1 John 1 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.
Time Period
Roughly AD 85 to 95, two generations after Jesus, when eyewitnesses of his life were nearly all gone
Location
Most likely Ephesus, a major port and commercial city on the west coast of Asia Minor in what is now Turkey, writing to a circle of house churches nearby
Audience
Christians in those churches, shaken after a group of members broke away and set up a rival version of the faith
Situation
The letter opens with a claim to firsthand physical contact with the one who was there from the beginning, heard, seen, and touched. It then sets out the message that God is light with no darkness in him, and insists that anyone claiming to be without sin is deceiving himself.
Key Background
The stress on hearing, seeing, and handling answers teachers who held that a purely spiritual divine being could not truly take on a physical body, an idea that spread through the eastern Mediterranean and became full-blown gnosticism in the following century. Those same teachers claimed a special knowledge that lifted them above ordinary moral rules, which is why the chapter pairs its talk of light with a blunt demand to admit sin rather than to claim graduation from it. Light and darkness as absolute moral opposites was familiar language in Jewish writing of the period, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, so the imagery would have landed as a hard either-or rather than as poetry.