John’s Logos Christology
The following excerpt is taken from Michael F. Bird’s Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World, published by Baylor University Press, Waco, TX in 2022], pp. 137-144. This is from section II. Jesus and Intermediary Figures, 4. Jesus and the “In-Betweeners”: Comparing Early Christologies and Intermediary Figures. All emphasis will be mine.
(4) Gospel of John.
The prologue to the Gospel of John is one of the Rubik’s Cubes of biblical studies: a set of puzzles, riddles, and questions that challenge interpreters.51
Everything, 1iterally everything about the prologue is disputed: religious background, origins, redaction, structure, intertextuality, literary analysis, narrative function, theology, and reception. I have no intention to explore them ail. Suffice to say that John the Evangelist’s opening stichs about the Logos are pregnant with a cosmos of theological significance. The notable words are, of course, John 1.1-5, 14:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of ail people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In brief, John’s prologue is a feat of christological midrash on Gen 1.1, intentionally merged with scriptural witness to God’s Creative speech-acts, primitive confessions of the preexistent Son of God, Jewish Hellenistic wisdom traditions, and messianic discourse, and fashioned in such a way as to deliberately resonate with tropes in Greco-Roman philosophy.52
In effect, John takes the Logos, a malleable yet popular concept in Greco-Roman philosophy for cosmic rationality, and he baptizes it in Jewish wisdom traditions and re-codes it with christological meaning. The assertion is astounding, as Schnelle notes:
“John is expressing a universal claim: the Logos Jesus Christ has come forth from his original unity with God, he is God’s own Creative power, he is the origin and goal of all being, and in the Logos Jesus Christ the religions and intellectual history of antiquity reaches its goal.”
53
In Johannine testimony, the Word is more than an intermediary with unusual proximity to God; rather, the Word is intrinsic to God’s self-revelation, shares in God’s God-ness, demonstrates God’s participation in humanity, and participates in God’s unique identity as creator.
First, the statement that God has in the arche, eternity past, always had a Word, indicates God’s intrinsic self-communicative nature and that God’s self-communication consists of his Logos. The Logos emerges in w. 1-5 from divine transcendence, even hiddenness, to bring illumination to those mired in noetic falsehood and moral darkness.
The repeated imagery of “light” (phos) in vv. 4-9 is indicative of the Logos as source and subject of a saving revelation analogous to Jewish depictions of Wisdom or the giving of the Torah.55
In addition, the provocative point behind v. 18 is that no one sees God without seeing his Word, just as no one can understand the things of heaven except for the Son of Man, who came down from heaven (3.11-13), just as no one can hear God’s voice, see his form, or harbor his word without believing in the Son (5.37-38), just as no one can come to the Father apart from him (14.6). The Logos is the sine qua non of revelation.
After the prologue, the Logos Christology does not recede; it is, rather, modulated in the unfolding drama of the revelation of God’s messianic savior. This is evident in the stress placed on Jesus’ logoi, where the Word is expressed in the very words of Jesus.55 Jesus’ words focus on explaining the themes of life, light, truth, and knowing, with a particular emphasis too on the Father-Son relationship, which at least partly validates Bultmann’s observation that the Johannine Jesus is the revealed Revealer.56 The “one true God” (17.4), then, is “exegeted” (1.18) and made known (17.4-8, 26) in Jesus the Christ (20.31). God reveals himself as creator and savior only as God reveals, creates, and saves in, by, and through his Word. The Logos is, then, God in his revelation.57
Second, the prologue intimates what will be a key christological motif of the Fourth Gospel, namely, Jesus’ preexistence. “The topic of pre-existence is gradually developed in the course of the Gospel,” says Friederike Kunath, “and it climaxes in Jesus’s farewell prayer, in connection with his departure and his glorification.”58
Whereas Mark introduces Jesus with the beginning of the gospel of God (Mark 1.1-15), John introduces his Gospel with the Logos at the center of the beginning of creation (John 1,1-3). John’s prologue and the wider Gospel indicate far more than the Word’s ideal or relative preexistence, as if the Word were an idea or plan that God hatched in eternity past.59 More concretely, what we find is what Ruben Bühner calls “the Johannine maximal preexistent christological assertions,” where the Logos has the attributes of “uncreatedness” and “participates in the essence of the one God.”60
This maximal and personal preexistence is implied by the Word’s intense proximity with God and agency in creation (1.1-3), then filled out with Jesus identifying himself with God’s name as the one who “is” from Exod 3.14 (8.58), his heavenly origins (1.15, 30; 3.13, 31; 6.32-58, 62; 8.23, 42; 16.27-28), scriptural imagery that makes him the nexus between heaven and earth (1.51), and his sharing in divine glory prior to creation (17.5, 24). The accent on preexistence means that John describes the heavenly descent of a personal divine agent who is enfleshed as a human being.
Third, the Word is more than “towards” or “close” to God, as the Word “was God” and is therefore in an intrinsic unity with God (John 1.1-2, 18). John does not say that the Word is adjectively theios (“divine-like”) as a lesser divine being, yet neither does John say that the Word is absolutely ho theos (“the God”), which would conflate God and the Word.
Rather, John predicates theos of the Word so that Jesus is one with God although distinct in the Father-Son relationship and enactment of his mission.61 What is striking is that this Word comes forth from a unity with God. John sets forth neither bi-theism nor modalism, neither the epiphany of an angel nor the metamorphosis of an Olympian god, nor the emanation of a lesser heavenly power.62
Rather, the Words’ human existence witnesses to a figure who in the course of the narrative is declared to be equal to God (5.18; 10.33-34), to be one with God (10.30), to mutually interpenetrate him (10.38; 14.8-11, 20; 17.11, 21-23),63 to be worshipped beside God the Father (5.23), and to share in God’s eternity, glory, love, judgment, and deliverance (4.42; 5.22, 27, 30; 8.58; 12.47; 17.24, 26).64 The relationship of the Word with God is never expressed as creation, emanation, or adoption, but in terms of begottenness (1.14, 18; 3.16, 18). The genus of sonship makes explicable the one-ness and sent-ness (8.29; 10.36; 13.16-20; 17.20-23) as well as equality and subordination (5.18; 14.28).65 The opening words of the prologue intend a simple yet fundamental claim: God has an eternal Word, a Word that is interior to God and intrinsically God, as that which is true of God is also true of his Word.66 The Word is not a “depotentiated divinity” but is to be understood as part of a “divine self-distinction.”67
Fourth, God’s own Word enters into human existence and draws God into the experience of human life. At one level, there is nothing in w. 1-5 that a Hellenistic Jew like Philo or the author of the Wisdom of Solomon would find remotely objectionable. That God’s Creative Word or Wisdom was involved in creation is a legitimate reading of Gen 1.1 in light of Ps 33.6 or Prov 8.22-23.
All is good until one gets to vv. 14, 18 and rereads vv. 1-5 in light of John’s provocative christological claims made therein. Greco-Roman “theology” was allergic to the idea of the gods taking on a true human form; they could only have a quasi-body and quasi-blood (Cicero, Nat. d. 1.18). Similarly, Jewish tradition could say that God’s Wisdom came forth or God’s word was revealed, but never that they became flesh; this takes us beyond the range of Jewish ideas of divine speech-acts, Wisdom’s immanence, and the Word’s efficacy.69
What would be startling is the particularity (v. 14) and exclusivity (v. 18) of the Christology (i.e., God’s divine Logos has become a human being who reveals God in a way that surpasses Moses, the prophets, and the sages). The language of John 1.14 rips off Jewish wisdom tradition to make a striking claim about Jesus as God’s Word in human flesh: “And the Word became flesh and lived [lit., ‘tabernacled’] among us [kai ho logos sarx egeneto kai eskenôsen en hemin], and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” It is notable that the metaphor of the body as a “tent” (skenos) was known to Jewish and Christian tradition (Wis 9.15; 2 Cor 5.4; Diogn. 6.8; 2 Pet 1.13, 14). The tabernacling language too is significant as it is allusive to: (a) the tabernacle as the place for divine speech (Exod 33.9) and the presence of divine glory (Exod 40.34); (b) the prophetic promise that God would tabernacle among his people during Israel’s restoration from exile (Ezek 37.27; Joel 3.17; Zech 2.14-15 [LXX]; Jub. 1.17; 11Q19-20 29.7-8); and (c) Wisdom Corning forth from God and pitching her tent in Israel in the form of the Torah (Sir 24.1-23), or the “angel of God,” who “tabernacled among men” in Jacob-Israel (Pr. Jos. A 4).70 Thus, the tabernacling of the Logos is the dwelling of God’s speech, Wisdom, and glory in the human life of Jesus, which is simultaneously the engrafting of humanity into the life of God.
Fifth, the Word shares in what made God unique as creator. Beyond the surprising idea that the Word is identifiable with Jesus the son of Joseph from Nazareth (1.45; 4.5; 6.42), equally striking is John’s assertion that Jesus the Logos shares in the creator-creature division that separates God from the cosmic order. John declares that God makes himself known in the Logos enfleshed in the very cosmos that God brought into being through this very same Logos (1.1-3, 10. 14, 18). The Logos might even a cryptograph for the divine name, suggested by usage in Jub. 36.7, which mentions “the name . . . which created the heavens and the earth and ail things together.”71 The implication is that Jesus the Logos is on the God-side of the creator-creature distinction. The Word is divine in the sense of being the uncreated instrument of creation.72
This is expressed in the statement that “apart from him nothing came into being” (1.3), which underscores a lack of superior, inferior, and parallel figures who assisted in the Creative act—it is God who creates by his Word alone.73 The same language—“apart from him is nothing done”—is attributed to Yahweh in 1QS 11.11 and 1QH 9.20, and this language of “apart from him” was to have salient significance in proto-orthodox and Gnostic cosmologies to distance the Logos from other intermediary figures.74
Bauckham offer a sagacious summary:
“The opening five verses of John’s Prologue, therefore, read in light of the later statement in 1.14 that the Word became flesh and lived among us as Jesus Christ, include Jesus in the unique divine identity by identifying him with the Word that was with God in the beginning and was God’s agent in the creation of all things.”
Resultantly:
“The statements place Jesus unequivocally on the divine side of the absolute distinction between the one Creator and all other things. By identifying Jesus with an entity intrinsic to the divine identity—that is, with God’s Word—they include Jesus in that identity without infringing monotheism. The Word ‘was with God,’ but it was not another besides God—for it ‘was God’ (1.1).”
Bauckham concludes:
“Thus, the Gospel begins by engaging with one of the most important ways in which Jews defined the uniqueness of the one God—that is, as the sole Creator of all things—and uses this way of understanding the unique identity of God in order to include Jesus within it.”75
John’s Logos is “God” and shares in a key attribute that makes God unique, namely, not being part of the heavenly cast or terrestrial creation.76
The Johannine prologue, then, functions like an operatic overture, a foreshadowing of the musical motifs still to come: Jesus as God’s word-of revelation, only begotten Son, light, life, testimony, truth, knowledge, glory, and even his rejection. Jesus is God’s Wisdom and Word, demiurge and deliverer, made one with human flesh.
Further Reading
JOHN 1:1
NT SCHOLARSHIP ON JOHN 1:1 AND TITUS 2:13 PT. 1
DEBATE MATERIAL FOR JOHN’S GOSPEL AND DEITY OF CHRIST PT. 1, PT. 2