Free Study Guide Included1 John: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
"God is Light, and in him is no darkness at all." The epistle that gave Quakerism its central metaphor. Walking in the Light is walking in love — and love is the ultimate test of whether spiritual experience is genuine.
- 5 chapters · ~30,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.4 hours
- Length19,784 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.4 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 1.4 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 1.1 hours to 1.9 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 19,784 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 19,784 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
1.1 hours and 1.9 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.4 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 57–79 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
First John gave Quakerism its central image. “God is Light, and in him is no darkness at all” — and therefore, “if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.” The Light is not merely metaphor in early Quaker writing; it is a description of experienced reality, the same reality that John 1:9 had identified as Christ himself, present in every human conscience. First John traces the implications of this: what it means to abide in the Light, what fellowship in the Light looks like, how love for the brother and sister is the test of whether one is walking in light or darkness.
The commentary explores all five chapters of First John with close attention to the language of light, love, and abiding that runs through the whole. It traces how early Friends — especially Isaac Penington, whose mystical sensibility was the most attuned to John’s Gospel and epistles — developed these images into a rich theology of spiritual experience and communal life. The letter’s warnings against the spirit of antichrist and its insistence on testing the spirits receive careful treatment: Quaker discernment practices draw directly on this epistle. The free Group Study Guide makes First John’s spiritual language accessible for contemporary reflection.
