CHAPTER IX

THE JOHANNINE CHRISTOLOGY

1. The Johannine Peculiarities. We have had occasion already to make use of the gospel according to John, and have noticed therein the corroborating testimony to many facts which the synoptic gospels record, and to the remarkable expressions of our Lord's self-consciousness. But the fourth gospel contains other things of a peculiar cast, bearing on the doctrine of the person of Christ, which demand a separate discussion. The three epistles of John are so in accord with the gospel on this subject that they may also be cited as like witnesses to the Johannine Christology. The doctrine of the Logos and the entire style and content of the fourth gospel confessedly represent a later and peculiar manner of conceiving the person of Jesus, the Son of God. The philological and historical questions of the authorship, date, and scope of this remarkable idealistic portraiture of Christ are a vast study by themselves, and cannot here be entertained. But we accept both the gospel and the epistles as a truthful presentation of the Christ, the Son of the living God. As compared with the synoptic records this writing of John is conspicuously more philosophical, more ideal, more spiritual, more mystic, but, we think, no less truthful and impressive in its way.' The facts and the thoughts which it records bear the impress of a disciple who has long meditated on the significance of the manifestation of his incarnate Lord.

2. The Word, or Logos. Unlike the human genealogies of Jesus which are found in Matthew and Luke, the doctrine of THE WORD confronts us at the opening of John's gospel, and turns our thought at once to the beginning of all things: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This Word was the life and the light of men, and "became flesh and dwelt as in a tabernacle (kokývwoɛv) among us. In this allusion to the tabernacle we perceive a metaphor drawn from Exod. xl, 34-38, where it is said that the glory of Jehovah came down and filled the tabernacle of meeting, and hung like a cloud

We may with all reverence describe it as the history of Jesus read as a chapter in the life of God. The distinguishing feature in the mind of the evangelist is that he read God through Jesus before he attempted to read Jesus through God. The book is a history written from a standpoint which its subject himself had supplied.-Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 340. York, 1893.

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of glory in the sight of the whole house of Israel; for it is immediately added: "We beheld his glory, glory as of an only begotten from a Father, full of grace and truth"; and in verse 18 it is written: "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son,' who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him." It seems obvious, from all this, that "the Word" is in some real sense identical with the Son of God, and is here conceived as essentially the highest revelation of God.

3. The Logos in Greek Philosophy and in Philo. This term λóyos, Word, was not original with the author of the fourth gospel. Long before any of the New Testament books were written there were divers speculations of a theosophic character about the creation of the world and God's relation to the visible universe. Poets and writers of wise proverbs had made much use of such terms as Logos, and Wisdom, in connection with the idea of God's selfmanifestation. Heraclitus of Ephesus (B.C. 500) used the word Logos to designate the underlying, universal principle of the universe, the divine eternal Reason, immanent in all things. The Stoic philosophers reproduced this doctrine of Heraclitus, and conceived the Logos as the soul of the world, working out the allembracing and eternal order of the universe. In Alexandria Greek thought and Oriental mysticism commingled a century or two before Christ, and we find a remarkable illustration of the mixture in the various writings of Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, contemporary with Jesus. This writer speaks of the divine Logos as the "elder Son of the Father," and his "firstborn." He calls him the "image of God," "the oldest angel," "archangel of many titles," a "second God," and the "archetype and pattern of the light." He i also conceived as the "indwelling Word," and the "uttered Word, the relation of which to each other is like that of thought to speech. Philo's Logos is the sum total of all divine energies, both as they exist in archetypal ideas in the divine mind and as they come forth in the varied forms of creation. He is, in fact, the ideal world as conceived by God, and also the actual world as outwardly existing in all visible products of creative energy. But in view of his numerous epithets and varied forms of statement it is difficult to determine the precise conception which Philo attached to the term

The reading God only begotten, povoyevǹs de65, is too well attested to be ignored in the discussion of this passage. It appears in N*, B, C, L and in ancient versions and patristic citations, and is inserted in the Greek text of Westcott and Hort. The evidence is not, perhaps, sufficient to displace the more common reading, only begotten Son; but it is of sufficient importance to suggest the profound and farreaching significance of the Logos-doctrine in this prologue of John. According to Thayer (Greek-English Lexicon New Testament, under povoyɛvý5), the reading eó "appears to owe its origin to a dogmatic zeal which broke out soon after the early days of the Church."

Logos. It is a matter of dispute among the learned how far he really hypostatized the divine Logos, for some of his declarations on the subject are hard to reconcile with each other. His ideas are no doubt, to some considerable extent, an elaboration of the teaching of Plato concerning the eternal archetypes of all things which come into being and form in time. But we are not here concerned to expound the various sayings of Philo about the Logos. They represent only an Alexandrian method of conceiving God's relation to the world, and one which is peculiar to Philo himself.'

4. Personification of Wisdom in Jewish Writings. In the apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon (vii, 24-26) we find a striking personification of Wisdom, which has close affinity with some aspects of the Logos of Philo:

Wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

Yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of her pureness. For she is a breath of the power of God,

And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty. . . .

She is an effulgence from everlasting light

And an unspotted mirror of the working of God,

And an image of his goodness.

In the same book, ix, 1, 2, we find the following prayer:

God of the fathers and Lord of thy mercy,

Who madest all things in thy Logos,

And by thy Wisdom didst form man.

And again, in xviii, 15, 16:

Thy all-powerful Logos leaped from heaven out of the royal thrones, a stern warrior into the midst of the land doomed to destruction, bearing thy faithful commandments as a sharp sword, and standing, it filled all things with death; and it reached unto heaven while it stood upon the earth.

Similarly the son of Sirach, in Ecclesiasticus xxiv, 3-10, where Wisdom says of herself:

I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,

And covered the earth as a mist.

I dwelt in high places,

And my throne is in the pillar of the cloud....

He created me from the beginning before the world;

And to the end I shall not fail.

In the holy tabernacle I ministered before him,

And so was I established in Sion.

1 For discussions of Philo's doctrine of the 26yo see Gfroerer, Philo und die alexandrinische Theosophie, in his Kritische Geschichte des Urchristenthums. Erster Theil, chap. viii, pp. 168-326. Stuttgart, 1831. Also Dorner, History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. i, pp. 19-39.

But the older source from which these concepts of Wisdom may be read is Prov. viii, 22-30, where Wisdom thus speaks:

Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way,
Before his works of old,

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,
Before the earth was.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth;

When there were no fountains abounding with water....
When he established the heavens I was there, ..
When he marked out the foundations of the earth,
Then I was by him as a master workman.

All these poetic portraitures belong to the so-called "Wisdom literature" of the Old Testament, and partake of its spirit.

5. Creation by the Word of God. The concept of God as Creator carries along with it the thought that all things were first brought into existence through wisdom, for without wisdom none of the objects of creation could have been made and pronounced very good. This lofty ideal of wisdom, as it took shape in the Hebrew mind, may well have started from suggestions of the Elohistic picture of creation in Gen. i, 1-ii, 3. A philosophic and poetic reader of that sublime description of God's work would naturally notice how each creative act is introduced by ", and God

said. Such an omnific word of God as brought light out of primeval darkness was necessarily a manifestation of the unseen personal Power. Hence one of the psalmists gives this profound thought the following poetical expression:

By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made,
And all the host of them by the breath of his mouth;
For he spake, and it was done;

He commanded, and it stood fast. Psa. xxxiii, 6, 9.

And so it became a common Hebrew conception and an article of faith that all created things which have been brought into manifestation, and continue through the ages, "were framed by the word of God" (Heb. xi, 3). A philosophic mind, moreover, would naturally perceive in such a picture of creation the distinction between God as he exists in his essential nature and as he expresses himself in an outward act of power.

6. Theophanies and Angelophanies. The theophanies and angelophanies of the Old Testament would naturally suggest further modifications of this concept of God as revealing himself in some

1Here the term employed is pñμa, not λóyo5; but there is no essential difference of thought, as a comparison with 2 Pet. iii, 5, shows, where it is said that heavens and earth were "compacted by the word (26y05) of God."

visible form. "The angel of Jehovah" that appeared in a flame of fire in the bush, and seems to be identified with Jehovah in the narrative of Exod. iii, 2-6, presents an ideal of divine revelation which receives additional emphasis by comparison with what is written in Exod. xiv, 19; xxxii, 34; xxxiii, 2, 14. In these places the angel of God appears to be identical with the pillar of cloud, and to represent the presence of Jehovah and to bear his name. This manner of thought and speech led to the later substitution of the terms Memra, Dibbura, and Shekina for the sacred name of Jehovah, as we observe in the Aramaic Targums.' The later Judaism shrank from pronouncing the holy name of four letters (mm), and so the words Memra and Shekina, as well as the title Lord (N), were employed as welcome substitutes.

7. John's Gospel Gave the Logos New and Deeper Significance. From the foregoing outline and references it is evident that λóyos, Word, in the fourth gospel, was no new or strange term first introduced into theosophic writing by the author of this remarkable composition. The first apostles of Christianity must have often come into contact with current systems of speculative thought. Paul encountered Stoic and Epicurean philosophies at Athens. The Alexandrian Jew, Apollos, "a learned man (avǹp λóy105) and mighty in the scriptures" (Acts xviii, 24), taught in Ephesus before he was thoroughly instructed in the doctrines of Jesus, and it is hardly supposable that he was not familiar with Alexandrian theosophy. But another Alexandrian Jew, Cerinthus, came at a later period to Ephesus, taught a form of Gnosticism that was largely mixed with Jewish and Christian elements, and, according to ancient tradition, came into sharp conflict with the apostle John. It was impossible for the early teachers of Christianity to avoid conflict with the doctrines of that eclectic Alexandrian philosophy which, in one form and another, sought to establish itself in every religious and literary center of the Greek-speaking Orient. It is a notable fact, moreover, that the first apostles of Christianity were obliged to use the Greek language for the propagation of their gospel of salvation, and to employ many a common Greek word to inculcate ideas which were new to the world. Thus old

1 Thus in the Targum of Onkelos, Gen. iii, 8, we read: "They heard the voice of the Word (DD) of the Lord God walking in the garden." The Jerusalem Targum of Exod. xxxiii, 11, reads: "The voice of the Word (17) he heard, but the splendor of his face he did not behold." In Exod. xvii, 7, the Onkelos Targum reads: "Is the Shekina (8) of the Lord among us or not?" It is also worthy of note in this connection that the Targum on Isa. ix, 6; Mic. v, 1, and Zech. iv, 7, says that the Messiah is from eternity and to eternity, and, according to the book of Enoch (xlviii, 2, 3, 6), his name was called the Son of man before the sun and stars were made; he was chosen before God, and hidden in him before the world was created; and he will abide before him to all eternity.