The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (26 page)

Although there are also traces of the wisdom tradition discernible in the body of the Gospel, the debt is especially clear in the Prologue—to which we now turn.  After its dramatic opening, the Prologue continues with what looks like an interruption: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him” (1:6-7). Raymond Brown reports with apparent approval “an interesting suggestion” of M.-E. Boismard and others about the origin of these verses, “that they were the original opening of the Gospel which was displaced when the Prologue was added.”
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I believe that we would be right to adopt this suggestion. Whoever had the idea of using the hymn or poem we call the Prologue as a preface to the Gospel (let us call him the evangelist) recognized the remarkable affinity between his own conception of Jesus and that of the author of the hymn (presumably a member of his own community). He realized how dramatic and powerful an opening this hymn would provide for his own work, but he was also on the lookout for a strong beginning for the body of the Gospel that starts immediately after the Prologue. He would get this with the words: “This is the testimony of John” (1:19). At the same time, he wanted to retain the notice concerning the Baptist. So it occurred to him that by moving the original opening to its present position (as a little parenthesis within the hymn—1:6-7) he could effectively introduce his first witness to Jesus, and at the same time prepare the way for the dramatic dialogue that now follows the Prologue between John (never called
Baptist
in this Gospel) and the priests and Levites. In its present position, the statement concerning John interrupts the thought of the Prologue very abruptly, but these two apparently intrusive verses must have been inserted deliberately. This is also true of v. 15, adopted from 1:31 and put in parentheses in the RSV: “John bore witness to him, and cried, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.”’”

Whatever truth there may be in this admittedly hypothetical restoration is immaterial to the next big question concerning the Prologue—perhaps the biggest of all—which has divided Johannine scholars into two camps. Many, perhaps most, regard it as axiomatic that every word transmitted as
The Gospel according to John
must be taken as the composition of the evangelist unless there is compelling proof to the contrary,
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 and hold that the Prologue in particular was composed precisely in order to furnish a proper introduction to body of the Gospel. C. H. Dodd and Rudolf Bultmann, who agree on this if not on much else, believe that the Prologue should govern our understanding of all that follows. Bultmann declares that “
the theme of the Gospel
is stated in the ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο.”
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Dodd says that the “pre-temporal (or more properly, non-temporal) existence of the Son is affirmed with emphasis, and assumed all through the gospel.”
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C. K. Barrett, though he has his own views about how the Prologue should be described, takes a similar line to Dodd: “The Evangelist may have drawn to some extent on existing material—what writer does not? But the Prologue stands before us as a prose introduction which has not been submitted to interpolation [!] and was specially written (it must be supposed) to introduce the gospel—and, it may be added, to sum it up.”
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A later scholar states firmly of the Prologue that “the pre-existent state of the Logos is the lens through which the rest of the Gospel and the entire life of Jesus are to be viewed,”
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and he backs up his statement with a footnote citing the work of several earlier commentators, including Barrett (though not Dodd or Bultmann).

Perhaps the majority of scholars, including some of those just mentioned (not Bultmann), think that the Gospel was composed from beginning to end at a stretch, and they consequently tend to assume that the Prologue was written, like many operatic overtures, with the express purpose of introducing some of the Gospel’s great themes. It is true that certain key ideas occur in the first few verses: light and darkness, the world, life, and the widespread (though ultimately ineffective) opposition to Jesus on the part of his own people. On the other hand, the amazing idea that the Logos was somehow to be identified with God’s plan for the world and for humanity in general
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is restricted to these few verses, and the identification of life with “the life of men” involves a very different conception of life from that found in the body of the Gospel, where life is the concomitant reward of faith, and not an attribute of human nature. Moreover the Logos, the undisputed subject of the Prologue, vanishes from sight after the Prologue is over, and never reappears. Barrett, who knows this perfectly well, brazens it out: “If the Prologue was intended to express in eighteen verses the theological content of twenty chapters a good deal of condensation was necessary; and much of John’s Christology is condensed in the word λόγος.”
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But this
if
-clause (not argued) represents an assumption, and an unlikely one at that, if only because the word λόγος occurs in this sense nowhere else in the Gospel. How is it possible to move from the use of a single word in the Prologue to the complex Christology of the body of the Gospel, where there is not so much as a hint of incarnation, and Jesus’ entry into the world is always referred to either as a descent (as Son of Man) or a mission?

A single sentence in Raymond Brown’s commentary shows just how difficult it is to rid oneself of the assumption that the whole Gospel is to be read in the light of the Prologue. At the very start of his commentary (after more than a hundred introductory pages) he describes the Prologue as “an early Christian hymn, probably stemming from Johannine circles, which has been adapted to serve as an overture to the Gospel narrative of the career of the incarnate Word.”
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Yet, as we have just noted, the remainder of the Gospel says nothing at all about the Incarnate Word. Even though Brown is one of a handful of scholars to recognize that the evangelist did not actually write the Prologue but simply adopted (and adapted) it to serve as a preface to his own work, he continues to read “the career of the incarnate Word” into the body of the Gospel. It is rather the case that the Incarnation is
not
presupposed in the body of the Gospel, and that themes such as exaltation and glorification, and also the descent/ascent of the Son of Man, were worked out and worked into the Gospel before the evangelist had taken over the Prologue and integrated it into his own work. We must accept that if the evangelist was not himself the author of the Prologue, then however readily he accepted it he cannot be credited with its leading ideas. What we
can
say, however, is that, by placing the Prologue at the head of his own work, the evangelist expressed his recognition that God’s plan for humankind was embodied in the story of Jesus Christ that he was about to tell. The Prologue is on the same wavelength as the Gospel as a whole and sufficiently in conformity with the thinking of the evangelist to make it easy to see why he might have seized upon it eagerly as an ideal introduction to his own work. Up to that point it had not occurred to him that the Incarnate Word might be an appropriate way of expressing his own conviction that Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life.” But after he was shown a wonderful hymn composed in all probability by a member of his own community, a hymn that brilliantly and succinctly expressed this view, then no doubt he will also have seen how closely the career of Jesus, sought by some, rejected by most, mirrored the fate of Wisdom when she came to earth.
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Have I
proved
that the Prologue was not originally composed by the evangelist himself? Have I
proved
that it was added to the Gospel later on in the course of its composition? Perhaps not. I submit, however, that I have made a good case.
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But there remains one further argument, which in my opinion is decisive. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). With this sentence Moses has been ousted from his position at the heart of the Jewish religion; his privileged role as God’s intermediary has been taken away from him and conferred instead on Christ. This is the announcement of a new religion and could not possibly have been written or uttered by anyone in the Jesus group until a moment in the life of the synagogue when the rebels within it had abandoned the law so completely that they could now see that the teaching of Jesus, not that of Moses, was God’s central revelation to humankind. The uncompromising opposition to traditional Judaism expressed in the Prologue would have been inconceivable before the separation of the two parties in the synagogue, and consequently the Prologue must have been composed quite late in the long history of their many disagreements.

Commenting on 1:18 (“no one has seen God”), Brown remarks that it is probably directed against Moses, and adds, “We may well suspect that this theme was part of the Johannine polemic against the synagogue, for it is
repeated
in v 37 and vi 46.”
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He also says that John is holding up the example of the only Son “who has not only seen the Father but is ever at his side.” Yet the Prologue does
not
say that the Son has seen the Father: it says that
no one
has seen God. The suggestion that this is part of a polemic against the synagogue is certainly a shrewd one. John 5:37, however (“his voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen”), was probably written by the evangelist before he had become acquainted with the hymn that he eventually adopted as a preface to his own work; and 6:46 (“Not that anyone has seen God except him who is from God; he has seen the Father”) is best read as a deliberate qualification of the uncompromising negation in the Prologue—at first sight a surprising idea but one that gains plausibility if it is conceded that chapter 6 belongs to the second edition of the Gospel and was quite possibly written about the time that the Prologue was adapted to form a preface to what follows, forcing a rearrangement of the original opening.
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In asserting that the polemical comment against Moses in 1:18 is
repeated
later in the Gospel, Brown has lost sight of his own suggestion that the hymnlike Prologue was not added to the Gospel until the second edition.

We have seen that by using the Prologue as a preface to his own writing, the evangelist proclaimed his own faith in the Incarnate Word. We have also seen (in Excursus IV) that the central motif of the Prologue is not creation, as virtually all commentators simply take for granted, but the revelation of God’s plan for humankind as it has been manifested to Christian believers in the life of Jesus. As Paul Lamarche observes, what takes the place of the Johannine Logos in this sentence is the design of God—the divine plan,
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a conception very different from what we find in a typical apocalypse. God’s plan for the world (the Logos) is not revealed by a visionary seer who has seen God and is consequently in a position to pass on his knowledge to others. Rather it is disclosed by a theophany (“we have gazed on his glory”), a form of God’s communication with the world found very often in the Bible. The revelation or “exposition” (ἐξήγησις) of God made by Jesus Christ is not, according to the Prologue, made possible by a vision.
That
form of revelation is what the supporters of Moses maintain (it is a constant theme in the Jewish tradition), but they are wrong to do so. Nor is it the case that the Jesus Christ of the Prologue acts as an
angelus interpres
, expounding and explaining a new revelation. No:
he is the embodiment of that revelation
. “Grace and truth,” states the Prologue, “came about through Jesus Christ” (1:17), and “it is the only Son, on the Father’s lap, who has been his manifestation” (1:18). The reason for rejecting the standard translation (“he has made him known”) of the final two words, ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο, is not only that it inserts an object (“him,” that is, the Father) where there is none in the Greek text, but also that it conflicts both with the body of the Gospel (where Jesus conspicuously refrains from giving any account of God at all, except to call him “the one who sent me”) and with the Prologue itself, where the mode of revelation is not explanatory but, as we have just observed, theophanic.
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The Prologue states firmly (and, one might think, unambiguously) in its opening verse that the Word was God. But this follows the statement, “the Word was with God,” or perhaps “close to God” (πρὸς τὸν θεόν), and it soon emerges that the Word is the masculine surrogate of Wisdom, whose presence by God’s side is highlighted by one of the earliest and most beautiful hymns to Wisdom in the Hebrew canon: “I was beside him. . . . I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men” (Prov. 8:30-31). But then comes the momentous assertion, “the Word became flesh,” proclaiming what was to become one of the cardinal tenets of Christianity; and even if we reject the reading “the only-begotten God” (μονογενὴς θεός) in the last verse (which is read by all the best manuscripts), in favor of the less well attested υἱός (“Son”), it is hard to resist the conclusion that the author of the Prologue thought that Jesus was divine in the strong sense of the word.

We should also no doubt conclude that, since the evangelist fully accepted the Prologue, he too believed that Jesus was divine. Even so, it is worth asking whether this belief is equally evident in the body of the Gospel. And for this we must inquire into the evangelist’s use of another Jewish tradition—that of the Danielic Son of Man.

Although the only occurrence of the name of Moses in John 3 is in v. 14, Moses must be included in any list of an indefinitely large number of Jewish seers of whom it is implied in the previous verse that they did not ascend into heaven: “no one has ascended . . . except the Son of Man.”
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Hugo Odeberg starts his long commentary on 3:13 by observing, “The wording οὐδεὶς ἀναβέβηκεν etc. immediately suggests that there is a refutation here of some current notions of ascent into heaven. Such notions were, as is well-known, frequent.”
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He continues by drawing on his well-stocked memory and citing a number of possible targets (Enoch, Levi, Isaiah, St. Paul, Rabbi Ishmael, the four who entered paradise), adding the names of Abraham and Moses only much later.
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Eventually, after several pages of what he admits to be mostly irrelevant citations,
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he concludes: