in a circle, while continually checking historical decisions against the literary assumptions and vice versa. What is offered below is one reconstruction of events, which depends on a number of literary assumptions and is only as good as they are. The following scenario proceeds on the assumption that there is a very close relationship between the Fourth Gospel and the three letters of John. If they are not all written by the same person, then the person(s) who wrote the letters had been deeply immersed
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