thee”; “Oh my God! What a beautiful dress!”; and “the god of this age.” Even a simple phrase like “the love of God” is tricky: does it refer to human love for God or God’s love for us? In the case of 1 John, one’s rendering of this phrase is affected by, and will affect, one’s interpretation of the document as a whole. As we will see in more detail in chapter 6, a word or phrase has a range of possible meanings; context narrows that range. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the meaning