1:14-18 “The Word Became Flesh”

1:14-18 “The Word Became Flesh”

1:1-18

The Prologue

The first chapter of John’s Gospel falls into two parts: vss. 1-18 and vss. 19-51. The first part, the prologue, forms the introduction to the entire Gospel. Vs. 19 functions as a transition from the prologue to the gospel story.

The overall intent of the prologue is clear: to describe the background against which Jesus’ historical self-disclosure must be understood. One can speak of the prologue as a splendidly constructed a priori introduction to the story, which is the gospel concerning Jesus of Nazareth. From the very start the person of Jesus and the significance of his work are placed in the context of the Word, which was in the beginning with God and to which all things that have been made owe their existence. It is the Word that in Jesus Christ came into the world, became flesh in him, dwelled among people, and was “beheld” in all its glory by those who saw him.

In the story that follows, certainly, the Word is no longer referred to in that separate sense, for the story speaks of the historical person of Jesus Christ, with whom the Word has been identified. But the entire story is full of the attributes that are ascribed to the Word in the prologue. For example, the story speaks of Jesus as “the Son” to whom the Father has granted to have “life in himself” (5:21, 24, 26; 6:51, 54, 57; cf. 1:4, 14, 18), who revealed his “glory” in the presence of his disciples (2:11; 17:22; cf. 1:14), who came into the world to be “the light of the world” (3:19; 8:12; 12:46, etc.; cf. 1:4, 5, 9), the light that shone in “the darkness” (12:35; 8:12) though the darkness did not receive it (3:19, 20; cf. 1:5, 10), who alone, as the one who was “with the Father,” “has seen the Father” (6:46; cf. 1:1, 18), and who could speak of the glory he had with God before the world was made (17:5, 24; cf. 1:18).¹ Some interpreters have even believed that the structures of the prologue and of the gospel story are demonstrably parallel: 1:3 = 1:35–4:42 (Christ as re-creator), 1:4 = 4:43–6:71 (Christ as the life of the world), and 1:4ff. = 7:1–9:41 (Christ as the light of the world).² Although this division of 1:35 through ch. 9, taken as a whole, has some support in the key words of the prologue (1:1-4), it is too artificial to serve as a principle of division for the material in these chapters. But this is not to deny that the prologue and the gospel story form an intrinsic unity and have been “attuned” to each other. The story in several ways presupposes the prologue; in fact, in the elevated pronouncements Jesus makes concerning himself the story can hardly be understood apart from the thrust of the prologue; at least it would not have the context that the prologue gives to it. And, conversely, what is said in the prologue about the Word cannot be separated from the story’s testimony concerning the historic self-disclosure of Jesus as the Christ as if it were simply free-standing. For the glory of the Word as that of the only begotten of the Father is “beheld” because the Word became flesh: The only Son who is in the bosom of the Father has made him known to us (1:18).³

For that reason the church has for a long time interpreted the prologue as an original and integral part of the Gospel. More recent research, however, has more or less radically backed away from that view. On the basis of the particular form of the prologue and the use of Logos (“Word”) as a name, which we see only here in the Gospel, the distinctive character of the prologue has come to be strongly emphasized. Nowadays it is widely viewed as a separate hymn to the Logos. Some believe the Evangelist himself composed this hymn and afterwards inserted it as a preface to his Gospel,⁴ but by far the majority of scholars who regard it as such a hymn see it as an existing church hymn that the Evangelist employed as the introduction to his Gospel.⁵

As indicated, scholars base this opinion on the distinct artistic form of certain parts of the prologue, in particular the progressive parallelism visible most clearly in vss. 1-5, with each line containing the key term of the next line, forming a stairstep pattern: a-b, b-c, and so on.⁶ This gives to the prologue a certain regularity of diction that to some scholars suggests a poetic doxology devoted to the Logos, a hymn like those in Ep. 5:16 and Col. 3:16, with examples also in Ph. 2:6-11; Col. 1:15-20; and 1 Tm. 3:16.

Within this understanding of the prologue as a preexisting Logos hymn one does, of course, have to face the complication—no small one at that!—that the poetic form that emerges in vss. 1-5 (with the exception of vs. 2) is not continued. In vss. 6-8 and 15 we have prose statements about John the Baptist. In vss. 9-14 the poetic-hymnic style is resumed, but with increasing irregularities in the rhythm and in the length of the parallel parts (vss. 12c, 13). Also, as the prologue advances it contains an increasing number of elements and statements that in content no longer bear the hymnlike stamp of the beginning but increasingly change from a poetic to a polemic or kerygmatic mode of discourse. So, for example, vss. 16-18, which read more like added explanations than like parts of the hymn itself.

On the basis of all this scholars therefore assume that the original hymn was adapted by the Evangelist (or by a later redactor) by means of modifications, interruptions, and interpretive additions, in line with his intended purpose, that is, so that the hymn could function as an overture to his Gospel. But there are hardly two advocates of this general hypothesis who agree on what material is from the original hymn and what has to be attributed to the Evangelist.⁷ Some are generous in their identification of material deriving from the original hymn, but others are inclined to attribute much more to the Evangelist. A consensus exists only with regard to vss. 1, 3, 4, 10, and 11, which are regarded as being clearly from the hymn.

But another matter makes things even more complicated. The exegete must continually ask not only where he or she is dealing with the hymn and where with the Evangelist, but also whether the Evangelist in his use of the “hymn” has left the original intent intact or in adapting it to his own purpose has given it another meaning. The clearest example of this is what happens to the hymn if one considers the prose material in vss. 6-8 an insertion or interruption from the Evangelist. It is clear, precisely because of these verses, which introduce John into the Gospel, that all that follows in vss. 9ff. (and perhaps even earlier, vs. 5) is immediately related by the Evangelist to the coming and the work of Jesus. John was the witness of the light that Jesus was and brought.

But if one disregards, for the purposes of the hymn, vss. 6-8 as an insertion, the person of Jesus Christ does not seem to appear on the scene till much later, namely when the incarnation of the Logos is mentioned in vs. 14. The preceding statements then seem—in the hymn—to refer to the Logos asarkos, that is, to his preexistence with God (vss. 1-4), to his “asarkic” penetration of the world in general and Israel in particular (vss. 5, 9-13), and then to arrive in vs. 14 at the final phase, the incarnate existence of the Word. The result is that then the section as a whole gets an entirely different structure and meaning. Much more than is the case in the prologue as it stands, the hymn’s description of the Logos is thus central as a priori information, of which the incarnation is then the conclusion and climax.

But in the prologue, as is clear from vss. 6ff., everything is christological from the start, a circumstance that of course will be reflected in our exegesis of vss. 1-5. To express this in somewhat polarizing fashion: In the first instance Jesus Christ appears under the aspect of the Logos, and in the second the Logos under that of Jesus Christ.⁸

Some interpreters are so convinced of the precedence of the “original” hymn over the “secondary” prologue that they leave vss. 6-8 out of consideration in their exegesis as an inappropriate and disturbing late addition.⁹ Others, like Bultmann, though they agree with this as far as the original hymn is concerned, nevertheless insist that the turn that the Evangelist gives to the sense of the hymn in vss. 6-8 must be examined on its own merits.¹⁰ It cannot be denied, however, that in this manner the exegesis of Scripture is forced to labor under a heavy encumbrance. It has to assign to certain passages a meaning that it knows is alien, if not outright opposed, to their original intent.¹¹

Although the hypothesis of the Logos hymn is advocated by many authoritative commentators¹² and is sometimes presented as a kind of exegetical dogma,¹³ it is not surprising that others have resisted it. If this hypothesis can be maintained only if one contents oneself with a fragmented and vaguely contoured picture of this hypothetical hymn and is prepared to involve oneself in a maze of adaptations and interpretations of this hymn, then the question arises whether this hypothesis does not sink under its own weight. For a long time now, and seemingly in increasing measure, forceful arguments have been advanced that answer that question in the affirmative and that maintain the original unity of the prologue, though on very divergent grounds and in a variety of ways.¹⁴

First, in 1951 (and it continues to be of interest today) Ruckstuhl brought a stylistic argument against the views of Bultmann and others that 1:1-18 does not constitute an original Johannine unit.¹⁵ If one nevertheless, like Schnackenburg, insists on maintaining the hypothesis of an antecedent Logos hymn (still recognizing the presence of these stylistic criteria also in the prologue), one will be forced to attribute ever more material to the Evangelist and will be less and less able to distinguish it from the peculiar features of the hypothetical hymn.¹⁶

Second, it has been pointed out from another direction that the inference of the existence of the hymn from the poetic character of the prologue passes too lightly over the criteria for such a poetic unit. In any case, the pertinent parts of the prologue do not stand up to evaluation in light of the precise rhythmic and metrical criteria of the Greek verse form:¹⁷ The construction, for all the parallelism, is too diverse and free. If one thinks in terms of a more Semitic verse form and hymnic construction, in which meter does not play the same role as in the Greek forms, the literary unity of the prologue presents fewer problems because then there is more room for divergent forms. Of course, then the question arises whether the hypothesis of an antecedent hymn can stand.

Old Testament scholar H. Gese believes, for example, that in its form the prologue bears not a Greek but a Hebrew character rooted in the Old Testament. He has even translated it into Hebrew and has examined the literary structure of its parts with the aid of Hebraic stylistic criteria. His conclusion is that the original Logos hymn—which he also presupposes—was incorporated unchanged, without additions, into the prologue. He also finds that the freer style of vss. 15ff. can be explained very well from the perspective of the whole composition, thus viewed. Of vss. 6-8, 15 (about the Baptist) he states that while in content they seem to be clearly secondary, literarily they nevertheless fit completely into the framework of the original composition and are certainly not the product of a redaction alien to the original hymn. He says, finally, that the style of the hymn and that of the Gospel are quite congruent, so that the typically Johannine features in the prologue need not be regarded as secondary additions to the hymn.¹⁸

That being the case, one wonders how necessary it is to assume the existence of an antecedent Logos hymn. One certainly need not do so on form-critical grounds. If the boundaries between poetry and prose (as in vss. 6-8, 15) are fluid in the prologue¹⁹ and if the transition between the hymnic beginning of the prologue and the later more kerygmatic or didactic pronouncements is by no means intrusive, then another conclusion seems much more obvious: In the prologue we are dealing not with a hymn adapted by the Evangelist but with a unit independently composed by him. In this connection he did not have before him a certain poetic model; rather, it was the content of what he intended to say to introduce his Gospel that was decisive, both for his composition as a whole and for the freedom of its poetic form.

This is not to deny either the special character of the prologue, particularly of its beginning, or that the remainder of the Gospel fails to reach the high level of harmonious form and poetic expression evident in some parts of the prologue. But from all this one can by no means conclude that the prologue must have its roots or setting in another religious context than the rest of the Gospel. Not only, as we have seen, do several central concepts and motifs of the prologue keep coming back in the Gospel, but in the sublime simplicity of language and expression that marks the entire Gospel one recognizes the hand of the author of the prologue. Some even believe that in the construction of the later discourses they can detect a structural similarity to that of the prologue.²⁰

But even if this last point is farfetched, it can hardly be considered surprising that the Evangelist, when in order to explain the glory of the historical Jesus he refers back in a truly splendid manner to the Word that was in the beginning, he also knows how to raise his characteristic style to a lofty poetic level that does not recur in those forms later in his Gospel. The prologue is an introduction to the history of Jesus Christ, and it should not be surprising that its purpose is a factor in determining its line of thought and form and thus serves as the natural explanation for the fluid boundaries between what have been distinguished as “poetic” and “prosaic,” “hymnic” and “kerygmatic.”

For that reason the criteria for the form of a hypothetical hymn—which is said to have had a totally different function and origin than that of an overture to a gospel story—can by definition not serve as standards by which to judge what is original and appropriate in the prologue and what is secondary and disruptive. Admittedly, by making that assertion we have not proven the unity of the prologue. As we look at the prologue in detail, we will have to examine more closely the objections raised against its unity (esp. with reference to vss. 6-8 and 15). But we have cleared the way for an examination of the unity and structure of the prologue on their own merits, that is, in the form in which it lies before us, without making it dependent on a Logos hymn that was supposedly distinct from the prologue in origin, genre, and function.

The immediate gain of this approach is that the structure of the prologue suggests itself naturally. As the introduction to and background of the portrayal of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God (cf. 20:31), the prologue speaks successively of:

1:1-5

“The Word in the Beginning”

1, 2 The words “In the beginning,” with which the prologue begin, also form the beginning of the book of Genesis and hence of the entire Torah. From this earlier occurrence they derive a solemn, perhaps even sacred, sound. Furthermore, the words that follow in John, the pronouncements concerning the Word, echo what in Genesis 1 constitutes the foundation of God’s revelation in the Old Testament and of Israelite religion: God’s creation of heaven and earth. All that now follows in the Gospel has to be understood from the perspective of that “beginning”: It arises from that beginning, and that beginning is its deepest and most essential Sitz im Leben.

Some interpreters even believe that the opening lines of the prologue (vss. 1-5) can be explicated totally in light of Gn. 1:1ff. P. Borgen in particular²¹ has argued that the prologue—in total divergence from the way the hymn hypothesis pictures it—forms an inner and independent unity that in its totality can be characterized as an “exposition” of Gn. 1:1ff. “Thus Jn 1:1-5 is the basic exposition of Gn 1:1-5, while Jn 1:6ff. elaborates upon terms and phrases from Jn 1:1-5.” Borgen bases this view not only on the opening words of John 1 and Genesis 1 but also on the central terms “light” and “darkness” in Jn. 1:4, 5 (cf. Gn. 1:2-5). He also claims that the content of vs. 3 in the prologue is nothing other than a “midrashic” paraphrase of Gn. 1:1: God created “heaven and earth” (cf. vs. 10). Finally, the term “the Word” is probably, says Borgen, an interpretation of and substitution for the repeated “and God said” in Genesis 1, as in vs. 3 this divine speech hypostatizes itself into light (“and God said … and there was”), an identification present also in Jn. 1:10, where the “light” replaces the “Word.” There is support in Jewish exegesis, says Borgen, for the existence of such an identification, namely in Philo, who in his interpretation of Gn. 1:1-3 “moves from the uttered word of God to the concept of Logos in an absolute sense,” just as he sometimes attributes to the Logos quite personal features, similarly derived from the creation story, as “God’s firstborn,” “the beginning,” “the Logos.”²² This interpretation not only has the merit that it views the prologue as an independent unit, unmixed with a Logos hymn derived from some other source, but also that it shows that the relationship between the prologue and Gn. 1:1ff. not only consists in the first words but continues verbally and materially with the terms “light” “darkness,” and “life.”

But it is another matter whether one can characterize the prologue (especially its beginning) as an “exposition” or midrash of Gn. 1:1-5. The purpose of Jn. 1:1-5 is not to provide a further exposition of Genesis 1 with an eye to the coming and work of Christ, by way of a “christological doctrine of creation,” but rather the reverse: to give to the Christ-event the fundamental “setting” in which alone it can be understood. Therefore, John 1 does not, like Genesis 1, begin with the creation that came into being by the Word, nor does the hypostatization of the Word originate there (as, e.g., in Mt. 4:4), since before creation is even mentioned it is already said that the Word was with God and was God. In that sense one can say that the words “in the beginning” in John 1 have a broader meaning than they do in Genesis 1 and that they refer to something behind Genesis, so to speak. They refer to the Word and to the Word’s existence with God “before the world was made” (cf. 17:5; 1 Jn. 1:2; 2:13) as a being distinct from God. Nor is the reference, as elsewhere, to a poetic personification or hypostatization of the mighty speech of God (cf. Pss. 33:6; 107:20; Is. 40:8; 55:11) but to a unique existence of the Word with God, an existence that is not coextensive with God’s actual speech.

Of the character of this relationship to God no further details are given.²³ The focus is entirely on the antecedent existence of the Word, that is, that it existed before all that is created, and on the Word’s participation in the divine. This latter point is made in no uncertain terms by the emphatic positioning of the predicate noun: “And God was the Word.” What we have here is not an exchange of subject, as if it were now being said of him who is called God in vs. 1b that he was the Word. What is at stake is the distinction of the subject, and hence the Word’s own participation in the divine life, which is why the idea of a subordination of the Word or a “divinity” as a qualification in the sense of an attribute abstracted from God is excluded.

2 It is this fundamentally dual content of the preceding sentence that is repeated with great emphasis in vs. 2: “He was in the beginning with God”—he of whom it has just been said that he was God—he, no one else and no one less. It is stated so emphatically because “he” is also the great subject of all that follows and hence from the very start determines the Evangelist’s discourse: the Word who has become flesh and dwelled among us. The thrice-repeated “he was” (vss. 1, 2) points in the same direction. Not, of course, that the content of these pronouncements about “the Word” is thus restricted to the past as something that once “was” and is no longer so. But from the viewpoint of the speaker (the Evangelist), that which was from the beginning is thus related to that which continued in the coming and the work of Jesus Christ in time and still continues, and is placed in the light in which alone it can be understood in its true nature.

This also implies, meanwhile, that the “in the beginning” of Jn. 1:1ff. transcends by far that of Gn. 1:1ff. and cannot be explained on the basis of Genesis 1. For between Genesis 1 and John 1 lies the Christ-event, and therein lies the “plus” (if one may call it that) of John over Genesis. Though the “score” of the prologue may be that of Genesis 1, the content is that of the gospel. Only the glory of the incarnate Word can enable us to understand the full thrust of God’s speech in the beginning and can teach us to distinguish between God and the Word, between the Father and the Son (1:18).

For that reason one can say that the pronouncements concerning the Word “in the beginning” and those concerning the incarnation of the Word mutually condition and explicate each other. On the one hand, this referring back of the glory of God that appeared in the human existence of Jesus to that which was in the beginning makes it clear that the gospel in no way exceeds the boundaries of the monotheistic revelation of God of which Genesis 1 is the foundation. It has been said that one cannot understand from the Old Testament the fact that the prologue does not speak of “the Word of God” but refers, absolutely, to “the Word,” and therefore that the proper name or title “the Word” is presupposed here, that is, as a name familiar from and borrowed from another source.²⁴ But that is to fail to do justice to the strong rootedness of the prologue in Genesis 1. This backward look to Genesis 1 is proof that the Evangelist did not wish to subsume the glory of Christ under some other heading and explain it in that other way. Instead, he sought to identify the presence of God in the advent and work of Jesus of Nazareth, on the basis of the Old Testament, as the presence of that God who from “the beginning” showed himself to be, not a self-sufficient, immutable, and silent God, but the God who “extended” himself and spoke: “Let there be light in the darkness.” Of that beginning the “in the beginning” of the prologue is the continuation, and in that “beginning” it also has its most fundamental basis.

On the other hand, it is no less true that it is only on the basis of the incarnation of the Word and the revelation of the glory of the only begotten of the Father (vss. 14, 18) that the Evangelist can speak of the Word in the beginning as in fact he does in vss. 1ff., namely as the Word in his distinct mode of being.²⁵ It is the “seeing” of the glory of the Word in the flesh, the self-disclosure of Jesus in his words and works and in his utterly unique relationship of oneness with the Father, that enables the Evangelist to speak of Jesus as he does—not only of “that which” (1 Jn. 1:1) but also of “he who” was from the beginning. But that correlation between vss. 1-2 and vs. 14 also shows that there was no other way to speak about the Word of the beginning than with a view to the incarnation—to that which he was for and in the world. There is here no speculation about the Word that would betray the presence of an already existing Logos theology. All that is said about the Word as such is that it was in the beginning, that it was with God, and that it was God. It is hardly conceivable that a deeper issue could have been expressed with greater simplicity and in fewer words.

There could be no greater sobriety or more rigorous regard for the purpose that the Evangelist set himself in this reference to the beginning than he practices in the splendid and lapidary statement in vs. 2, a statement that serves no other end than to reinforce the preceding statement. The Evangelist cannot say a single word about either the concept of the Word or the glory of the Word, which was “before the world was made” (17:5; cf. 17:24), apart from the incarnation. The light that shines from “the beginning” and bathes the entire gospel in the radiance of the divine glory does not come in from a “side window” but teaches us to understand the end in terms of the beginning, just as the beginning can only be understood in terms of the end. “No one has ever seen God. The only begotten Son, who was in the Father’s bosom, has made him known.” It is on the basis of this correlation that the splendid opening utterances of the prologue become intelligible in their redemptive-historical place and meaning—in the light of which also the rest of the prologue and the gospel story that follows should be understood and interpreted.

The History of Religions Approach

In contrast to the above, some exegetes have, in very different ways, looked for the background of the prologue in broad layers of Hellenistic syncretism. In this connection the “history of religions method” plays an important role. Within this method an effort is made to determine the “the locus of this hymn in the history of religions” as a “new task” confronting modern research.²⁶ It appears that Genesis 1, as also (according to the majority of the proponents of this method) the entire Old Testament, fails to provide an adequate explanation of this “locus,” since personifying the speech of God (Gn. 1:3, 6f.) into a “person standing alongside God” (as with the Logos of Jn. 1:1) remained an alien idea for Jews.²⁷ Therefore, one who follows this method will have to look elsewhere in the history of religions for the background of this “hypostasis.”²⁸

There is all the more reason for this because both in Greek philosophical literature and in the literature of later Hellenistic syncretism the figure of a Logos as a metaphysical entity makes its appearance in a variety of ways. In philosophical literature (e.g., in Stoic writings) the Logos plays a large role as the essence of the divine world order and the principle that creates the world. Around the beginning of the first century Philo of Alexandria in particular, the most representative figure of Hellenistic Judaism, used the Logos concept to a great extent in his religious-philosophical writings. He fused various Old Testament influences, Judaism, and the popular Greek philosophy of his day, which incorporated both Stoic and Platonic elements. The Logos concept also functions in his work, particularly in his creation theology, as a divinely created intermediate being between God and the world, as a mediating principle in the creation of the world, and as the source of the meaning of the world and of humanity. Similar concepts occur in the equally syncretistic Hermetic literature, which was written in Greek in Egypt.²⁹

It is against the background of such syncretistic religiosity that the prologue of the Fourth Gospel is to be understood, we are told. The author is said to have addressed himself not so much to Christians who needed a deeper theology as to non-Christians who in their desire to gain access to eternal life were said to be prepared to follow the Christian way if it were presented in terms intelligible to them and related to their own religious interests. Hence the beginning of the prologue. “It is clear that a reader who knew nothing at all about Christianity or its Founder could read that exordium intelligently, provided that the term ‘logos,’ and the idea of a ‘man sent from God,’ meant something to him. But these are ideas that are in no way distinctive of Christianity.”³⁰

It is certainly true that, with the advance in the comparative study of the pagan, Jewish, and Christian literature of the Hellenistic period, including the more recently discovered writings of the Qumran community and of Nag Hammadi, scholars have increasingly encountered commonality in the usage of religious language, speculative concepts, nomenclature, and the like. Particularly important for our purpose is the insight that the boundaries that existed in this respect between certain movements in later Judaism and syncretistic Hellenistic religiosity were much more fluid than scholars often thought. That there was reciprocal influence and that in this process Judaism was not only the receiving, but no less the contributing, party has been demonstrated in all sorts of ways.³¹

But what comes through no less clearly as the research advances is that precisely because of the commonality of similar usage one has to be extremely cautious before assuming direct connections of dependence and mutual influence. And this applies specifically to the Fourth Gospel, which, when it refers in the prologue to the Logos, the Son, the only begotten, though it certainly does not employ exclusively biblical terminology, is nevertheless far removed in content from the abstract idea of the Logos that pagan and syncretistic philosophy postulated as it considered the origin of the world and its (Logos-mediated) relationship to God. For how could such an idea, even though it is at times personified, be the background for the concrete person and work of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, as he is depicted in the Fourth Gospel?

In more recent research, not surprisingly, this history of religions field of exploration has been left behind, and the focus has shifted to what is called the Gnostic “redeemer myth.” The advantage of this approach is especially said to be that in this myth the Logos does not just possess the abstract function of an idea or hypostatized principle that bridges the chasm between God and the world but assumes the concrete form of a revealer descending from heaven who at the same time is said to be a redeemer.

It was Bultmann who, from 1925 on, sought to understand the Gospel of John against this particular history of religions background and who for a long time found a large measure of support for his view, especially in Germany.³² In his view, the origin of this myth is no longer discoverable and its wide dissemination is hard to unravel on account of its entwinement with all sorts of mythological and philosophical motifs. Nonetheless, it occurs, he says, in John’s prologue—in a form stamped by the cosmological thinking of Gnosticism.

In Gnosticism, God and cosmos are dualistically related to each other insofar as human souls, which originated in the supracosmic sphere and belong there, have become trapped in the material world as scattered sparks of light and must be liberated and gathered up from it. To that end the figure of the Logos, usually called Nous, descends from above. In him souls find their original unity. Apart from this cosmological function, however, the Logos also has a soteriological task as the divinely sent redeemer to gather the souls belonging to God and to bring them back to their heavenly home. Therefore, he disguises himself in a human body in order to deceive the demonic powers of darkness and thus descends. This—in the judgment of Bultmann and others—original Gnostic myth of the redeemer sent from heaven and disguised as a human being is said to have been taken over at an early stage by Christians and made fruitful for christology. Thus it is said to form the background of the Johannine prologue.³³

For a long time this approach determined the options in discussion of the background of the Fourth Gospel. Some scholars believed that they could, with increasing self-assurance and elaborateness, demonstrate that this Gnostic “redeemer myth” is the starting point of Johannine christology. But skepticism about the existence of such a developed myth came to be on the rise.³⁴ As a result the correctness of this entire approach was increasingly discredited.

Admittedly, some new life was breathed into this rigid and polarized discussion by the discovery at Nag Hammadi of certain Gnostic writings. Of special interest for our subject in this collection is a revelatory discourse known as the Trimorphic Protennoia. In this document the Protennoia reveals itself in the first person as “the thought,” “the voice,” and “the word.”³⁵ Especially with regard to “the word” there are statements that in diction and content are strongly reminiscent of John’s prologue and that are regarded by some scholars as clear confirmation of the prologue’s dependence on the Gnostic redeemer concept.³⁶ Others explain these statements with no less cogency as proving dependence in the opposite direction.³⁷

It has thus become evident that there must have been connections between John’s prologue and certain Gnostic or gnosticizing writings of the early Christian centuries. But it is doubtful that anything more can be established from this material than that the Gospel of John, notably in its reference to the Word in the beginning and its sharp antithesis between Spirit and flesh, above and below, and light and darkness contained more points of contact with Gnostic thought than, say, any of the other Gospels and for that reason gained a certain reputation (and popularity?) in the circles that produced such writings.

Still, the objections that have regularly been advanced against the dependence of the Fourth Gospel on the so-called Gnostic redeemer myth have lost none of their validity. They can briefly be summarized as follows: First, the sources from which information about this myth has to be derived are of a later—in part much later—date than the Gospel of John. Hence these written sources could not have been utilized in the Gospel of John.

Second, even if we can assume that Gnosticism (which used to be understood mainly as a group of Christian heresies whose existence had to be deduced from the writings of the church fathers) was in vogue as a spiritual movement of a very specific character already in pre-Christian times, solid evidence that in this pre-Christian period the myth of the redeemed redeemer played anything like a typical role is far from present.³⁸

Third and most decisive, the contexts in which Gnosticism and John’s prologue speak of redemption do not coincide but rather exclude each other. In Gnosticism God and world are dualistic opposites. In the Johannine prologue all things—the “heaven and earth” of Gn. 1:1—have been made by the Word that was with God and that was God. Jn. 1:14, 18 mentions the only begotten who made the Father known to us, and the reason for this mission of revelation is later found in the love with which God, in him, “loved the world” (3:16). Bultmann describes this difference as “a development” of Gnosticism “under the influence of the O.T. faith in the Creator-God.” The mythology was pushed into the background, Gnostic cosmology had to “give way to the belief in Creation,” and “the soteriological concern” became “dominant.” But even this grand reduction does not solve the problem, for in what is called “the soteriological concern” we face the same enormous gap. It is true that in both the prologue and Gnosticism the light comes into the world to shine on the darkness, and also that in the Fourth Gospel the word “world” is used to express the break between God and humanity. But in John human souls are not, as in Gnosticism, imprisoned as preexistent particles of light in the darkness, and their salvation does not consist in their acknowledgment of their divine origin in the redeemer who comes to them and in their being led by him out of this prison of flesh and world. None of this can be related in any way to the redemption from the religious and moral estrangement of humanity from God that the Gospel identifies as the basic human problem or to faith in the saving love of God as the way of salvation (3:16), in which people escape from the judgment and wrath of God (3:18, 36). And none of it is compatible with what has been called the most pithy utterance of the prologue, namely that the Word became flesh. Here the descent of the Redeemer acquires a meaning that fundamentally distinguishes it from all pre-Christian notions of descent but most of all from the Gnostic world of thought. If one would want to posit a connection from the prologue to Gnostic speculation, it could only be as its antithesis.³⁹

On the basis of all this it is hard to believe that “absolute” or “hypostatic” discourse about the Logos, which distinguishes John 1 from Genesis 1, should be explained on the basis of a Gnostic background.⁴⁰ For that reason it is not at all strange that an increasing number of scholars have become convinced of the untenability of this hypothesis and are inclined—to the extent that this is necessary—to look for such a background “closer to home,” that is, in the Old Testament.⁴¹

The Logos and “Wisdom”

In the interest of shedding further light on the Logos figure in John 1 there has been fresh emphasis in recent exegesis on the Old Testament and Jewish wisdom poetry, in which Wisdom is celebrated in its involvement in creation and its world-embracing significance. At the high points in this wisdom literature Wisdom appears in a personified form, either, as in Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24, in the first person or, as in Job 28 and Wisdom of Solomon 7, in the third person. One of these high points occurs in Pr. 8:22ff., where Wisdom is introduced as saying:

The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth—

when he had not yet made earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there.… (NRSV)

Another is Wis. 9:9, where God is addressed: “With you is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world” (NRSV). Admittedly, it is nowhere said that Wisdom is God, nor in so many words that all things were made by Wisdom.⁴² But the degree to which the attribute “divine” is applicable comes out in statements like Wis. 7:25f., where Wisdom is called “a breath of the power of God,” “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty,” “a reflection of eternal light,” “a spotless mirror of the working of God,” and “an image of his goodness.”

In addition to these transcendent qualities of Wisdom some interpreters also place special emphasis on the several phases that Wisdom is said to have passed through in the course of its existence. This, then, is again said to be strikingly analagous to what in the “Logos hymn” (see above) is supposed to have been said about the fortunes of the Logos. Appeal is made particularly to Sir. 24:3-7, where it is said that Wisdom “came forth” from God’s mouth and then inhabited heaven, after that seeking a lodging place on earth. “Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob and in Israel receive your inheritance’ ” (vs. 8, NRSV). This is said to have happened because nowhere else in the world was Wisdom given a place to live. This is not stated in so many words in this passage (and vs. 6 may state the contrary), but grounds for the world’s negative attitude toward Wisdom are clearly found in 1 Enoch 42:1f., where it is stated that Wisdom returned to heaven because it found no dwelling place among humans.

On the basis of these—thus combined—passages picturing Wisdom as a transcendent person, scholars occasionally speak of the “Wisdom myth,”⁴³ with which, according to some, the Johannine prologue (in its original form as a “Logos hymn”)⁴⁴ is linked. For a long time, it has been said, the “disruptive insertion” in vss. 6-8⁴⁵ prevented interpreters from understanding that in the prologue, too, namely in vss. 9-12, there is a similar reference to the Logos’s futile attempts, after the creation of the world, to gain a foothold among humans, as in the Wisdom myth. Thus the Wisdom myth was adopted in the first half of the prologue.⁴⁶ But there is this all-important difference: In the old Wisdom myth, Wisdom returns in desperation to heaven to resume its place among the angels, but the paean of praise sung by the Christian church was able to proclaim a different turn of events: The Logos “became flesh” and as a human being found a welcome among his people.⁴⁷ Hence the prologue is neither a vade mecum for Hellenistic readers nor a summary of the gospel; rather, it describes the history of redemption from its beginning in eternity and its progress in time before the incarnation in order to come to the climax of this development in vs. 14: the incarnation itself. In this way, the story of Jesus’ words and deeds can then begin in vs. 19 as the historic sequel to that which is narrated in the prologue up to the coming of Jesus.

Regardless of what one might think of these “mythical” fortunes of Wisdom and their supposed adoption and elaboration in the “Logos hymn” (see below), this material does bring out that Wisdom, as it figures in the Old Testament and Jewish writings, in certain respects closely approximates the Logos in the Johannine prologue. At the very least we see here a common atmosphere of thought manifesting itself specifically in the fact that when the absolute significance either of Wisdom (and elsewhere, in connection with Wisdom, that of the Torah),⁴⁸ or of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is featured, they are in both cases referred back to, or derived from, “the beginning,” that is, from the God of the beginning, the One who created heaven and earth. Wisdom and Torah belong to that God and in that beginning, as does the Logos, and they belong there as that which is antecedent to the creation of all things and involved in creation by God’s design. In this respect there is a fundamental difference between them and the Gnostic cosmogony, in which God and world are dualistically opposed to each other—a difference that can hardly be understood as a late Old Testament interpretation or a repression of the original Gnostic conception, but rather demonstrates the different origins of the two systems of thought.⁴⁹

Another matter is whether on the basis of all this one can find in these wisdom texts the tradition-historical “source” of the prologue.⁵⁰ Whereas the reference to Genesis 1 is very deliberate, given the opening words “in the beginning” and the mention of light and darkness in vss. 4a and 5, any such reference to wisdom is lacking, not only here but in the Gospel as a whole. Nor is this surprising because, despite the analogy between “the Word” and “Wisdom,” there remains an essential difference between them. In whatever noble and highly poetic language Wisdom may be celebrated, as in Wis. 7:25 (quoted above), Wisdom belongs, in distinction from “the Word” of John 1, to the created world. It was “created,” “set up,” and “brought forth” (cf. Pr. 8:22f.; Sir. 24:9). This sets a line of demarcation between the figure of Wisdom in the wisdom texts and the Logos in John 1, one that cannot be blurred, for example, by insisting that the reference to the Logos as God in Jn. 1:1 and the role as creator associated with it have their roots in, and indeed are “fully intelligible” in light of, Pr. 8:22f. and Sir. 24:1f.⁵¹ The emphasis in Jn. 1:1 on the deity of the Logos and the role that he fulfills in creation is, in fact, intended to accentuate the line of demarcation that separates the Logos from that which has been created.

The same is true of hypostatizing personal references to Wisdom in its preexistence with God. Some of these references are very concrete: “I was beside him like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world …” (Pr. 8:30f., NRSV). In this connection special reference is made to Job 28:20ff., where Wisdom is presented as hidden from the eyes of all creatures but “seen” by God when he created the world:⁵² “He saw it, declared it, … and searched it out” (vs. 27) as an entity independent of himself but objectively present to him.⁵³

But in my opinion all these personifications of Wisdom have a poetic character that can in no way be equated with the mode of existence of the Logos in John 1. Nor can they be called “mythical” in the sense of a story about God. When in Job 28 Wisdom is mentioned in a more or less hypostatizing sense, that is just as poetic as when in the same connection destruction and death are personified (vs. 22) and when it is said that wisdom is concealed even from the birds of the air (vs. 21). Also, passages like Pr. 8:30f. can hardly be characterized as anything other than poetic. The extent to which all this differs from the core pronouncements of Jn. 1:1f., which by saying “He was in the beginning with God” excludes all doubt about the utter uniqueness of the existence of the Logos, needs no demonstration. For that reason it can hardly be surprising that, whatever in John 1 may be reminiscent of the wisdom texts, there is not the slightest indication that the Evangelist would want what he has to say about the Logos understood in light of the figure of Wisdom.

The same applies to an even greater degree against the hypothesis that John 1 adopts the supposed myth of Wisdom’s vain search for a dwelling place and provides it with a Christian meaning and outcome.⁵⁴ However ingenious such a construction may be, it consists, on closer scrutiny, of not just one but a series of unproven assumptions. After all, how can one possibly link together wisdom passages from very different periods, and in part of very different literary categories (cf. Pr. 8:31 and Wis. 24:6), in order to make up one mythological “story,” especially when the essential point of this myth (wisdom’s failure to find a dwelling place among the nations) stems not from the wisdom literature itself but from the much later apocalyptic book of 1 Enoch?⁵⁵ And we are told it is precisely that form of the “myth” that was incorporated into the prologue and given its Christian meaning, not to be sure in the prologue as we now have it, but still visible as the intent of the underlying Logos hymn when it was not as yet “corrupted” by vss. 6-8. Indeed, there are as many gaps as links in this chain!

In summary, the following conclusions seem justified:

First, the “absolute” description of the Word that was with God and was God (1:1) is explained, at the deepest level, by the absoluteness of the historic self-disclosure of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. It is essentially nothing other than that which, at the close of the Gospel, brings the unbelieving Thomas to confess “my Lord and my God” as the ultimate human response in the confrontation with the glory of God in the coming, work, and, finally, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In that sense, therefore, one can say that the first utterance of the prologue is not different from the last word of the gospel story. But the prologue places that glory where it belongs and in light of which alone it can be understood. And that place is not the great pantheon of gods and demigods of pagan mythology nor the conceptual teaching of philosophical cosmology in which the “crossings” of God to the cosmos were expressed, but—as the Evangelist himself says in so many words—the knowledge of that God of whom Israel had always known as the God of the beginning.

Second, the authors of Israel’s wisdom books had this knowledge, and therein lies the reason that the similarity between John’s prologue and these didactic wisdom poems is much deeper—and the result, after all, of a much closer kinship—than what we have from Hellenistic syncretism. Still, there remains a fundamental difference here. The “plus” of the “in the beginning” of John 1 over that of Genesis 1 cannot be explained by analogy from the pronouncements about wisdom. Nor can they serve as a link or intermediate stage for that explanation. For not even in the farthest reaches of the imagination with which they speak about wisdom can they cross the threshold that separates the beginning of the gospel from the Torah.

Third, one may ask whether and to what degree the absolute use of the name “the Word” with reference to the coming and work of Jesus Christ was already common property in the early Christian church. Some scholars believe that the manner in which the prologue posits the name “the Word” is itself an indication that the readers must have been familiar with it or at least did not need further explanation.⁵⁶ In connection with this question, one often hears again about the supposed Logos hymn that is said to underlie the prologue. Even if one rejects that hypothesis, however, one can of course assume familiarity with the use of Logos as a name referring to the preexistence of Jesus as the Son of God among the members of that which is called the Johannine congregation or “school.” On the other hand, there is no shred of proof that in the early church “the Word” already served as a title or name for the Son of God. The name Logos is not even used in those New Testament passages in which Christ’s sonship is associated with the creation of all things (cf. 1 Co. 8:6; Col. 1:16f.; Hb. 1:2; Rv. 5:14). Our conclusion therefore can hardly be other than that the name, which is used in reference to Jesus’ preexistence only in the opening lines of the Gospel and the first letter of John, has a unique, specific, and limited character that is conditioned by the rest of the Gospel, such that it can only be described as typically Johannine.

3 Vss. 3-5 form an immediate and natural sequel to vss. 1 and 2. “In the beginning” evokes the divine work of creation, when God called all things into being by his “word” (Gn. 1:1f.). Here all this is credited to “the Word” in an absolute sense, not only to qualify the creation, but in particular because it is this Word that has become flesh in the advent and work of Jesus Christ. Because the Word existed in the beginning with God and was God, it was through him that all things were created. The emphatic position that “all things” has in vs. 3 and the addition that nothing is excepted from what has been made by the Word⁵⁷ therefore intend to express—against all the speculations about the origin of the world that are in competition with this viewpoint—not only the absolute monotheistic idea of creation, but even more the all-embracing significance of the incarnation of the Word; in other words, the “christological” viewpoint presents itself here at the very outset.

The range of action of God-in-Christ at the creation coincides with the range of action of the Word in his incarnation. Therefore Christ is the light of the world (cf. 8:12) and by his coming into the world enlightens every person (1:9). The question arises whether in connection with the phrase “through him” anything more can be said about the relationship between “God” and “the Word.” “Through” (διά) could imply mediation, and reference is made by some scholars to texts like 1 Co. 8:6; Col. 1:16; and Hb. 1:2, which are said to describe Christ as Mediator of creation. Whatever we think of these other passages,⁵⁸ in my opinion vs. 3 does not permit any conclusions in this regard beyond that which is already stated in vs. 1, namely that the Word was God⁵⁹ and that for that very reason the coming and incarnation of the Word has this all-embracing significance. With regard to the nature of the distinction within God’s being and the distinct role of the Word in creation, the prologue makes no further pronouncement. Here again (cf. the exegesis of vs. 2) it is clear that the prologue does not furnish us a theology of the Logos but seeks to convey the revelation of God in Jesus Christ in its absolute and comprehensive significance.

The old question whether the words “that was made” belong to vs. 3 or to what follows in vs. 4⁶⁰ should in my opinion be settled in favor of the former. Others opt for the latter from considerations of rhythm. These words are also said to be superfluous in vs. 3. But to combine them with vs. 4 also leads to difficulties: Would the meaning be “in what was made, therein was life,” “therein he was the life,” or “in him there was life (for it)”? The first is very unattractive, because then the second clause does not say much more than the first and no longer speaks of the Logos as the source of life. The third does, but without the added phrase “for it” the sentence would hardly flow. The second translation would, then, have to be preferred, but it is by no means clear on first reading that the Logos is the subject of the sentence. Another possible translation would be “what has come about in him was life,” which would have to be understood in reference to the incarnation of the Logos. That which “was made” then has to mean something like “what has appeared in him.” This translation is commended by the fact that it brings out “the thoroughly Johannine emphasis on the historical advent of salvific life and light in the person of Jesus.”⁶¹ Although I agree with this last point, it seems to me forced to interpret “what was made in him” (or “what has appeared in him”) as a reference to the incarnation, in any case as the first announcement of it.

Nothing is more natural, however, than that the second “was made” should refer back to the beginning of vs. 3 and thus to that which was made⁶² by the Logos at the creation, and not to what appeared in him at the incarnation. In my opinion, the difficulties all resolve themselves if one takes “that was made” as the somewhat stately—and certainly not discordant—conclusion of vs. 3 and continues in vs. 4 with “in him (the Logos) was life.” The concepts then follow each other in logical sequence: “was made,” “life,” “light,” “shines.” It may be true that from a viewpoint of rhythm there is more to be said in favor of connecting “that was made” with what follows in vs. 4. But anyone wanting to bring the first five verses of the prologue completely into logical order has to perform all sorts of surgical operations.⁶³

Verse 4a now continues to speak of the Word as the source of life. The reference is not yet to life in its effect among people—that follows in vs. 4b—but to the Logos as the possessor and giver of life. Elsewhere this is conveyed by saying that the Father has life in himself and has granted the Son also to have life in himself (5:26). One can say that this is already implied in 1:3, but the life over which the Logos has control does not limit itself to the creation of all things but also extends itself in the power by which life is maintained, so that “life” has here its absolute meaning without further differentiation as to the forms in which it consists.

The past tense is consistently used (six times in vss. 1-4), but this does not mean that the reference is to a state of affairs that is past. Rather, the tense is to be understood from the perspective of one who looks at the present in light of its origin, which is antecedent to all human experience.

Humans are first mentioned in vs. 4b,⁶⁴ which says what the life that was in the Word meant for them: light. Everything is still totally qualitative: life in its absolute meaning, light as the gift that makes human life possible, and humans as such in their dependence on the light and without reference to place or time. The text does not explicitly refer to humanity before the fall, nor, I believe, is that meant.⁶⁵ We are dealing with neither the reception of the light nor who will and will not have a share in the light of life, but with the light that people need to live, whether they know it or not (cf. 8:12). Nor, for the same reason, are we to assume that in vs. 4 we are reading about the period between the creation and the incarnation and that this is one reason for the use of the past tense (“he was”).⁶⁶ Of course one can ask whether the statement that the life was the light of humanity does not also apply to those who lived before the incarnation. This question must certainly not be answered in the negative. But the statement is too general to apply to one specific period in history. With both “the light” and the people that are spoken of, we are dealing with qualitative terms, not with something historical. This changes only in vs. 5.

5 This verse constitutes a further step in the development of the argument by speaking of the light in its actual effect, the source of illumination in its illuminating radiance. But what is the significance of the step made here? Are we dealing with:

Of these three possibilities, the second is improbable if not impossible. It clashes with vs. 7, where the reference is to the light attested by John and hence the light that came in Christ, so that then it becomes necessary to eliminate vss. 6-8 from the context. Further, there is mention here of “the darkness” without any mention (after vs. 4) of the fall, which in the theory of the “phases” or “periods” is inexplicable. And the strongest argument against this view is that present tense “shines” can hardly relate to a closed period in the past.⁶⁷

There is then more to be said for the first view, namely that the verse is a timeless statement about the light. As a rule the second clause in the verse is then translated as “and the darkness has not overcome/extinguished it [i.e., the light, as the light of the Word, which was God].”⁶⁸ The greatest objection to this, however, is that the second clause of vs. 5 clearly corresponds to vss. 10b and 11b, which refer to the rejection of the Word as it appeared in Jesus Christ.

For that reason the present tense “the light shines …” is in all probability not a timeless statement but refers to the light that came when Christ entered the world and that now shines (cf. “the true light is already shining,” 1 Jn. 2:8). Therefore, the second clause of vs. 5 must not be translated “the darkness has not vanquished it,” but “the darkness has not understood it.”⁶⁹ Therefore, though the first view described above cannot be totally excluded, the third certainly deserves preference. “The darkness has not understood it” also provides the best connection with vs. 7, where “the light” is unmistakably used of the coming of Christ. The same is true of vs. 9, where, in view of what follows in vs. 12, there can again be doubt about this point.⁷⁰

All this means, then, that what is said about the Logos in vss. 1-4 is directly applied to what one can call the great content of this Gospel, that is, to Christ’s appearance as the light of the world in its confrontation with the darkness (cf. 8:12; 3:19f.; 9:5; 12:35, all passages in which the core concepts of 1:4, 5 return). For that reason it is not permissible to end the first cycle of ideas, the Word in the beginning and so on, at vs. 4.⁷¹ All the imperfect verbs in vss. 1-4 that describe the preexistence and essence of the Word that was antecedent to all existence and experience have their point and meaning in that they reveal the grand background of the actual situation of proclamation in which the Evangelist and the Christian community know themselves to be: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” For no other purpose did the Evangelist begin his Gospel with the Logos. He did not do so in order to place the coming and work of Christ in the context of an already existing universal Logos theology, of which his words would be the crown. His purpose was, rather, to trace the gospel story to its final and deepest origins and so—taking up the conflict between what he will refer to over and over as darkness and lies versus truth and light—to point out at the outset the importance and range of what he is about to narrate and the grounds on which he will call people to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (20:31).

1:6-13

The Coming of the Word as the Light of the World

Now begins a new cycle of thought that in a variety of ways elaborates what was said in vss. 1-5. In vs. 14 the third and last segment of the three-part cycle begins, and at the end (vs. 18) everything returns to the beginning.⁷²

Verses 6 and 7 link up with the statement in vs. 5 by reporting on the ministry of John the Baptist, the man sent by God as a witness to the light mentioned in vs. 5. Here and in vs. 15 scholars have repeatedly found what they regard as conclusive evidence that the prologue is not an original unity. These intermezzi about John the Baptist are said to interrupt both the rhythm and the thought pattern of the Logos hymn. But as stated earlier, one cannot use rhythm and meter as criteria for the original hymn without getting stuck, and that for a number of reasons. The material about John is, it is true, more “prosaic” than the lofty opening lines about the Logos in vss. 1-5. But vss. 6-8 are by no means incongruous. They have been composed in a solemn, stately style on an Old Testament model (cf. Jg. 13:2; 17:1; 1 Sa. 1:1).⁷³ One can even arrange them in three parallel “couplets.”⁷⁴

In various ways some interpreters have forcefully maintained (against the long-dominant opinion) that these verses do not disturb the thought pattern of the prologue but rather constitute an essential contribution to it.⁷⁵ These pronouncements about John are picked up again later and elaborated in vss. 19ff. and 29ff., where the real gospel story begins. Although the prologue reaches past the “beginning” of the gospel (cf. Mk. 1:1; Ac. 10:37; 13:23; 1:22) to the “in the beginning” of Gn. 1:1, this does not mean that the salvation-historical role of John the Baptist as the herald of the coming One became of less importance to the Evangelist. On the contrary, the Fourth Gospel describes and identifies the purpose of John’s mission and baptism (cf. 1:31), in a way different from that of the Synoptics, as that of a witness (1:7, 8, 15, 19 [cf. vs. 20], 32, 34; 3:26; 5:33). Therefore, the prologue’s references to this witness are not distracting, “puzzling,” “abrupt,” or even “coarse” interruptions⁷⁶ but rather highly appropriate appeals to the witness of a man whose appearance and ministry belong integrally to the Christ-event.

One may add that these references to John’s witness come at two strategic points in the prologue: first, after the thematic beginning in vss. 1-5, before it is further elaborated in vss. 9-13, and then after the pronouncements in vs. 14 about the revelation of the glory of God in the incarnation of the Word, before those pronouncements are explicated in vss. 16-18.⁷⁷ In both cases we are dealing with John’s identifying witness concerning Jesus, first in regard to Jesus’ unique significance as the light of the world, then in regard to Jesus’ antecedent transcendent glory. The references to John thus do not break the thought pattern of the prologue but precisely reinforce what one may call its central content.

The unity of the prologue is particularly evident in that vs. 7 alludes to what has already been said in vs. 5 about the importance of the coming of the light. In the confrontation between the light and the darkness John is the great witness, a concept that here, and in general, has a forensic meaning. John appears as the divinely appointed spokesman on behalf of the light to put the darkness in the wrong. But at the same time that witness is also—and this, too, is divinely intended—one who recruits for the light (cf. 3:16). The purpose of his coming and mission is that through him all should come to believe (cf. also 5:33ff.). Here for the first time faith is referred to: The appearance of the light does not automatically bring with it acknowledgment and acceptance, though one might perhaps expect this. It is a light to which people may be blind (cf. 9:5, 39) and from whose illumination one can shield oneself because one prefers the darkness (cf. 3:19ff.). All that will come up at length later, but here already it is clear that the coming of the light demands a choice: People must want to leave behind the darkness in which they have been enclosed and imprisoned and “come to the light” (3:21; 8:12).

8 Before this line of thought is continued in vss. 9ff., vs. 8 first adds that John himself was not the light. This emphasis on John’s subordination to the coming of the light returns in John’s own words (vss. 15, 20f.; 3:28f.). Some scholars think that this emphasis is a polemic against a sect that considered John the Messiah. This is also said to be the explanation for the supposed insertion of vss. 6-8 into the prologue.⁷⁸ Regardless of whether such a tendency is at all present in the Fourth Gospel,⁷⁹ interpretation of vs. 8 does not make this hypothesis necessary. The thrust of vss. 6-8 is very positive with regard to John. That he himself was not the light does not diminish him in any way but rather serves to mark his unique place in salvation history as the one who pointed to the coming of the light but preceded the hour of fulfillment (cf. Mt. 11:11, 12).

9-13 After this first “Johannine intermezzo,” vss. 9-13 return to the central opening theme, which was provisionally rounded off at vs. 5. One can perhaps speak of a second concentric cycle of thought, in which the categories of the first come back, but this time—after what has been said about John as witness—in their kerygmatic implications.

Verse 9 begins by saying that the light mentioned in vs. 5, to which John was the witness, was the true light that by its coming into the world enlightens every person.⁸⁰ “True” means genuine, that which is in fact what it claims to be, hence implying a contrast with what is falsely described or offered as the light. Here it also has a clearly exclusive meaning, referring as it does to the “uniqueness” of Jesus.⁸¹

Because of that uniqueness, it is also true of this light that it “enlightens every person” (cf. vs. 4b). This statement describes the light in its fullness and universality. It does not say that every individual is in fact enlightened by the light (cf. vss. 5, 10f.) but that by its coming into the world the light is for every human being that by which alone he or she can live (cf. 8:12). The light’s “coming” is not of course just the moment of its arrival but the proximity and accessibility that result from that coming and by which every human being has come within reach of the light. The reference is to the coming of the Logos into flesh, even though this modality of its coming is not mentioned until vs. 14. In view here is only the coming as such.

Verse 10 again speaks (cf. vs. 5b) of the negative reaction of the world to the coming of the light. In order to bring out that contrast fully and vividly vs. 10a-b summarizes what has been said before. Though linked paratactically, these pronouncements essentially have a concessive meaning in relation to the last clause of the verse: “Although he.…” The “and” that introduces the third clause clearly (as in vs. 11) has an adversative meaning: “and yet, but.”

At this point the subject is no longer just the light but the Logos as well. Everything that has been said about the Logos to this point is cast into the scales against everything else to bring out the mysterious negative character of the world’s “not knowing.” Clearer proof that in the prologue and in the entire Gospel we are not dealing with a dualistic Gnostic world of thought is hardly possible.⁸² The world to which the Logos came was his own creation. The world did not know him, not because he was a stranger but because it was estranged from him, from its origin. The world should have known him. The inner contradiction of this not knowing is not explained. The opposition simply posits itself in all its mysteriousness. It is not said that the world could have known him if only it had followed the clues provided by its own deepest being as created by him and its own deepest need of the light—of that which was made by him for it. All this is true, of course, but there is no mention here of an unsatisfied dormant sense or preunderstanding that needed only to be activated in order to acknowledge him. What is needed to bring about the suspension of this estrangement, the miracle of a new creation, will be named (cf. 1:13; 3:3ff.).

Connected with all this, finally, is that the term “world” is not unambiguous either here or elsewhere in the Gospel. As the world that came into being by the power of the Word it is the whole of creation (vs. 3), specifically the human world (vs. 10), that which belongs to God and alongside God, the object of God’s love (cf. 3:16). At the same time, however, here and in several places in the Gospel “world” stands for the humanity that is estranged from and hostile to God—in that sense the world outside God. “Knowing” is not just intellectual but refers to total relatedness. It is rooted in a choice that embraces not only the intellect and not only the heart, but also the human will. Accordingly, not to know the Word is to reject a relationship with him (see also on 10:14).

Verse 11 has a similar thrust to vs. 10. The question is only whether “his own home” and “his own people” still refer to the world as that which came into being by the Word and hence as that which belongs to him—in the same sense as in vs. 10—or to the special relationship between the Word and Israel as the people of God (cf. Ex. 19:5; Dt. 4:20). The choice is difficult because both make equally good sense.⁸³ But if one thinks of Israel in vs. 11, then one gets two viewpoints in vss. 10 and 11, and a sort of climax: In Jesus Christ the Logos came not only to a world that had been made by him; he also came to a people adopted by God as his own possession. In the context of this “coming” of the Logos the Jewish people could hardly be left out of consideration. Throughout this Gospel there is reference to “the world,” but that world manifests itself primarily in the confrontation between Jesus and Israel.

With this the negative reaction to the coming and work of the Logos, already referred to in vss. 5 and 10, the prologue has reached its low point. Those who from of old were called the people of God’s possession (cf. Is. 43:21) did not receive him, that is, were unwilling to receive him as a welcome guest.⁸⁴ Again this does not apply to the experience of the Logos before the incarnation, whereupon there would follow an “evangelic turn” in vs. 14.⁸⁵ It is rather the actual historical situation that the Evangelist pictures to his readers, but he does it here against the all-determining background of the eternal Word. Therefore the rejection of the Word is the mysterious and culpable resistance of the creature against its creator, of humankind against its own redemption, and of the people of Israel against its God (cf. 8:54).

12 There is, however, another side to this, which is described in words that show that the transition to the revelation of Christ does not have to wait until vs. 14. After what we have heard of in vss. 5, 10, and 11 (“the darkness,” “the world,” “his own people”), “all who received him” are apparently those who went against the current, who broke with the general pattern by which the world thinks, lives, and acts. They are further described as those “who believed in his name” (see on vs. 7; cf. 20:31); that is, they accepted him for what he was and as he manifested himself.

Again the emphasis falls on what, in virtue of what he was from the beginning, he had to give them, namely the “power,” that is, the right and the freedom “to become children of God.” The ability to confer this right marks his exclusive relationship to God (cf. 3:35; 20:17) and his utterly unique position as the way to the Father (14:6). No one comes to the Father except through him, nor does anyone become a child of God except by the Son.⁸⁶ In John, unlike elsewhere in the New Testament, believers are not called “sons” (νιοί) but exclusively “children (τέκνα) of God,” while “son” is used only of Christ (cf. 11:52; 1 Jn. 3:1, 2, 10; 5:2).⁸⁷

In John being a child is always rooted in a new birth “of God,” “of the Spirit,” or “from above” (cf. vs. 13; 3:3f.).⁸⁸ It denotes a totally new mode of existence, one that belongs to the “eschatological” renewal of all things by God, which as “eternal life” has already been initiated by the work of Christ; elsewhere in the New Testament it is as such also often linked with the future (“the revealing of the sons of God,” Ro. 8:19; cf. Col 3:4 but also 1 Jn. 3:2). The privilege of being children of God is special and exclusive. It is not a natural quality that every human being has as a creature of God; nor is it the inalienable right of Israel as “his own” (cf. 8:42). It is, rather, the gift that is given only to those who believe in the Word.

Verse 13 concludes the train of thought begun in vs. 6. A reading occurs in some church fathers that continues in the singular: (qui) non natus est, which thus refers not to the rebirth of believers but to the virgin birth of Jesus. But this reading is hard to accept as original. Not only is the textual basis very weak, but a statement about the virgin birth of Jesus would not easily have been replaced by another about the rebirth of believers.⁸⁹ Also, such a statement about the Logos not being born of blood and so on would be very surprising after vss. 1-5 and 9-11 and before vs. 14.⁹⁰

Some interpreters forcefully reject any idea that the relative clause with which vs. 13 begins (“who were born …”) is a comment on the preceding clause (“who believed in his name”)⁹¹ since then faith would proceed from regeneration whereas, according to their view, a person must opt for rebirth as a possibility opened up to him or her in the call that comes from the Revealer. In the choice that faith makes a person can be “born again” and so change and come to his or her real being.⁹² However, against this it has to be asserted that the concluding statement in vs. 13 traces the entire gift of being a child of God, including the manner in which it is effected, to its deepest ground: “procreation” by God. The idea that faith as a human choice should precede that birth and therefore that in some sense a person should have this rebirth of God at his or her disposal not only seems absurd but is also at variance with statements like this in 1 Jn. 5:1: “Everyone who believes … is born of God.”⁹³ By saying this one does not in any way detract from the call and invitation to believe so emphatically issued in John’s Gospel, a call addressed to all without distinction (just as in 5:8 the lame man is asked to “rise”). The two-sidedness in the redemptive order consisting of God’s gift and human responsibility, the secret of which the Fourth Gospel does not unravel,⁹⁴ will force itself on our attention again and again in the Gospel.⁹⁵

Three opposites to birth from God are named in vs. 13a. The plural of “blood” is hard to explain. One thinks of the blood of two parents as bearer of the life that propagates itself, or something of that nature. The most probable solution seems to be something more general: “whose birth is not a question of blood” or the like. The double “of the will of” refers to sexual desire, first in general terms then in regard to a man’s initiative in fathering offspring. In all three the reference is to the natural process of procreation—that which lies within human power (cf. Gl. 4:23, 29).

“Flesh” here denotes humanity in itself in its creaturely human potentials and limitations (cf. 1:14); but in this context “the will” of the flesh and of a man do not carry the connotation of something inherently inferior.⁹⁶ The “dualism” expressed in vs. 13 is not rooted in an anthropological opposition between the lower or the higher elements of a person or in a metaphysical contrast between a heavenly world and an evil world mired in matter. It is, rather, rooted in the distinction—characteristic also of Old Testament thought—between God as the all-controlling Spirit and the human person in his or her creaturely dependence (cf., e.g., Is. 31:5; Ps. 56:5).⁹⁷

Therefore, the fact of being born of God does not cancel out the qualitative distinction between God and humanity. “Of God,” “of the Spirit,” “from above” qualifies the new life of the children of God as a participation, not in the divine being, but in God’s imperishable gift. This gift does not lie within the range of possibilities granted a person in his or her natural birth. A person is entirely dependent for it on the Spirit of God (3:6f.), and all the more because the world made by God and the flesh in which he has given human beings their particular mode of existence have become the element in which, by human sin and self-will, people have alienated themselves from God and hence do not know and accept the light that comes to them in the Word.

It is this contrast that continues to shape vs. 13. That is, vs. 13 not only explains vs. 12 but also refers back to the negative statements in vss. 5, 10, and 11 to protect those statements from possible misunderstanding. The rejection of the Logos by the world and by his own people has been pointed out in its paradoxical and “unnatural” significance, but this does not mean that acceptance of the Word and faith in his name would be merely the obvious response to the revelation of the Word. In fact, the contrary is true because of what humanity has become in the world and in the flesh. Though human unbelief, viewed in the light of the creation of humanity by God, may be a riddle, faith is, in the light of human estrangement from God, a miracle, the fruit of new birth not from below but from above (cf. 3:3f.). However hard, accusatory, and humiliating the verdict against human unbelief may be, here and throughout the Gospel its intent is not to throw people back on themselves and to appeal to their “better” nature but to portray to them their radical lostness. But this is not done—and here lies the transition to the now following third cycle of the prologue—merely to place this dependence on God’s grace in the context of the impotence and obstinacy of unbelief, but above all to illumine it from within the revelation of the Word in the beginning, the description of whose full glory is now about to begin.

1:14-18

“The Word Became Flesh”

14 This third and final cycle of the prologue is also the transition to the gospel story since here the figure of Jesus comes clearly to the fore, though he is not named until vs. 17. This further concretization of what so far has been credited to the Word—though from the very start the kerygmatic situation that came into being with the coming and work of Christ is aimed at—is first expressed in the statement “And the Word became flesh.” Although the Word was repeatedly the subject in the preceding verses, after vs. 1 that name is mentioned expressly again only here. Whereas in what precedes all the emphasis lies on the divine presence of the Word as the light of the world, now the entire focus is on the self-identification of the Word with the man Jesus of Nazareth.

“Flesh” is not just the material side of human existence but, in the Old Testament sense, all of the human person in creaturely existence as distinct from God (cf., e.g., Ac. 2:17; Mt. 24:22; “flesh and blood” in Mt. 16:17). Also in view here is that which is human as such, apart from sin (which is sometimes referred to with “flesh,” notably in Paul: Ro. 8:4, etc.). That the Word became flesh therefore does not implicitly mean that it also took upon itself the sin of the world. Although “flesh” as a term for the creaturely human in itself is also intended as a description of human weakness, perishability, dependence, and the like, one cannot say that the word is used here on account of the offense that the Logos, by appearing as a man and nothing more, occasions to the natural intellect—a notion strongly advocated by Bultmann.⁹⁸ For however much the incarnation of the Word in the man Jesus of Nazareth is also the occasion for human unbelief (cf. 1:45; 6:42; 7:27, etc.), this does not alter the fact that in 1:14a, as in 14b, “flesh” is clearly not the means by which the glory of God is concealed in the man Jesus but the means by which it is revealed before the eyes of all. The flesh is the medium of the glory and makes it visible to all people. By means of incarnation God has visibly appeared among humankind. And—we may immediately add—the entire Gospel of John is proof of it: proof of that abundant glory, a glory manifested before the eyes of all.⁹⁹

If then we cannot interpret vs. 14a in isolation from vs. 14b, we also cannot lose sight of the expression “the Word became flesh.” The Word remains the subject of that which follows. It did not cease to be the Word that was from the beginning, and “became” does not mean “changed into.” It denotes an identification. However unfathomable this identification may be, it does not mean only that the Logos—that is, God to the degree that he reveals himself—“appeared” in the human sphere and that the Revealer, the one in and by whom God reveals himself, was a man and nothing but a man. Nor does it thus declare superfluous all questions concerning the “how” of that “became.”¹⁰⁰ To “become flesh” is more than to “appear in the sphere of the flesh,” that is, as Jesus of Nazareth. It is an identification that, though it is not further defined here or linked with the virgin birth, does mean that all the redemptive categories (the “life” and “the light of humanity”) thus far attributed in the prologue to the Word now apply with the same absoluteness and exclusiveness to the man Jesus of Nazareth and, in his person as the possessor of that which belongs to God alone, completely transcend and exceed the possibilities of a mere man. One cannot (in “docetic” fashion) hide or even dissolve the reality of the flesh, the true humanity of Jesus, in the revelation of the glory of God any more than one can (in “kenotic” fashion) detach the glory of God from the humanity of the earthly Jesus. The Word did not become flesh by just assuming the form of the man Jesus as a garment in which God walked on earth or as an instrument that God used from time to time. Nor does “became flesh” only indicate the “place” or “sphere” where the revelation took place.¹⁰¹ At stake here is the Word’s act of being united with the man Jesus such that in his self-revelation in words and deeds the glory of the Word of the beginning manifested itself, visibly and audibly (cf. 1 Jn. 1:1f.), and is interpreted by him as such with a recurrent appeal to his Sonship and his having been sent by the Father (cf., e.g., 5:19f., 26f.).¹⁰² Thus “became” refers to a mode of existence in which the deity of Christ can no more be abstracted from his humanity than the reverse.¹⁰³

The words “and dwelled among us” further explicate the preceding words. One can take them to refer either to the beginning of the Word’s residence among people or to the entire (past) period of that residence.¹⁰⁴ The verb means “pitch one’s tent” and is reminiscent of numerous Old Testament statements in which mention is made of God dwelling in the midst of Israel, the fundamental motif being the tabernacle in the wilderness in which God’s presence in Israel and his glory were manifested (Ex. 25:8, 9; also, e.g., Ezk. 37:27; Jl. 3:17; Zc. 2:10; cf. also Rv. 21:3). In Sir. 24:8 Wisdom says, “The Creator of all things … assigned a place for my tent, saying ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob …,’ ” and to some this is a strong argument that the Johannine prologue is closely akin to wisdom literature.¹⁰⁵ I regard as unproven the view that the structure of the prologue was borrowed from, for instance, Sirach 24,¹⁰⁶ and there is no direct reference here to the tabernacle and temple as the place of God’s dwelling in Israel¹⁰⁷ (cf., however, also 2:19-22!). Nonetheless, “pitch one’s tent” in this context nevertheless has a clear salvation-historical connotation, which is reinforced by the connection in the following clause with “glory.” The effulgence of God’s glory is an aspect of his indwelling among his people (cf. Ex. 40:34, 35; Nu. 14:10; 1 K. 8:10, 11; Pss. 26:8; 102:16; Jr. 17:12; Ezk. 10:4, etc.; Rv. 15:8; 21:10, 11, 22, 23). Therefore, use of “pitch one’s tent” does not emphasize the transience of the manifestation of the Logos in the human sphere but rather the act of taking up residence and then staying.¹⁰⁸

The newness of this indwelling consists, of course, in the incarnation of the Word. It distinguishes itself from the divine indwelling operative up to that point by its totally different form of proximity—as that of one who permits himself to be seen and to be a member of society (cf. vss. 38, 39), to live among people as one of them.

It says that he took up residence “among us” and refers to the “we” who beheld his glory, that is, neither people in general nor the “we” of the Christian church, but the “we” with whom Jesus lived and who were with him as his witnesses from the beginning (15:27). This “we” is distinguished from the inclusive “we” of the church (vs. 16) just as 1 Jn 1:1f., in a very similar context, distinguishes between the “we” who witnessed Jesus and the “you” of the church.¹⁰⁹ In this connection “beheld,”¹¹⁰ more strongly than the word for merely “seeing,” as is evident also from the climax in 1 Jn. 1:1, seems to point to the dramatic, spectacular, and totally absorbing nature of what is seen, which, after all, is the glory of God. Those who think the “we” means the church speak of “the sight of faith” that relates to the incarnation but is not restricted to eyewitnesses or contemporaries and can be transmitted to all future generations.¹¹¹ But that is to remove the specific connection between the incarnation and this sight. At stake is the glory of God in the flesh, which could only be seen and “beheld” by those who were the eyewitnesses of that flesh. Many contemplators of that glory were not moved to believe and could therefore be described as spiritually “not seeing” (cf. 9:39-41), just as others believe in that glory without having seen it in the flesh (20:29). But this is no proof that the glory of the revelation was visible only to the eye of faith. The reverse is much rather the case. The revelation of Jesus’ glory, not just the weakness of the flesh, occasions the hostile reaction of “the Jews” (cf. 9:16, 24f.; 11:47). The plea they sometimes base on his human origins and the like (6:42; 7:27) is nothing but an attempt to hide from the power of that glory.¹¹²

For that reason it is not the function of the eyewitness to convey to every generation anew the offense that is said to lie in the incarnation of the Word,¹¹³ but conversely to witness to the glory as in all the concrete visibility and tangibility that it manifested in their presence (“among us”). This is not to imply that for the witnesses in view here faith in Jesus as the Son of God kept pace from the beginning with the revelation of his glory. Much would still have to be made clear to them, and the witness of those who had been with Jesus from the beginning would not have led to the correct understanding of what they had heard and seen without the co-witness of the Paraclete (14:26; 15:26). But the issue in vs. 14 is, again, not faith but the revelation that underlies the understanding of faith. And not just the revelation of glory, of Jesus as the exalted and glorified Lord, but of his glory in the flesh—of his earthly, human existence (see also above, , ).

The Greek word δóξα, “glory,” is a translation of the Old Testament word kabōd and refers to a visible and powerful manifestation of God. Though the story of the transfiguration of Jesus offers various points of contact for this passage (cf. Lk. 9:32; 2 Pet. 1:16ff.), the idea that the reference here is solely or especially to that story is not likely. The transfiguration does not occur in John’s Gospel, and the point here is not a single sensational event but that glory that is attendant on the dwelling, just as in the Old Testament there is a persistent connection between God’s presence in tabernacle and temple and the divine kabōd revealing itself there. Accordingly, here as well we must think of the continuous glory in the earthly life of Jesus, notably in his miracles (cf. 2:11; 11:40; 17:4; 1:51, etc.). “Glory as of the Father’s only begotten” does not imply a comparison but is explanatory: “in keeping with his nature as.”

“Only begotten” is used as a term for Jesus’ relationship to God only in John. Elsewhere it is used of a parent’s only child (e.g., Lk. 7:12; 8:42), but also as an indication of the value of a certain child with no indication of how many children the parent has (cf. Hb. 11:17). Here the reference is clearly to oneness not in number but in being, the utter uniqueness of the Sonship of Christ. There is a difference of opinion on whether this is all it means or whether the “generation” of the Son by the Father is also included, so that the meaning is unigenitus (only begotten) and not just unicus. In the ancient Latin version the latter is used, but the later Vulgate has the former, possibly under the influence of the Arian controversy. Whereas some scholars believe that what is at stake here is no more than a quality, the uniqueness of Jesus as the Son of God, and not what in trinitarian theology is called his “procession” from the Father,¹¹⁴ others advance strong arguments for the translation “only begotten” (and not just “only”).¹¹⁵ Although we will not pursue the issue further here, a text like 1 Jn. 5:18 proves that there is every reason to assume that here, too, “only begotten” means more than simply “only,” and this is all the more true because here (as in vs. 18) it is meant to be read against the background of 1:1ff. and the glory rooted in that background. Also the preposition “from” (“from the Father”) may point in that direction.¹¹⁶

The concluding words of vs. 14, “full of grace and truth,” further qualify him¹¹⁷ who has just been called the only begotten from the Father (cf. vs. 16: “and from his fullness”). “Grace” and “truth” are used together frequently in the Old Testament of God’s relationship to humankind and speak first of all (“grace”) of God’s favor, benevolence, and mercy.¹¹⁸ In this combination grace is the supporting concept; in vs. 16 it therefore stands alone. The second term, “truth,” adds to the first (in the traditional combination and therefore surely here also)¹¹⁹ the element of trustworthiness, faithfulness, and unwaveringness and thus characterizes God’s graciousness as a relationship in which he binds himself to his own and to which they can unconditionally entrust themselves.¹²⁰

It is the fullness of that “grace and truth” that marks the revelation of glory in the incarnate Word. That revelation not only creates distance and radiates authority but is also powered by God’s love for the world (3:16) and consists above all in the descent of the one who has power (3:13)¹²¹ and his self-surrender for the life of the world (6:51) and for the sheep of his flock (10:11ff.); it is a “grace” that at the same time proves its “truth” and reliability by the fact that he loved to the end his own who were in the world (13:1) and that of those whom the Father gave him not one will be lost, but he gives them eternal life and no one will snatch them out of his hand (10:28, 29).

It is also clear from these last words of vs. 14 that, however much in the prologue and throughout the Gospel everything is focused on the glory of Christ as the Son of God, the soteriological significance of his coming is not thereby pushed into the background. Rather, it is the high glory of God’s nearness “in the flesh” that determines the fullness of the grace and truth revealed in Christ (cf. 3:1-17). In vss. 16-18 these last words of vs. 14 are explicated further. When we come to them there we will have to consider to what degree this qualification of the glory of the only begotten from the Father has its background in the story of the theophany at Sinai in Exodus 33 and 34.

15 First, however, comes the second reference to the “witness” of John,¹²² this time in relation to the glory of the one coming after him. The Evangelist cites here a testimony—described more exactly as a proclamation (“cried”)¹²³ that recurs more precisely localized in vss. 29ff. and also refers back (“of whom I said”) to what John had told the Jews earlier (though it is recounted later, in vss. 23ff.). The manner in which John testified of the glory of “the coming one” is characteristic for his role as a forerunner, one who can speak of the coming one only in veiled and, in a sense, paradoxical language: “He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.” The translation is difficult because the temporal and the spatial are involved in a play on words.¹²⁴ But the intent is clear: “He who comes after me (i.e., whose forerunner I am) has left me behind,” obviously in the metaphorical sense of “has surpassed me in importance, has put me in the shadows.” “For”—and this in view of the first clause is the paradoxical part—“he was before me.” This explains the superiority of him who came after John (elsewhere, too, chronological priority is considered proof of superiority, e.g., 1 Tm. 2:13).¹²⁵ What John had in mind with “before me” remains unclear (“mightier than I” in Mark and Matthew), but in the context of his witness it is limited to a general reference to the superiority of the coming one: “He was the point of it all” (see the comments below on vs. 30). In the context of the prologue these words certainly have a longer reach, namely, to the absolute beginning of all things (1:1). It is only the incarnation itself that enables us to understand the deep thrust of John’s prophetic word.¹²⁶ In the later disputes over John’s significance (see the comments on vss. 6-8), the fact that his ministry preceded that of Jesus played a role. Whether this polemic is also behind vss. 15 and 16¹²⁷ is another matter (see comments on vs. 20). Vs. 16 can be understood apart from the polemic.

Verse 16 no longer forms a part of John’s testimony but (as is evident from the word “fullness”) continues vs. 14. This obviously implies that vs. 15 is an intermezzo that the Evangelist may have inserted later. It does not, however, disturb the connection. Vs. 16 is intended as a confirmation of vs. 14, and its causal “for” (ὅτι) is not isolated by the insertion of vs. 15. Rather, it incorporates vs. 15 into what is explained.

The fullness of the Word that was from the beginning proves itself in that which “we all” have received from it: “grace upon grace.” “We all” is now the appropriate expression because not only the “we” of vs. 14 is meant but the entire community of those who believe in Christ. Of the hendiadys “grace and truth” in vs. 14 only the first term is repeated in this hard-to-translate phrase: “grace upon grace.”¹²⁸ Some interpret this occurrence of ἀντί, “upon,” as referring to substitution: The grace of Christ takes the place of that of the Old Testament, the covenant given at Sinai (cf. vs. 17). In my view this is incorrect because John’s Gospel does not understand the relation of the old and the new, Moses and Christ, in that way (cf., e.g., 5:39, 45f., and the comments below on vs. 17). Others read the “for” (ἀντί) as expressing the correspondence between grace and the giver of grace. This would, however, be a very difficult way to convey that idea.

More appealing is the view that interprets that “grace for grace” accumulatively.¹²⁹ The phrase then serves to explicate “his fullness.” This translation is all the more commendable if—as will be further discussed in the comments on vs. 17—one may relate this double expression to the revelation of God’s glory on Mt. Sinai according to Exodus 34. There “grace and truth” constitutes but one of the many designations by which Yahweh makes himself known in his glory: “Yahweh, Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin” (Ex. 34:6, 7). “Grace upon grace” then reflects the “fullness” in which Exodus 34 speaks of grace and then again more grace.¹³⁰

The Evangelist says that this abundance of grace is “received.” After all the elevated pronouncements about the Logos himself, the Evangelist thus now makes himself the spokesman for the grateful church with its experience of this grace as an ever-accessible and inexhaustible fountain.¹³¹

Verse 17, again as a further explanation (“for”), juxtaposes the “grace and truth” that came through Jesus Christ with the law that was given through Moses. This is the first and—apart from 17:3—the only time that the full name “Jesus Christ” occurs in this Gospel. Thus the approaching story announces itself. Jesus was the focus from the beginning, and everything up to this point led to his story.

The contrast with Moses (if indeed that, rather than a simple juxtaposition, is what we have here) is not straightforward. We need to ask whether all of vss. 14-18 must be read against the background of the story of the giving of the law in Exodus 34. One can advance several arguments in support of this view.¹³² Vs. 17 explicitly mentions the giving of the law. Exodus 34 mentions God’s “grace and truth”¹³³ and explicates it as “slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness …” (vss. 6f.) and describes the revelation of God’s glory to Moses (cf. Jn. 1:14). Exodus tells of Moses’ desire to “see” God’s face, just as Jn. 1:18 mentions “seeing” God. Though most interpreters acknowledge the connection with Exodus 33 and 34 at least in regard to the expression “grace and truth,”¹³⁴ only a few explore this link more deeply. That this link exists and that it illumines the comparison between Moses and Jesus is—in view of the striking points of resemblance—hard to deny.¹³⁵

On this assumption it is clear that in vs. 17 we are not dealing with a Pauline contrast between law and grace. In the giving of the law God revealed himself to Moses, when “Yahweh passed before him” (Ex. 34:6) as the God of grace and truth, steadfast love, and faithfulness. But in that event Moses was not to see God’s glory, even though he had prayed for it (33:20). Only after God had passed by would he remove from Moses the hand that covered him (33:18f.).

Therefore, the difference between Moses and Jesus Christ as it is described in Jn. 1:17 is not that Moses and the dispensation of which he was the great representative stood outside the grace and truth of which Jesus Christ was the personification. After all, it was just before the giving of the law that the Lord revealed himself to Moses in the “fullness” of his grace. Still, however unequalled Moses’ significance was as the mediator between God and the people of Israel, he could not see God’s glory except from afar as the last rays of the sun, and even less could he be the bearer or dispenser of that glory in its fullness. But of Jesus Christ we are now told that grace and truth “came through him.” That is, he not only proclaimed grace and truth but, as the one who was from above and into whose hand the Father had given all things (cf. 3:31, 35), he himself represented them in such a way that “from his fullness we have all been allowed to receive” (vs. 16). It is in this totally different background of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ that everything ends in the last verse of the prologue, which is thus the summation and intensification of its entire content.

Some interpreters go further and are of the opinion that Moses and Jesus are not opposed here as representatives of two dispensations, the first of less value by comparison with the second. This is true of the law, to be sure, for it was temporary and antiquated, but what Moses saw of the revelation of Yahweh’s glory was nothing other than the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn. 12:41). It differed from the revelation in the incarnate Word only in that it was temporary and restricted to Moses. For that reason “grace for grace” is not the substitution of one grace for the other but the continuation, renewal, and maintaining of the old.¹³⁶ It may be that neither here nor elsewhere does the Evangelist oppose Moses and Christ as bearers of two different “principles” or even of two different “kinds” of grace.¹³⁷ But this does not alter the fact that while Moses is the one whose significance is in the mediation of the giving of the law,¹³⁸ Christ is the one who has God’s grace and truth at his disposal. Apart from this contrast the mention of Moses here is hard to make intelligible.

That is also true of vs. 18. What has just been said about Moses resonates with the statement that “no one has ever seen God.” Although the Old Testament speaks in different ways concerning the vision of God (cf. Ex. 33:11, 20; Nu. 12:8; Dt. 18:16),¹³⁹ the persistent view is that for no one, not even for Moses, can God be an object of direct observation and that the human person cannot even exist in God’s unveiled presence.

In vs. 18b this divine presence is attributed to “God’s only begotten Son,¹⁴⁰ who is in the bosom of the Father” (see the comments on vs. 14). The idea that already in Pr. 8:30 this last phrase referred to the transcendent Logos as one who “was enthroned before all time like a child on the lap of his father”¹⁴¹ seems unacceptable on general grounds.¹⁴² Also, the imagery is different here in John: It is not that of a child seated on his father’s lap but that of two adults reclining next to each other at the same table, able to converse intimately (cf. 13:23). In this imagery there is also perhaps an allusion to the contrasting position of Moses (“you will see my back, but my face will not be seen,” Ex. 33:18-23).

In any case, it is from this unique and direct communion with the Father, the immediacy of this “seeing” and “hearing,” that the Son can speak (6:46; cf. 3:11, 32; 5:19f.). Therefore, the concluding statement of vs. 18 and of the entire prologue is: “He it is who has made God known (to us).”¹⁴³

And thus the circle is completed. No one, of all the witnesses to God, has witnessed to God like the one who was from the beginning with God and was God. No one ascended to God but he who descended from him (3:13). He who comes from above is above all and bears witness to what he has seen and heard (3:31). That is the great thrust of the prologue, and it keeps returning in the Gospel. It is only in that light that we can understand what the Gospel will from this point say about the coming and the work of Jesus Christ.

1. For this perspective, see the instructive article by M. D. Hooker, “John’s Prologue and the Messianic Secret,” NTS 21 (1974), pp. 40-58, esp. pp. 45ff.

2. J. A. T. Robinson, “The Relation of the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John,” NTS 9 (1963), p. 122.

3. Cf. C. K. Barrett: “The Prologue is necessary to the Gospel, as the Gospel is necessary to the Prologue; the history explicates the theology, and the theology interprets the history” (“The Prologue of St. John’s Gospel,” in his New Testament Essays, 1972, p. 48). See also my “The Structure and Scope of the Prologue to the Gospel of John,” in Placita Pleiadia (in honor of G. Sevenster), 1966, pp. 191, 199f.; and my Het Woord is vlees geworden. Beschouwingen over het eigen karakter van het Evangelie van Johannes, 1979, p. 17.

4. As a substitute for an earlier and shorter preface, of which traces can still be found in the present prologue (vss. 6-8, 15); so Robinson, “Relation of the Prologue,” pp. 120f.

5. An exception to this is Bultmann’s view of the “hymn” as pre-Christian, derived from the circle around John the Baptist. There use of Logos as a name is said to have been applied to John. The Evangelist, who came from this circle, is said to have transferred the name to Jesus, thus claiming for him the honor that John’s disciples accorded to their teacher. This, says Bultmann, also explains the “negative” statements about John in vss. 6-8 and 15. Bultmann, Comm., p. 17. This opinion has not found much acceptance.

6. Thus in vs. 1: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God.” In vs. 3 the term is “was made.” The pattern is clearest in vss. 4 and 5: “In him was life. The life was the light of humanity. The light shines in the darkness. The darkness.…” Note also “world” in vss. 9 and 10, “his own” in vs. 11a-b, “receive” in vss. 11b and 12a, “glory” in vs. 14a-b, and “fullness” in vss. 14b and 16.

7. See the comparative overview of the opinions of eight scholars in Brown, Comm. I, p. 22, each of whom has made a different choice. Brown himself, “with great hesitancy,” adds his own as a ninth option, “emphasizing its tentative nature.”

8. See also my “Structure and Scope,” p. 191.

9. Cf. E. Haenchen, “Probleme des johanneïschen ‘Prologs,’ ” in Gott und Mensch. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1965, pp. 114f.; idem, Comm. I, pp. 125, 127. Cf. also Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 254ff., on vss. 6-8, as also on vs. 5 (“a digression of the evangelist”). See also Schnackenburg’s “Logos-Hymnos und johanneïscher Prolog,” in Biblische Zeitschrift 1 (1957), pp. 66-109, esp. 103f.

10. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 16f., 48.

11. Cf. C. K. Barrett’s harsh judgment: “The analysts—Bultmann, Käsemann, Haenchen—have forgotten that exegesis must in the end concern itself with the entire text und contented themselves with reconstructing a primitive form, an Urprolog, of which the canonic text is an inferior, bowdlerized version, which can be safely consigned to the historical museum” (New Testament Essays, pp. 28, 29). This applies more to Haenchen than to Bultmann.

12. Such as Bultmann, Schnackenburg, Haenchen, and Wikenhauser in their commentaries, E. Käsemann, “Zur Johannes-Interpretation in England,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen II, 1960, 131-55; idem, “The Structure and Purpose of the Prologue to John’s Gospel,” in New Testament Questions of Today, 1969, pp. 138-67; J. Jeremias, Der Prolog des Johannesevangeliums, 1967, pp. 7ff.

13. So, e.g., S. Pancaro, The Law in the Fourth Gospel, 1975, p. 535.

14. See esp. E. Ruckstuhl, Die literarische Einheit des Johannesevangeliums, 1951; W. Eltester, “Der Logos und sein Prophet,” in Apophoreta (Festschrift for E. Haenchen), 1964, pp. 109-34; M. D. Hooker, “John the Baptist and the Johannine Prologue,” NTS 16 (1970), pp. 354-58; Barrett, “Prologue”; P. Borgen, Logos Was the True Light, 1983, pp. 13f.; see further the list of authors assembled by E. Loper in R. A. Culpepper, “The Pivot of John’s Prologue,” NTS 27 (1980), p. 1, n. 5.

15. Ruckstuhl, Literarische Einheit. Cf. his review after twenty-five years in “Johannine Language and Style,” in L’Évangile de Jean, ed. M. de Jonge, 1977, pp. 126f. On stylistic criteria see also E. Schweizer, Ego Eimi, 1939, 1965, pp. 87f., later expanded and supplemented by R. Fortna in The Gospel of Signs, 1970, and W. Nicol, The Sēmeia in the Fourth Gospel, 1972.

16. Cf. Schnackenburg, “Logos-Hymnos und johanneïscher Prolog,” pp. 78ff.

17. See esp. the penetrating criticism by Barrett, “Prologue.”

18. H. Gese, “The Prologue to John’s Gospel,” in Essays on Biblical Theology, 1981, pp. 167-222, esp. pp. 170, 177ff.

19. Cf. also Barrett, “Prologue.”

20. Cf. B. Lindars, “Traditions behind the Fourth Gospel,” in L’Évangile de Jean, pp. 107-24, esp. p. 122, n. 51.

21. P. Borgen, “Observations on the Targumic character of the Prologue of John,” NTS 16 (1970), pp. 288-95; idem, Logos Was the True Light, 1983, pp. 13ff.

22. Borgen, “Observations,” p. 290.

23. Apparently “with God” (πρóς + accusative) is intended as an indication not only of place but also of disposition and orientation (cf. 1 Jn. 3:21; 5:14; see further the comments on 1:18).

24. Bultmann, Comm., p. 21.

25. Cf. Brown, Comm. I, p. 253: “The Prologue has carried personification further than the OT did …, but that development stems from the Incarnation” (italics added).

26. So Haenchen, Comm. I, 135f.

27. Ibid., 136.

28. Cf. Bultmann’s exegesis of 1:1f., especially his comments on the Logos in his Comm., pp. 19-31. He seeks “what possible forms of expression were open to the author; the possibilities being those he has inherited with the tradition in which he stands. What the author intends to say here and now, is of course not simply to be deduced from these possibilities: but they have given a particular direction to what he intends to say, and have imposed particular limits …” (p. 20, italics original). The breadth of this “tradition” as Bultmann conceives it is evident from the scope of his investigation into the background of the prologue.

29. For a comparison of the prologue with the Hermetic literature and Philo’s writings, see C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 1953, pp. 10-73. For a critical response to Dodd, see G. D. Kilpatrick, “The Religious Background of the Fourth Gospel,” in Studies in the Fourth Gospel, ed. F. L. Cross, 1957, pp. 36-44, and Bultmann, as noted below.

30. Dodd, Interpretation, pp. 8, 9.

31. See, e.g., already E. M. Sidebottom, The Christ of the Fourth Gospel, 1961, pp. 16ff. and passim.

32. “Die Bedeutung der neuerschlossenen mandäischen und manichäischen Quellen für das Verständnis des Johannesevangeliums,” ZNW 24 (1925), pp. 100-146 = Bultmann, Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. E. Dinkler, 1967, 55-104.

33. See the lengthy discussion of this background in Bultmann, Comm., pp. 19-29. The conclusion is (pp. 30f.):

The Prologue’s source belongs to the sphere of a relatively early oriental Gnosticism, which has been developed under the influence of the O.T. faith in the Creator-God. This development has taken the following direction: the mythology has been severely pushed into the background; the Gnostic cosmology has been repressed and has given way to the belief in Creation; and the concern for the relation of man to the revelation of God, that is to say the soteriological concern, has become dominant.

34. Such, as early as 1961, was the view of C. Colpe in his influential work Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlösermythus, 1961, p. 10; see also below.

35. Cf. The Nag Hammadi Library in English, revised edition, 1988, pp. 511-22.

36. See, e.g., the report of the Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostischen Schriften: “Die dreigestaltigen Protennoia,” TLZ 99 (1974), 731-46, which compares the Trimorphic Protennoia with John’s prologue and concludes that the substance of the third discourse of the Protennoia, on “the Word,” is on the same level as the Logos hymn underlying John’s prologue and that “it looks at first glance as if the light falls rather from the Protennoia on John’s prologue than the reverse.” See also H. M. Schenke in Gnosis und Neues Testament, ed. K. W. Tröger, 1973, p. 225.

37. Y. Janssens, “Une source du Prologue?” in L’Évangile de Jean, pp. 355-58, regards the Old Testament rather than the Protennoia as the interpretive key to the prologue. See also J. Helderman, “In Ihren Zelten,” in Miscellanea Neotestamentica I, ed. T. Baarda, A. F. J. Klijn, and W. C. van Unnik, 1978, pp. 181-211. A mediating position is held by C. A. Evans in “On the Prologue and the Trimorphic Protennoia,” NTS 27 (1981), pp. 395-401.

38. Colpe’s Religionsgeschichtliche Schule cast much critical light on this fundamental thesis in Bultmann’s position. Colpe especially emphasized the irresponsible generalization involved in speaking of the myth as if it were a single unified entity that can be found ready-made in the writings in question. On the contrary, the Gnostic concept of redemption is far too complicated and diverse for anyone to be able to reconstruct the model of a mythical redeemer figure from it (Colpe, pp. 203ff.; see also p. 171).

39. Cf. E. Fascher, “Christologie und Gnosis im vierten Evangelium,” TLZ 93 (1968), p. 726.

40. Others have pointed out that the idea of a descending and ascending divine messenger or redeemer was so widespread in the Mediterranean world, notably in Hellenistic Judaism, that it is impossible to see why, for such “hypostatic” discourse, Gnosticism should have to provide the material. E.g., C. H. Talbert, “The Myth of a Descending-Ascending Redeemer in Mediterranean Antiquity,” NTS 22 (1976), pp. 418-40.

41. On “the search for the intellectual milieu of the Evangelist” see, e.g., the overview in R. Kysar, The Fourth Evangelist and His Gospel: An Examination of Contemporary Scholarship, 1975, pp. 106f. He concludes that “the Gnostic hypothesis for the background of the logos concept appears less tenable in the light both of the stronger evidence for an Old Testament-Jewish milieu and the effective refutations for a gnostic influence” (p. 111).

42. But in Wis. 7:22[21] Wisdom is called ἡ πάντων τεχνῖτις, which some translate as “the fashioner of all things,” others as “skilled in all things,” which in this context seems more fitting. Cf., however, Pr. 3:19 and 3:34 (LXX!). Apparently the boundaries are fluid here. Cf. also my Paul and Jesus, 1957, pp. 124ff.

43. Thus, e.g., Bultmann, who also believes, however, that the Wisdom myth is only a variant on the pagan revealer myth and therefore that the similarity between Wisdom and the Logos is based not on the latter’s dependence on the former but on their common rootage in this myth (Bultmann, Comm., p. 23, n. 2).

44. See above,

45. See above,

46. Haenchen, Comm. I, 138f.

47. Ibid., 139f.

48. Cf. Strack/Billerbeck II, pp. 353ff.

49. On this, see esp. Gese, “Prologue” (see n. 18 above), according to whom the post-exilic wisdom tradition, in contrast with the forms of wisdom developing outside Judaism in the direction of philosophy, is peculiar to Israel (190f.). With regard to the Old Testament background of the prologue, we are not just dealing here with “connections” but with “the real relationship of the entire text [of the prologue] to the whole Old Testament” (p. 169).

50. So Gese, “Prologue,” 196f.

51. So Gese, “Prologue,” p. 197. This disparity of Wisdom and the Logos is also recognized by Schulz, Comm., pp. 27f., when he asserts that the absolute personification of the Logos cannot be explained from the background in the wisdom literature. But for him this is proof that this absolute formulation of the prologue stems from Hellenistic Gnosticism.

52. So most interpreters.

53. Cf. Gese, “Prologue,” p. 192.

54. Notably advanced by Haenchen; see above.

55. Even though Gese also thinks that there is in 1 Enoch 42 a striking parallel to vss. 10-13 of the prologue, he, too, believes that in tradition-historical interpretation of the prologue “it would be best not to begin with this late apocalyptic use of the wisdom motif,” “since we have here, not a text from wisdom literature which fully represents a specific stage in this tradition, but only a borrowing of content that is then totally subordinated to the apocalyptic aspect of the document” (“Prologue,” p. 202).

56. Cf., e.g., Bultmann, Comm., p. 19.

57. In this context πάντα is even stronger than τὰ πάντα; it denotes not only the totality of all things but also their diversity; cf. οὐδὲ ἕν.

58. On this cf. also my Paul and Jesus, pp. 128ff., and my Paul: An Outline of His Theology, 1975, pp. 79ff.

59. The preposition διά with the genitive, though specifically used elsewhere for the work of the Son in distinction from that of the Father (ἐκ; cf. 1 Co. 8:6), cannot be decisive here; διά with the genitive is also used elsewhere in a general sense of God (Gl. 4:7; Rm. 8:31).

60. Text-critically the issue cannot be settled with certainty, though some scholars think that the punctuation that adds ὁ γέγονεν to vs. 4 is the lectio difficilior and that the other reading may owe its existence to dogmatic considerations arising from the Arian conflict. The twenty-sixth edition of Nestle-Aland attaches ὁ γέγονεν to what follows in vs. 4. Cf., at length, also K. Aland, “Eine Untersuchung zu Joh. 1:3-4. Über die Bedeutung eines Punktes,” ZNW 59 (1968), pp. 174f.

61. E. L. Miller, “The Logic of the Logos Hymn,” NTS 29 (1983), pp. 552-61, here p. 553.

62. The perfect γέγονεν can be easily understood as the permanent effect of ἐγένετο.

63. In order to achieve the desired parallelism in vss. 1-5 Miller, too, has to delete vss. 1c and 2 (“Logic,” 555). On the whole issue of the poetic character of the prologue, see

64. τῶν ἀνθρώπων, objective genitive.

65. Cf. Aland, “Eine Untersuchung zu Joh. 1:3-4,” p. 217.

66. Cf., e.g., E. Smilde, Leven in de johanneïsche geschriften, 1943, pp. 15, 16. On the speculations concerning light as λóγος σπερματικóς and the like, see at length A. Wind, Leven en dood in het Evangelie van Johannes en in de Serat Dewarutji, 1956, pp. 42ff.

67. According to Bultmann, φαίνει already has to refer to the incarnation in the same way as in 1 Jn. 2:8. But this must then be viewed as an anticipation of vs. 14 whereas vs. 5b is said to describe the attitude of people from the creation of the world on. The identity of the light by which people were confronted from the beginning and the nature of the incomprehension of the darkness Bultmann then tries to articulate from within his existentialist view of humanity.

68. So, e.g., Barrett: “The light shines [simply because it is light—we are not yet, in vs. 5, dealing with the incarnation] in the darkness, and the darkness has never quenched it” (New Testament Essays, p. 45). He is more nuanced in Comm. (p. 158), where he believes he can combine the two meanings. Cf. also G. Delling, TDNT IV, p. 10: “to vanquish the power of His light”; Bernard, Comm. I, p. 6, thinks of the creation story, in which the light drives the darkness from the chaos.

69. κατέλαβον. What is in view, according to Bultmann, is not intellectual understanding but, as in vss. 10 and 11, “the comprehension of faith”; for his reasoning here see his Comm., p. 48, n. 1. Similar uses of καταλαμβάνω are in, e.g., Rm. 9:30; 1 Co. 9:24; Ph. 3:12; Ep. 3:18. Perhaps on this basis one can also translate it here as “appropriate,” “absorb,” or “grasp.” To be sure, in Jn. 12:35 we read: ἵνα μὴ σκοτία ὑμᾶς καταλάβῃ, in which the verb has the meaning “overtake.” But that is different from “vanquish.” And “overtake” does not fit in 1:5. Therefore one must understand 1:5 in a way similar to vss. 10 and 11. See also H. Conzelmann’s argument in TDNT IX, p. 352, n. 345.

70. For this exegesis see also Käsemann, “Structure and Purpose,” pp. 142ff.

71. As does Käsemann, following Bultmann. Käsemann is concerned that the parallelism between vs. 5 and vss. 9ff. not be obscured (see n. 70 above). But the criterion for the prologue’s structure is not its literary form but the Johannine pattern of thought, which is one of return and repetition of the same motifs and of progressive expansion of the field of thought. Thus also here: That which was provisionally concluded in vs. 5 is taken up again and continued in the new beginning in vss. 6ff.

72. Some scholars see a chiastic structure in the prologue; see at length and with references to targumic parallels Borgen, Logos Was the True Light, pp. 16f.; more carefully and with less force, Hooker, “John the Baptist and the Johannine Prologue,” p. 357.

73. See, e.g., M. É. Boismard, Le Prologue de Saint Jean, 1953, p. 46.

74. So Barrett, New Testament Essays, p. 39.

75. See Barrett, New Testament Essays, pp. 45f.; even more convincingly, in my opinion, Hooker, “John the Baptist and the Johannine Prologue.”

76. So also Hooker, “John the Baptist and the Johannine Prologue.”

77. See especially ibid., p. 357.

78. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 17f.

79. On this point see the comments on vs. 20 below.

80. The translation is difficult. Some scholars, claiming support in Hebrew usage (see Strack/Billerbeck II, p. 358; Schlatter, Comm., p. 15), take that which was “coming into the world” (ἐρχóμενον εἰς τòν κóσμον) as humankind. But after ἄνθρωπον this would be a pleonasm. Also that which is ἐν τῷ κóσμῳ in vs. 10 is the Logos (cf. 3:19; 6:14; 9:39; 11:27; 12:46; 16:28).

Others connect ἦν at the beginning of vs. 9 with ἐρχóμενον as a periphrastic verb with τò φῶς as the subject (“The true light was … coming.…”). But ἦν is too far removed from ἐρχóμενον for this, being separated from it by a relative clause, which would be very unusual. In this interpretation all the emphasis would lie on the light’s coming into the world, which is already assumed in vs. 5.

The emphasis is rather on ἀληθινóν and πάντα ἄνθρωπον. We should take τò φῶς τò ἀληθινóν predicatively. The subject of ἦν is “it,” the antecedent of which is φωτóς in vs. 8b and vs. 7: “It was the true light.”

Others take the Logos as the subject. But the Logos was last mentioned in vs. 4, so that here, too, the connection is very distant. It is, however, true that in vss. 10-12 αὐτóν refers to the Logos. Logos and light are identified such that “it” can easily become “he” (cf. also 1 Jn. 1:1; 2:13).

81. So correctly C. Maurer, “Der Exclusivanspruch des Christus nach Johannes,” in Studies in John (Festschrift for J. N. Sevenster), 1970, p. 145: “ἀληθινóς, which in John, in distinction from ἀληθής (= ‘faithful, reliable’), consistently means ‘unique, exclusive.’ ” For this distinction between ἀληθινóν and ἀληθής he refers to 1:9; 4:23; 6:32; 8:16; 17:3; 19:35a and to 3:33; 5:31f.; 6:55; 8:13f.; 19:35 respectively.

82. See also H. Hegermann, “Er kam in sein Eigentum,” in Der Ruf Jesu und die Antwort der Gemeinde (Festschrift for J. Jeremias), 1970, p. 131.

83. Schlatter, Bultmann, and Schnackenburg (at least in regard to the supposed original hymn; the Evangelist himself probably had Israel in mind) opt for the first view. Lindars opts for the first in regard to τὰ ἴδια but thinks of a “subtle transition” to Israel when it comes to οἱ ἴδιοι (Comm., p. 90). Opting for the second in both clauses are, among others, Lagrange, Dodd (Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p. 402), Brown, Haenchen, and Barrett (though not with certainty).

84. Schlatter writes that the word translated “receive” is characteristic for the manner in which Jesus in his human presence was received and accorded hospitality or denied access into people’s homes (Comm., p. 18); see also G. Stählin, TDNT V, p. 28, n. 191.

85. For this view (held by, e.g., Haenchen), see above,

86. On this see also M. de Jonge, Jesus: Stranger from Heaven and Son of God, 1977, pp. 151f.

87. See also A. Oepke, TDNT V, p. 653.

88. The linking of the juridical term ἐξουσία with γενέσθαι—which evidently refers here to being, not status—remains striking: “He gave power to become children of God.” But Brown, with others, believes translating ἐξουσία thus (“power,” “right”) makes of the sentence “a semi-judicial pronouncement” alien to Johannine thought: “Sonship is based on divine begetting, not on any claim on man’s part” (Comm. I, p. 11). For that reason some scholars explain ἐξουσία as a somewhat infelicitous rendering of a Semitic expression, “give” (naṯan) in the sense of “permit, grant.” In any case ἐξουσία τέκνα θεοῦ γενέσθαι does not have a strictly juridical meaning such as comes to the fore in υἱοθεσία, adoptio. Perhaps one can best translate ἐξουσία as “privilege”: τέκνα … γενέσθαι is not a description of the new birth (that does not come until vs. 13) but of the privilege of being children of God.

89. Tertullian asserts that we are dealing here with a falsification by the Valentinians who thus imported into the text their view about the class of the elect. But that is implausible simply because the Valentinians did not include “believers” among the elect. For the rejection of this reading see also the lengthy argument of Schnackenburg, Comm. I, pp. 264f.

90. So Barrett: “The Prologue reaches its climax in the assertion that Christians share the miraculous origin of the Lord” (New Testament Essays, p. 46). But then the question arises whether vs. 13 does not exclude every form of human participation in the birth intended here (not only that of a human father), and though that is true of the rebirth of believers, it would not apply to the virgin birth of Jesus.

91. So Bultmann: “Naturally οἱ ἐγενν. explains τέκνα θεοῦ and not πιστ.” (Comm., p. 59, n. 5; see also n. 4: “Naturally procreation by God is not the ‘root and presupposition’ of faith” [referring to Holtzmann’s view]).

92. Cf. also Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament I, 1951, pp. 335f. On this complex of problems see at length R. Bergmeier, Glaube als Gabe nach Johannes, 1980, pp. 213f.

93. On this relationship see also Bergmeier, Glaube als Gabe, p. 219; de Jonge, Jesus: Stranger from Heaven, p. 153.

94. Cf., e.g., de Jonge: “We would like to know what is first and what comes later, and we like to think in terms of cause and effect, but the Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle also simply put things side-by-side, and they attribute all that is good, and all that is willed and given by God to his initiative” (Jesus: Stranger from Heaven, pp. 153f.).

95. The so-called “predestinarian problem” in the Fourth Gospel; see further on 6:44f.; 10:26.

96. Cf. Bergmeier, Glaube als Gabe, pp. 219f.: “not in the sense of late Hellenistic aversion to the body as that which is characterized by ἐπιθυμία or ἡδονή.”

97. See also E. Schweizer, TDNT VII, pp. 138f., 109; Bergmeier, Glaube als Gabe, p. 221. See further under 3:6ff.

98. So Bultmann, Comm., pp. 63f., e.g.:

It is in his sheer humanity that he is the Revealer. True, his own also see his δóξα (v. 14b); indeed if it were not to be seen, there would be no grounds for speaking of revelation. But this is the paradox which runs through the whole gospel: the δóξα is not to be seen alongside the σάρξ, nor through the σάρξ as through a window; it is to be seen in the σάρξ and nowhere else. If man wishes to see the δóξα, then it is on the σάρξ that he must concentrate his attention, without allowing himself to fall a victim to appearances. The revelation is present in a peculiar hiddenness.

99. For a rebuttal of Bultmann’s exegesis, see esp. E. Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus according to John 17, 1968, pp. 11-13. Käsemann goes in the opposite direction, to the thesis that the christology of the Fourth Gospel bears a (naive) docetic character, that is, that Jesus’ humanity is regarded as little more than appearance, so that it is actually God who walks the earth in the guise of a human being (pp. 12-13, 16). For this entire discussion, see my Het Woord is vlees geworden, pp. 5f.; and in particular W. Nicol, The Sēmeia in the Fourth Gospel, 1972, pp. 130-37: “The Glory in the Flesh.”

100. Bultmann, Comm., pp. 63ff.

101. See also E. Schweizer, TDNT VII, pp. 138f.

102. See the comments on ch. 5.

103. See also Nicol, Sēmeia in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 130-37. Although Nicol opposes Bultmann as well as Käsemann, he clearly prefers the latter. He believes the translation “the Word became flesh” is not entirely correct because then “become” would have to mean “changed into.” He opts for Barrett’s translation, “The Logos came on the human scene as flesh,” and regards “flesh” as a description not of “the nature of the Logos” but of “his place, the human scene, where he had to come for the sake of manifesting himself to men” (Nicol, p. 131). In my opinion ἐγένετο says more than that.

104. Ingressive aorist (BDF §331) or “complexive” aorist (BDF §332: “for linear actions which [having been completed] are regarded as a whole”).

105. Apart from the above-mentioned view of Haenchen (

106. See above,

107. But whatever one makes of the close connection of vs. 14 with Exodus 33 and 34, the idea of God’s dwelling in the tent of meeting lies close to hand (note also the comments on vs. 17).

108. So correctly Helderman, “In Ihren Zelten,” p. 207, thus distinguishing the usage here from the reinterpretation that the term undergoes in the Trimorphic Protennoia; he appeals to C. Colpe, who writes that in this respect Johannine christology is distinguished from “the mere temporalization and historization of a mythological happening.” “It is, first and foremost, something substantially and phenomenologically new” (quoted by Helderman, p. 207, n. 100).

109. Thus some writers distinguish the pluralis apostolicus from the pluralis ecclesiasticus; e.g., de Jonge, Jesus: Stranger from Heaven, pp. 27, 205, 212. Cf. Gese, who speaks of “ ‘we,’ meaning the apostle [vs. 14] … which became in time the ‘we’ of the New Testament Church (vs. 16)” (“Prologue,” p. 183).

110. θεᾶσθαι; see also Brown’s discussion of the different words for seeing in John (Comm., I, pp. 501f.).

111. E.g., Bultmann at length, Comm., pp. 68ff.

112. See also Nicol, Sēmeia in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 132f.

113. So Bultmann on this passage.

114. So, e.g., Brown, Comm. I, p. 13. See also the lengthy treatment of this text by T. C. de Kruyf, “The Glory of the Only Son (John 1,14),” in Studies in John, pp. 111-23, who believes, esp. on the basis of 7:39, that the glory in 1:14 refers to the exaltation and glorification of Christ as God’s only Son on the cross and in the event of his death. “Only Son” would be a reference to what God sacrificed, recalling Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac: “John uses the title of Isaac,” and the use of μονογενής in this verse is soteriological more than it is christological (p. 123). However, in my opinion all this is based on an overly restricted view of the glory of the Word in the flesh, a view that is, moreover, not reconcilable with the entire thrust of the Gospel.

115. See esp. J. V. Dahms, “The Johannine Use of Monogenēs Reconsidered,” NTS 29 (1983), pp. 222-32; F. Büchsel, TDNT IV, 737–41.

116. παρά + genitive; Lindars, Comm., 96: “ ‘of the Father’ … is decisive for ‘only-begotten.’ ”

117. If one takes πλήρης as declinable, it is nominative and can strictly only go with ὁ λóγος, from which it is, however, far removed. But it can also be indeclinable, according to BAGD, s.v., though “almost only when it is used with a gen.” In that case one could link it with δóξαν (cf. the variant reading πληρη in D) or, even better, with αὐτοῦ (so BAGD).

118. See the extensive discussion in Gese, “Prologue,” 205-8.

119. Others think that here ἀλήθεια should be read against a Greek background, that it is above all an ontological concept distinguishing true reality from illusion, a contrast that—in distinction from dualistic Greek philosophy—is said to refer to the life lived genuinely under God versus the pseudolife in sin. See, e.g., G. Kittel, Die Religionsgeschichte und des Urchristentum, p. 87; so also Bultmann, Comm. and Bultmann in TDNT I, pp. 245f. But although elsewhere the element of faithfulness does not come to the fore in ἀλήθεια, in this traditional connection with grace, love, etc., it has just that meaning.

χάρις is not typically Johannine (it occurs in the Gospel only here and in vss. 16 and 17). For the conceptual linkage between love and faithfulness, see also 13:1. As to the rejoinder that the word translated by χάρις here (ḥesed) is normally translated by ἔλεος, see the contrary evidence in Gese, “Prologue,” 205, and A. Hanson, “John I:14-18 and Exodus XXXIV,” NTS 23 (1976), pp. 92f.

120. So Schlatter, Comm., p. 28: “In John, therefore, love and truth are not contrasts, for in combination they are the powers that establish community.”

121. For the central meaning of the motif of this descent in John’s Gospel, see the comments under 3:13.

122. Which we have already argued belongs to its context: see the comments on 1:6-8.

123. μαρτυρεῖ … καὶ κέκραγεν, a hendiadys in which the first verb describes the enduring significance (present tense) of John’s testimony, the second the modality of that word once for all spoken (perfect tense) as a prophetic, Spirit-inspired proclamation intended for the ears of all (cf. Ro. 9:27); see also W. Grundmann, TDNT III, pp. 901f.; Bultmann, Comm., p. 75, n. 1.

124. ὀπίσω is primarily spatial but is sometimes used temporally (BAGD, s.v.). ἔμπροσθεν is a spatial term but can refer metaphorically to rank. πρῶτος clearly refers to temporal priority (used here comparatively, not προτέρος as often in the koine). ὀπίσω may therefore be the opposite of either ἔμπροσθεν or πρῶτος.

125. See also Strack/Billerbeck III, pp. 256ff.

126. “The proposition [in 1:15] introduced by ὅτι [looks] at the matter from the standpoint of absolute chronology, which is that of the prologue,” according to O. Cullmann, “Ό ὀπίσω μου ἐρχóμενος,” in The Early Church: Historical and Theological Studies, 1956, pp. 177-82, here p. 181.

127. So already W. Baldensperger, Der Prolog des vierten Evangeliums. Sein polemischapologetischer Zweck, 1898. See further in Cullmann, “Ό ὀπίσω μου ἐρχóμενος,” pp. 181f.

128. For the different translations that have been proposed, see Hanson, “John I:14-18 and Exodus XXXIV,” p. 97.

129. BDF §208, refers to Philo, De Posteritate Caini: τὰς πρώτας χάριτας … ἑτέρας ἀντʼ ἐκείνων … καὶ ἀεὶ νέας ἀντὶ παλαιωτέρων, which would mean “an unbroken succession of grace.”

130. A similar accumulative repetition is in Ro. 1:17: “through faith for faith,” i.e., by faith alone.

131. The καί before χάριν can probably best be translated as “that is”: “Of his fullness have we all received our share, that is, grace upon grace”; cf. BDF §442.9, on epexegetical/explicative καί: “that is to say.”

132. For what follows see Hooker, “John the Baptist and the Johannine Prologue,” pp. 53ff.

133. The LXX translates it as πολυέλπος καὶ ἀληθινóς; in view of the entire context of the two passages, this is clearly no argument against the notion that John 1 refers back to Exodus 33–34; see above in the comments on vs. 14.

134. An exception is Bultmann, Comm., p. 78 (see above). There is an extensive overview of the different opinions in Hanson, “John I:14-18 and Exodus XXXIV,” p. 90.

135. Cf. Hanson, p. 95: “It would be impossible to find a scripture passage which contains more fundamental elements in common with John 1:14-18. I find it inevitable to conclude that the one is the basis of the other.”

136. So Hanson, “John I:14-18 and Exodus XXXIV,” pp. 96f., with an appeal to earlier authors such as H. J. Holtzmann and A. Loisy.

137. Against E. Grässer, who, following Bultmann, Comm., pp. 78f., sees here an absolute contrast between Christ and the Torah, the latter typifying the Jewish and the (later) Christian religion, “in which ‘Torah’ stands for a certain synagogal dogmatics, just as ἀλήθεια or Jesus Christ is the quintessence of a certain churchly, not to say, dogmatic confession”; every form of salvation-historical thinking is foreign to the Fourth Evangelist (“Die anti-jüdische Polemik im Johannesevangelium,” NTS 11 [1964], p. 79). This interpretation of the Fourth Gospel is misleading, as is evident not only from the Old Testament background of vss. 16-18 as I have described it, but also from later passages (see the comments below on chs. 4 [esp. vs. 22], 5 [esp. vss. 39 and 45ff.], 6 [esp. vss. 31ff.], and 8 [the summary after vs. 47]).

138. διὰ Μωϋσέως ἐδóθη.

139. See also Gese, “Prologue,” pp. 207f.

140. Another important reading is μονογενὴς θεóς (⁶⁶, ℵ, B) or ὁ μονογενὴς θεóς (⁷⁵, ℵ1, etc.). Although this reading is well attested and is not impossible in John (cf. 1:1; 20:28), “the only begotten God” or “God, the only begotten one” is very difficult (“θεóς cannot be defended here, for it neither fits in with the preceding θεóν κτλ., nor can it take the appositional phrase ὁ ὥν κτλ.,” Bultmann, Comm., pp. 81-82, n. 2). The material grounds against this reading motivate us to choose the reading of the later Greek mss. and the Latin and Syriac versions (μονογενῆς υἱóς).

141. So Gese, “Prologue,” p. 208.

142. See

143. ἐξηγήσατο, not in the sense of “explain” but “reveal,” referring to communication of direct knowledge of God, here on the basis of having seen God (vs. 18a; cf. F. Büchsel, TDNT II, p. 908; Bultmann, Comm.; Schnackenburg, Comm.).

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