John 1:1-14: The Classic NT Passage
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word
was fully expressive of God Himself. This was with God in the beginning.
Everything came into existence through it, and without it nothing of what came
into being existed…And the word became a human being” (John 1:1-3, 14).
The great prologue of John 1:1-14 is arguably
the greatest section of holy Scripture, dedicated to the “word” (not Word with
capital), meaning the reason and whole point of the Genesis creation, recalling
the light and life of Genesis 1 where 10 times “God said.” The “word” is the
most precious and yet also vulnerable and twistable word in Scripture, since as
Jesus observed in Luke 8:12, “whenever anyone is exposed to the word [of
the Kingdom, Matt. 13:19), the Devil is there ready to snatch that Kingdom
word/Gospel from his/her heart, so that he/she cannot believe it and be
saved.” This must be one of the greatest intelligence reports to come from
the lips of Jesus. It tells us about how to be saved and how not to be saved!
These then are issues of salvation!
According to Jesus it matters very much how we understand “word,” and the Devil
understands that well and so works to make the “word” unintelligible. I think
he has succeeded well even among unitarians. Paul made the same point when he
warned that Christians must have “a love for the truth in order to be saved”
(2 Thess. 2:10). This reminds us too that “salvation is given to those who obey
Jesus” (Heb. 5:9), and thus not given to those who disobey Jesus – not
given to those who do not have a love for truth.
That Gospel of the Kingdom word
(Matt. 13:19) was finally embodied uniquely in Jesus (John 1:14), who is never
in John or the epistles of John ever called “the word” (exception in Rev.
19:13). This is the central truth of Scripture.
I think that the Bible writers show
us here that they deliberately reserve the word “word” for what God and Jesus say,
and they avoid the confusing proposition that “Jesus is the word” or “Jesus
is the Gospel.”
John is deliberately working against
the appalling idea that Jesus is other than a genuine human person, i.e.
“flesh.” John also wants you to know that Jesus is the first and authoritative
Gospel-Message speaker. Everything depends on what Jesus says. Our
culture however has been propagandized to think that what really matters is the
work of Jesus, his death and resurrection, to the exclusion of the words
and message of Jesus. Hence the memorable saying of Billy Graham that “Jesus
came to do three days’ work — to die, be buried and rise.” Clever! But what got
left out? The word and words of Jesus and Jesus’ own summary purpose
statement that his own mission was expressly to “proclaim the Gospel of the
Kingdom” (Luke 4:43).
Some argue that “In the beginning” in
John 1:1 means the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. But as the Pulpit
Commentary notes, “From early times expositors have perceived…here a
comparison with the ‘in the beginning’ of the first verse of the book of
Genesis. This can hardly be doubted…The Socinian view that it referred to ‘the
beginning of the preaching of the Gospel’ [is] not now seriously maintained.”[1]
So also a former schoolmate of mine, Don
Cupitt, later a professor of theology at Cambridge: “John’s words ought to be
translated, ‘the Word was with God the Father, and the Word was the Father’s
own Word,’ to stress that the Word is not an independent divine being,
but is the only God’s own self-expression.’” This preserves
monotheism.
In John 1:1 “the word” cannot be a person.
The preposition pros in the “word was with God” is used when a thing,
not a person, is with a person. Thus the word cannot be a person, but rather
the word or Gospel Message. When John means a thing with a person he uses pros,
as in John 1:1.
Note too, the neuter “light” of John
verse 5 becomes the masculine person, Jesus in verse 10. That is, the “it” of
the light becomes the “him” of the Messiah who as the prologue develops,
appears as the uniquely begotten Son, there being almost certainly a reference
to his virginal begetting in John 1:13 (reading “he who was begotten by God”).
Then in John 1:14 “the word became
flesh” describes the same transition and transformation as the “water became
wine,” and “stones become bread.” The word “became” here marks, of
course, a vivid superseding of water by wine. Thus also the word becoming
flesh means that the word changed from one thing or form to another. It is
logically impossible for the “word” of John 1:1 to be Jesus!
Such a reading would empty the word
“became” of all meaning. The point can be made like this. When egeneto =
“became” is found with a complement, in the form A became B, then B
cannot equal or be the same as A. Thus Jesus is a human being who perfectly
speaks the word or message of God his Father. The “word” of John 1:1 has
assumed an exciting brand new definition (v. 14), a human person, Jesus. God
now speaks uniquely, as Jesus keeps saying.
The meaning of “became flesh” is
agreed by all the standard lexicons. The word became flesh (o logos sarx
egeneto). “Of persons and things, which change their nature, to
indicate their entering a new condition: become something” (Bauer’s
Lexicon). As also in: “I became a minister.” “It became a large tree.” “He
did not exalt himself to be made high priest.” “Water became wine.” Lot’s wife “became
a pillar of salt.” The “staff became a snake.” Daniel Wallace: “as in sarx
egeneto [became flesh], sarx [flesh] expresses the state into
which the divine word entered by a definite act.”
Compare, by contrast, “the word was
God” (John 1:1: een, verb ‘to be,’ not ‘become’). There is no
change or becoming in verse 1! “Was” in verse 1 is not the same as “became” in
verse 14. “Observe the contrast between the egeneto (became) of John the
Baptist’s appearance [v. 6] and the een (was) of the logos, between the
man John, sent from God, and the ‘word became flesh.’”[2]
As Goppelt says so well, Jesus is
what the word became, not one-to-one equal to the word: “The logos of
the prologue became Jesus. Jesus was the logos become flesh, not the
logos as such.”
“Became” in verse 14 marks the transition.
Note how obviously Jewish all this is:
“One of the most interesting correspondences
in the Qumran literature is in fact with John 1:3: ‘By his knowledge
everything has been brought into being. And everything that is, he established
by his purpose; and apart from him nothing is done’ 1QS 11:11). The
equation Knowledge = Wisdom = Logos would not be hard to make.”[3]
Compare this with Genesis:
“‘And God said’ at the beginning of
each work of creation including the two providential words of verses 28, 29 —
ten times in all (hence the later Jewish dictum: ‘by ten sayings the world was
created,’ Aboth 5:1)…In the fact that God creates by a word, there are several
important truths implicit. It is an indication not only of the ease with which
He accomplished His work, and of His omnipotence and also of the fact that He
works consciously and deliberately. Things do not emanate from Him
unconsciously, nor are they produced by a mere act of thought…but by an act of
will of which the concrete word is the outward expression. Each stage in His
creative work is the realization of a deliberately formed purpose, the word
being the mediating principle of creation, the means or agency through which
His will takes effect. Cp. Ps. 33:6, 9, also 107:20, 147:15, 18 in which
passages the word is regarded as a messenger between God and His
creatures.”[4]
All this information is meant to help
us avoid the very false capital “W” in John 1:1 in almost all translations,
which: 1) destroyed both monotheism and 2) the human Jesus (which is
antichrist, 1 John 4:2, 2 John 7-9). “That Jesus has come in the flesh
separates belief from unbelief.”[5]
So the docetists (docetism is belief
that Jesus only appeared to be a man, but really was not) ended up
twisting John, who was deliberately wanting to be anti-docetic!
Today we still have to oppose the
false notion that “the word” was a person, before it finally became a
person in the summary verse 14. We see then that 1 John (the Epistle) is John’s
own effort (with its 7 times, including 2:24, repeated “that which,” not “he
who”) to frustrate and correct the error being created out of his Gospel! Of
all errors, the greatest error!
Any Jew would hear wisdom = word.
Jesus is the incarnation (not “Incarnation,” capital “I”) of wisdom and
word. He is fully human, and to say otherwise, i.e. that he preexists, makes
him not human! “Preexistence” creates apostasy and polytheism! Kegan Chandler (The
God of Jesus in Light of Christian Dogma) wrote a whole chapter on “another
Jesus,” the Jesus who cannot be really human because he begins as non-human.
On a related subject, I note that we
do not pay enough attention to the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.
These surely tell us that Jesus was human! The only Jesus there is! God can
obviously not have a genealogy!
The celebrated work by Lord Hervey on
the Genealogies of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (free online) shows
that the royal line from Solomon came to a screeching and tragic end when Jehoiachin
was cursed and not permitted to have sons as royalty fit to sit on the throne
of David (the ultimate privilege and honor). So what has to happen? They
brought in a legal successor to Jehoiachin as in Matthew 1:12. His name was Salathiel
and he was descended from another son of David, i.e. Nathan. This ensured that
Jesus was the true Messiah who, to qualify, must be a descendant of David, and
could not be via the Solomon’s line cursed in Jehoiachin (Jer. 22).
You see how important the genealogies are! They prove the human Jesus, just as we prove it also by his “begetting” (coming into existence: Matt. 1:20, Luke 1:35). Salathiel replaces the cursed line in Jehoiachin. This guarantees continuity for the royal line from David to Jesus! There are not two Salathiels, but just one who appears in the Matthew and Luke genealogies to repair the damage done by the failed and cursed Jehoiachin (Jer. 22). These are not small issues, which this conference is tackling. We need to make sure we have taken the information in and are ready to pass it on to others, which is what the Great Commission demands.
[1] “The Gospel
of John,” Pulpit Commentary, 1950, p. 4-5.
[2] Ibid., p.
11.
[3] J.A.T. Robinson, Twelve More New
Testament Studies, p. 75
[4]
Driver, Commentary on Genesis
[5] New
International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol. 1, p. 678
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