ONE scholar has compared theories about how John’s prologue was composed with attempting to iron a pleated garment in a way that makes the pleats go in one other direction. I like that homely image. It expresses how we absorb the Fourth Gospel’s viewpoint, regardless that we cannot ensure which community produced it, or the way it was compiled, or the way it pertains to other New Testament theologies. The moment we glance behind what we all know, attempting to reconstruct origins, we’re working against the grain. We can press and press the material, but the unique configuration continues to be imprinted.
The prologue includes some powerful theological terms — “Word” (logos), “grace” (charis), “fullness” (pleroma, 1.16) — that are never mentioned again. Is this an indication that one other hand has composed it? Or that the writer of John’s Gospel is basically a compiler of various sources? One suggestion is that it was a hymn that the Evangelist repurposed. That fuels further speculation about whether the “Logos/ Word” idea pre-existed the Christian faith.
If the prologue had a separate origin, that fact wouldn’t invalidate the Gospel’s truth. After all, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are usually not undermined by their separate infancy narratives. It would show only that Christians did then what Christians do now: gather evidence/ideas/signs, which express their experience of “God, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5.19).
We must not lose sight of the elemental power in John’s enigmatic prologue. It was not written to maintain theologians on a gravy train of metaphysical speculation, but to talk plainly to its audience, as “excellent news”: as an introduction to the salvific story of Jesus Christ. Its purpose, in every verse, is proclaiming that excellent news.
We don’t have to know the historical “how” and “why” of the prologue’s composition before we are able to make sense of it. It is smart to take it because it seems: an introductory section, providing a divine context for the human Jesus, and directing how we “read” him from the moment of his first public motion (being baptised: 1.29). Taking the text as we discover it just isn’t intellectually lazy: it is solely an admission that we’ve the document as Christians have encountered it from the tip of the primary century. In this kind, they’ve found it to be each faithful and meaningful. And so can we.
When we read, in Paul’s letters, passages of rigorous and sometimes confusing theological argument, they confirm that early Christians, in addition to later ones, went in for deep theological speculation. This included argument concerning the nature of God, his purpose and windfall, his disclosure in sacred texts, and his technique of communication along with his creation and in human history. It is affordable, then, that John includes some fruits of this early reflection. Then, his listeners and readers can meet up what Paul mostly leaves as separate spheres: the earthly lifetime of the human Jesus and the cosmic significance of the everlasting Christ.
John reveals the character of his Gospel — an indication of the brand new covenant — by echoing the opening words of Genesis: “In the start”. In Genesis, the “starting” referred to God’s initial act of making. In John, the “starting” is a starting of being. It comes before creation. The same easy verb is used 3 times (en: “was”), but every time it shifts allusively — from existence, to relationship, to description. In John’s Gospel, complex truths often hide inside easy forms.
Both beginnings touch on darkness and lightweight, and on things coming into being. But John quickly focuses his attention on humankind and human nature. Even if we found clinching proof that John the Baptist was a prosaic intrusion into the poetry of some hypothetical hymn, it will make no difference to the purpose of John the Evangelist’s placing him there. The so-called intrusion exists to place it beyond doubt that, nonetheless holy a human being could possibly be, nonetheless truth-full his message, “he was not that light.” The true light is Christ, and none other. The calling of each holy human being is “to bear witness to that light”.
The message of this Gospel is so mind-bogglingly essential, so ineffably precious, that I need to express as plainly as possible what I think to be its message. But wait: the Gospel has done that already. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us.”
