from reading some modern interpreters of the Johannine letters that the community was being violently ripped apart by the debates to which the author refers. In an oral culture, infused with rhetoric at every level, minor debates could produce major rhetorical responses that were often not indicative of the nature of the problem.… The point of rhetoric was to use every means possible to see that one’s own position, the true or good one, prevailed over its “bad” opposition. Even sciences and medicine