1 John 2:7

Beloved, no new commandment write I unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning: the old commandment is the word which ye heard.

No new commandment ... but an old ... The old commandment is here identified as "the word which ye heard," meaning the gospel of Christ; and this automatically gives the meaning of "which ye had from the beginning." The beginning in view here is the beginning of the gospel. Despite this, which it seems is obvious, one finds some strange views on what the old commandment is. The New Catholic Bible makes the old commandment to be "love promulgated in the Old Testament";[20] but since John's addresses were largely Gentile, it is not likely that the thing they had heard "from the beginning" was the Old Testament.