, live immortally."38 Again he writes,
"Deathless life delivers the dying pious; but the dying impious
everlasting death seizes."39 And a great many passages plainly
show that one element of Philo's meaning, in such phrases as
these, is, that he believed that, upon their leaving the body, the
souls of the good would ascend to heaven, while the souls of the
bad would descend to Hades. These discriminated events he supposed
would follow death at once. His thorough Platonism had weaned him
from the Persian Pharisaic doctrine of a common intermediate state
detaining the dead below until the triumphant advent of a Redeemer
should usher in the great resurrection and final judgment.40

John declares salvation to be conditional. "The blood of Christ"
that is, his death and what followed "cleanses us from all sin, if
we walk in the light as he is in the light;" not otherwise. "He
that believeth not the Son shall not see eternal life, but the
wrath of God abideth on him." "If any man see his brother commit a
sin which is no