The Prologue of John’s Gospel

Louis Pernot

translated by Sara MacVane

 

What we call the “prologue” to John’s Gospel is a wonderful text, of a very different style to the other Gospels. It is poetic, lovely, profound, theological, and also a bit mysterious. It is a text which raises many theological questions and includes certain risks.

 

God is the Word and the Light

 

In the beginning was the Word… and right from the start this well-known opening requires some important comments.

 

First of all, John does not speak at all about the birth of Jesus. In this respect he is like Mark and indeed like Paul. So John gives us a clear warning that he will go beyond any mythological description of Jesus’ more or less miraculous birth. He is interested rather in the spiritual meaning of Christ’s coming into the world; its theological significance. Who is Jesus in relation to God; what does he reveal to us about God ; who is God and how does he act in the world?

 

John offers a theology which is particularly modern and credible. What he tells us is that God is both Word and Light. So, we are beyond a childish vision of God as an all-powerful person who rules the world from the sky. Instead he gives us God as a dynamic creator at work in the world.

 

If God is Word, he isn’t all-powerful. The word is essential, but it cannot constrain or impose anything. The word is the power of persuasion, appeal, instruction. It does not have the force of concrete action. God is conceived as operative in the world, in so far as he is the carrier of creative information, not a force outside the laws of nature. God’s word can only become efficacious with human collaboration; it is not sufficient unto itself.

 

And then to say that God is Light is essential, because light imposes nothing. It opens a pathway and allows each of us to find our own way with intelligence. There is something similar in Psalm 119, verse 105: your word is a lantern to my feet, and a light upon my path. The psalm does not say: “Your word is a path that I must follow”; rather, it affirms that the word of God can enlighten our way. Each one of us has a road which is our own, and the word is not given in order to put us into passive submission. It does not require us to believe and do everything it says. The word illuminates, opens up horizons, and allows us to choose our own pathway with intelligence.

 

Logos

 

The opening words of the prologue have led some people to see the influence of Greek philosophy. The original Greek text says: εν αρχη ην ο λογος – in the beginning was the logos. And the idea of logos is very important in Greek philosophy, especially in stoicism, where it means reason or intelligence. Because of this word logos some people conclude that the Gospel of John is late and that John was influenced by Greek philosophy or by other movements which also use the word logos, such as gnosticism.

 

However, we do not really need recourse to Greek philosophy in order to explain the presence of this word logos. The idea of “word” is well known in Judaism, expressed as dabar in Hebrew. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint and dating to 300 BCE, the Hebrew dabar is translated logos. Jews did not need Greek philosophy in order to evoke the word of God (λογος του θεου), which was quite an important idea for them. First of all of course, God had created the world by his word. In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates by speaking: God said: Let there be light. Indeed, John’s prologue is a commentary, a reworking of the story of creation using the opening words of Genesis. In the beginning, God created – εν αρχην εποιεσεν ο θεος. So John’s Gospel and Genesis in Greek begin with the same words: en arche. This is why John’s prologue is often called a sort of “midrash”, or commentary on the story of creation. It belongs to Jewish thought and nothing contradicts a much earlier dating than is usually given.

 

So, John takes up the idea of God as creator and gives particular importance to his creative word.

 

What is this word “close” to God?

 

Things become more complicated fairly quickly. Right after the first affirmation, most translations give us: and the word was with God, and this suggests that there is a distinction between God and his word. That is very difficult, even impossible to understand. How can we understand that God is on one side, his word on another, with the word a sort of independent being, another person so to speak, at God’s side. And what is totally absurd is that John concludes the first verse with: and the Word was God[1], as though to say that first the word was next to, so distinct from, God and now they are the same thing. The word cannot be both with God and also God himself; it makes no sense.

 

Starting from this, there have been lots of commentaries and many attempts to resolve the problem. The simplest is to ask simply what the Greek preposition pros means. Most frequently it does indeed mean beside, next to, turned towards, but it can also describe possession. For example, Romans 15. 17 uses the same formula: pros ton theon to say: I have reason to glorify myself in Jesus Christ, for he is of God.[2]

 

In other words, we can translate this first verse as: in the beginning was the word, and the word was of God, and the word was God. That is very clear; the source of everything is a word, but it does not matter which word, the word is God, that is to say the creative word. John then gives us some more essential theological information: this word is God; God is assimilated to his own creative act. God in himself is word, and the word is God, it is God.

 

This is the simplest solution, the most monotheistic, and without a doubt, we must keep hold of it. Curiously though, no translation today gives us this. All the translations[3] and most commentaries propose a disassociation between God and his word. Among the worst translations is La Bible en français courant (and more or less as bad is la nouvelle Segond 21) where we find: When God began to create the world, the word already existed.[4] This isn’t really a translation, but a sort of theological extrapolation, and that is very serious indeed. It is quite troubling that translators do this sort of thing. To add on when (lorsque) is already arbitrary; it is not in the text, inserts the idea of creation from nothing, and denies God as the first and only principle of the creation. It is as though God were not the only and eternal principle of creation, as though there were another divine principle (that is to say person) coextensive with God, who could be his word. Our translations offer a kind of incoherent theological pap to the good souls who want to discover the Bible. No wonder then that lots of people dismiss Christianity when anyone tries to tell them that they should go along with texts which are totally irrational and unbelievable.

 

The Word and the Son in the Trinity

 

The debate about the nature of this Word has been going on for a long time. From the earliest centuries of our era, serious discussions about the meaning of the Word have stirred up the Christian world. In the forefront was the Arian crisis, when some Christians claimed that the Word of God was a being created by God. It was as though God were on one side, with a sort of lower-case god or divine entity created by God and under him, which is to say: the Word. Arianism was condemned and the official theology favored by the majority affirmed: The word of God was engendered, not created. God engenders his own word for all eternity, and so the word of God is co-eternal with God, finally identifiable to God, and in this way we can avoid a dualistic approach of Arianism.

 

Today, when we read: When God created the world, the word already existed; we might well ask ourselves what underlying theology inspired the author of that translation to the point that he/she renders a beautifully clear text incomprehensible.

 

Another problem tied to this dilemma and indeed much more important begins with Tertullian in the 2^nd century, (he was born in 150 CE). He had the curious idea to call this logos, this eternal word of God: the son of God. At this point the doctrine of the Trinity started to develop. The doctrine affirms that there are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that all three are: mia ousia kai treis upostaseis, or a single essence and three persons of the divinity.

 

And that’s where we find one of the greatest misinterpretations in the history of theology. Today indeed most people, even pastors and priests, believe that when we teach that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three times God, Son refers to Jesus Christ. They believe that the doctrine of the Trinity insists that Jesus is God himself. However, that is not what the Trinity means, or at least what it meant in the 3^rd century, nor what it teaches us today according to classical theology. What the Trinity teaches us is that when we say the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are God, Son does not Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus; it means God’s eternal Word, that is to say the logos to which John refers in his prologue. The Trinity only says that God is both Father and logos, or creative word and that he is also Spirit. Once we know this, we can see that the idea of the Trinity does not force us to claim quite brutally that Jesus equals God. The doctrine of the Trinity does not mention Jesus of Nazareth directly; it speaks of the eternal Word, which became incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth, created when he was conceived in the womb of his mother, Mary.

 

We will return to the question of the divinity of Jesus, because it comes up almost immediately in verse 14. For the moment however, let’s leave aside Jesus Christ and hold on to the idea that the Trinity affirms only that God is Father, Word, and Spirit. Theologically this is perfectly acceptable, so long as we do not make the Word into a sort of independent person, or second god, but consider these qualities as different aspects of God. God may reveal himself as Father, as creative Word, and as Spirit just as well, because God is spirit (John 4. 24).

 

This is how the Trinity has been understood by all the great theologians, right down to Thomas Aquinas. Thomas discusses the Trinity many times in which he speaks of the Father and then the Son, and he says quite clearly that when he speaks of the Son he means verbum dei, the word of God. He shows us that the creative word of God is the same as God, that we cannot think of the word of God as some sort of being apart from God. And he is right. That is exactly the mistake that Arius made when he said that the son of God, that is according to him the logos, the word of God, was a created creature, which therefore had an individual identity distinct from God’s.

 

If we read a little further in John’s Gospel, we can see what he says about Christ himself.

 

The formula of the incarnation

 

At verse 14 John gives us another essential and absolutely passionate affirmation: And the word became flesh. Right there we have all the elements we need for a correct Christology, but also all the possible risks. In these simple words: And the Word became flesh (in Latin: et verbo caro factum est; in Greek: και ο λογος σαρχ εγενετο) lies the question of the incarnation: how can that eternal word of God be present in a real live person, that is to say in Jesus of Nazareth?

 

The translation of this verse includes some mistakes, or some serious dangers. The first danger is in the word flesh. For us, for westerners of the 21 century, the word flesh designates the purely material, physiological dimension of our existence, and not our whole being. And so, when we say: the word became flesh, we risk understanding that this word of God crystallized in a fleshy form, that it took on a body without a soul and enrobed itself in flesh. That is not the point however, because in the Bible flesh does not mean “meat”; it means a person in all his or her totality. In Isaiah 49. 26, God says: All flesh shall know that I am the Lord your Savior, and of course this means “everyone” “you and me”. In other words, “flesh” stands in for the whole person, with his psyche, her intelligence, his freedom, her will; all of that is included in “flesh”. So, the word is found wholly present in a complete person; in an individual with his own intelligence, own freedom, and own soul, and he was called Jesus of Nazareth.

 

The word made is also very dangerous[5], because the Word is God, and as God is unconditional and absolute, he cannot “make himself” anything at all. God remains God. He is eternal and cannot transform himself into anything else, or change his very nature to become flesh. So this translation[6] is perilous for our theological understanding for it may leads us to believe that everything passes away, as in a single blow God becomes a human being. In this case, Jesus would be some sort of God transformed into a human person, an idea which classical theology has always rejected, I am happy to say. Rather than claiming that Jesus is God who made himself man, it would be better to say that in him, God is to be found present in a man. That is something else altogether. God does not undergo a transformation, but it is God who makes himself present within an entire and complete human being.

 

Christological heresies

 

An incredible number of heresies were invented in the first centuries CE, and just about everything was imagined. Some claimed that Jesus was God himself dressed up in flesh, like a cake frosted with chocolate. The cake on the inside would be God, and the chocolate all over would be his human appearance. Some said that in Jesus, it is as though God had covered himself with flesh, just as when someone paints a picture of the invisible God, all of a sudden, he becomes visible. Some people even said that God had passed through the virgin Mary, as you might pass through a pipe, and that he went into her invisible and came out the other side visible. None of this has any theological foundation. Some other people were a bit more subtle. They claimed that yes, Jesus Christ was a whole human being, but that in place of his intelligence, will, and freedom, stands God. In other words, externally Jesus would be a human being like anyone of the rest of us, but in place of his liberty, his intelligence, and his person, is God himself. This sounds as though God were piloting and empty body, or had taken the place of its soul. The church of Rome also rejected this early heresy, because, if it were true, the hypostatic union could not possibly have been total, and so Jesus would not have been a completely human person and have been at the same time unified with the true God.

 

The official doctrine has always held that Jesus was a complete human person, with his liberty, his individuality, and own soul, who was created at his conception. So, Jesus is a whole person, created by his conception in the virgin Mary’s womb. He is a man, a true man, perfectly in unity with the true God. Or we might say that Jesus is a man in whom the fullness of God’s presence is found. In theological terms this is called “the hypostatic union”. It affirms that Jesus is both fully human and also fully God. In other words, he is a complete, truly human person, and at the same time, he is totally and perfectly united with God.

 

Many theologians today tend to be “monophysites”, since they often forget Christ’s human dimension and even teach that to be a Christian includes the belief that Jesus is God. This is clearly a false supposition however, if we look at theology and the history of theology. Jesus is not God; he is a human person in unity with God. Jesus is the meeting point between the human and the divine. Jesus has both natures, ours and God’s. According to traditional official theology, if we say: Jesus is God, we make the same mistake we would make if we said quite simply: Jesus is a man. Jesus is not simply a man, nor is Jesus God; he is a man in unity with God, the place of relational encounter between God and humankind.

 

That is the official theology, and we can do with it what we want. It is true that Protestants often tend to push Jesus towards the human side, and others (even among Protestants) tend to push Jesus towards God’s side. In any case, it is important for each of us to form our own opinion and to tolerate others whose opinion is not exactly at one with ours. And this is not obvious, since reactions on this point are often very violent. If we claim that Jesus is a man, if we speak about Christ’s humanity, some Christians are deeply shocked, even aggressive. So the problem is extremely complex and should not be treated as simplistic or easy.

 

Who is Jesus and who is Christ?

 

How can we understand the incarnation then? We can say that Jesus is a man, that hi,s humanity is complete and perfect, that he incarnates the Word of God – that is to say that the Word of God in its entirety dwells within him, that there is total unity between this man and the creative word, so that he adheres entirely to the word and assimilates it totally so that in him the word of God is fully present.

 

This is the way that the theology of the early centuries made the distinction between the Jesus of history, Jesus of Nazareth, and the divine dimension of Christ. There is something in Jesus which is his divine dimension. We call this dimension the eternal Word of God and find it incarnate in him. Today some theologians call this the Christly dimension, and they make a distinction between the Jesus of history and Christ. It would be even clearer to distinguish between Jesus as an historical person, the place where God is present, where God’s eternal Word is made flesh, and God himself. We must not mix them altogether. The second person of the Trinity is the eternal Word before the incarnation. It is this “son” which becomes incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary of Nazareth, and we can understand how that works. The Word of God partakes of eternity, because God is his own creative word. However Christ’s soul was not present from all eternity, because Christ is a created individual, and Jesus as an individual had no pre-existence. The idea of the pre-existence of souls is not Biblical, nor is it Christian. Souls do not pre-exist and Jesus does not contain an eternally divine soul which tumbled into his body. That would be a gnostic idea, orphic theology not Biblical theology. In Biblical theology souls are created. Jesus was created and in him an eternal and divine principle exists, which is the very word of God and is found in Jesus, a created person.

 

We can also distinguish between the Jesus of history, a person who was thirsty, suffered, died, and the eternal Word that did not die on the cross. Certainly it was Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified on the cross, who was thirsty, who became angry with the merchants in the Temple, and who died. It was not the eternal Word of God that died on the cross. The eternal Word of God is eternal. That is its very definition. It was eternal before Jesus; it is present in Jesus of Nazareth during his ministry, and afterwards surely it remains eternal in God. The particularity of Jesus is his total transparency with God’s eternal word; he is entirely filled with the word of God, and almost nothing else, so that we might even hold that there is a complete assimilation between the eternal word of God and Jesus Christ.

 

Jesus shows us the Father

 

However, John’s text is extremely complex, and right at the end of the Prologue in verse 18 there is another difficulty. Recent translations go something like this: No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.[7] This is completely unintelligible. We can say that no one has ever seen God, but to speak of God the only Son lands us back in a two-god theology. There would be God, and then another God, Jesus, who reveals the first one. In fact, the Greek text is very corrupt ad very complex, and translators make things more difficult still, as they try to find complications which would allow Jesus to pass as God. We can also read the text in the simplest version, which is also the most wide-spread: No one has ever seen God; the only son of God, who is in the Father’s heart, has made him known.[8] This affirmation is clear. In the Bible, “the only son” is Jesus, the Jesus of the incarnation, and not, as in Tertullian’s system “the eternal word”. Jesus is in the Father’s heart, in intimacy with God, he makes God known to us.

 

This is all quite complicated. However what we can say is that God himself is word and light. Word means information, vocation; it is a word of love, a word of hope. God is also light, that is to say, freedom for us, the capacity to see, to find, to choose, to go forward. It is exactly this God who is word and light, who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, for he is the very incarnation of the creative word and the light of freedom. In this sense we can believe in Jesus Christ as the son of God, because he brings the creative word and the light of freedom to us.

[1] All direct quotes from the Bible in this translation are from NRSV, unless otherwise stated.

[2] Here I have translated from the French in Pernot’s article ; the NRSV in English reads: In Christ Jesus then, I have reason to boast of my word for God;

[3] Evidently, the author refers to all French translations …..

[4] Lorsque Dieu commença à créer le monde, la parole existait déjà.

[5] Here Pernot refers to well known French translations : Et le Verbe s’est fait chair (La Traduction Œcuménique de la Bible, Société biblique française & Editions du Cerf, Paris 1988) ; La Parole a été faite chair (Nouvelle Version Segond Révisée, Alliance Biblique Universelle, 2014) ; English readers may be familiar with this wording from the Authorized Version (King James) : And the Word was made flesh.

[6] The use of the word made is now largely absent from contemporary English translations.

[7] NRSV ; it corresponds well to the French.

[8] My translation from the French in Pernot’s article.

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