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Introduction


In the opening verses of each of the four Gospels, the evangelists provide initial clues to the interests that will govern their respective accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. Mark’s opening is the most compact, recounting Jesus’ baptism in order to establish his identity as Son of God. Matthew’s opening genealogy identifies Jesus as a descendant of both Abraham and David as well as supplying his credentials as Messianic king, while Luke’s introduction sets a detailed account of the announcements and actual births of both John the Baptist and Jesus against the backdrop of the wider Roman world. Of the four, however, John makes the most dramatic use of the prologue form in shaping the contours of a particular Christological emphasis. In his recent treatment of the Johannine writings, R. Alan Culpepper comments that "By any standard the prologue to the Gospel of John is one of the most profound passages in the Bible. As simple as its language and phrases are, its description of Jesus as the Logos has exerted a lasting influence on Christian theology." He concludes:


All the prologues...serve to educate or prepare the reader for the rest of the Gospel. Important themes are signalled and the identity of Jesus is established at the very outset by means of Christological titles, divine portents or the manner of Jesus birth...All the prologues therefore are Christological affirmations, but John is the only Gospel to speak of Jesus’ pre-existence as the Logos and the only Gospel to include a poetic prologue.1


In a very real sense, the prologue provides a profound and highly developed theological summary that has a structural integrity of its own, while also introducing many of the key themes of the Gospel account that follows. A careful examination of this material repays any student of John’s Gospel many times over.


Sources and Themes


A key question among interpreters is the original source of the Prologue, and, as a corollary, its relationship to the rest of the Gospel. Scholarly opinions vary as to the exact genre of the prologue, with some writers arguing for a source in the hymnic traditions of the early church (Beasley-Murray) or the Gnostic faith (Bultmann, [1971]), while others downplay the apparent lyric form and argue that even the more overtly poetic sections of the prologue (e.g. 1:1-5) are "rhythmic prose" (F. F. Bruce) or "elevated prose" (Morris)2. While a protracted examination of the issue is not possible here, a brief consideration of the issues is useful.


Most objections to identifying early Christian hymnody as the source of the poetic sections of the Prologue rest on the assumption that the form of this material can only be positively identified as, at best, stylistic prose. Scholars who defend the hymn-like qualities of major parts of 1:1-18 vary in the details of their division of the Prologue into lyric and prose sections. Yet this difference of opinion should not be taken as evidence against the thesis that the evangelist has incorporated an early hymn here. Moreover, despite differences in the division of the passage, there still seems to be a fairly broad consensus concerning the genre of the material, provided subjective assumptions are held lightly3. Moreover, Raymond Brown points out that there are parallels of both form and content to the hymnic material of 1:1-5, 10-12b, 14 and 16, in Colossians 3, Philippians 2, Hebrews 1 and I Timothy 3:16.4 The Evangelist’s prose insertions provide (in turn) an assessment of John the Baptist’s role (1:6-9), an explanation of soteriology (12c-13), a comment on John the Baptist’s relation to the Logos (15), and an expansion of the phrase "love in place of love" (Brown) or "one blessing after another" (NIV, 1:16) in 1:17-18, all of which play an important role in linking the poetic sections together.


The origin of these poetic materials is explained in various ways. Following earlier attempts to locate the hymn (and particularly the Logos theme) within the broader Hellenistic world, Bultmann sought to trace the hymn’s origin to Gnostic circles, via a sect of John the Baptist’s adherents. He argues that the hymn was originally directed to John, and only later adapted to Christian usage, when the final editor of the Gospel set it here to introduce the work as a whole.5 Ridderbos, however, rightly points out the numerous problems inherent in this suggestion. Besides the fact that the Gnostic texts Bultmann works from post-date the Gospel by several centuries, and the lack of evidence suggesting that such Gnostic movements were even current at the time of the fourth Gospel’s composition, the contexts of redemption described in Gnosticism and the Prologue are mutually exclusive and too incompatible to allow for such adaptation from one to the other.6 Brown’s proposal that the hymn-like sections were written independently of the Gospel itself—but within the same Christian circles as that of the Evangelist—best explains both their apparent independence from the rest of the Gospel and their intrinsic similarities to the theology both of the Gospel and of the Johannine Epistles.


John’s use of the term "Logos" (1:1-2; most frequently rendered "Word" in modern English translations) continues to draw much attention. A survey of commentaries suggests that the term is deeply rooted in Old Testament thought (e.g. Genesis 1, Proverbs 8). Further, the role of the Johannine Logos parallels in some ways that of personified Wisdom in a number of traditions within Judaism (e.g. Sirach 24). As Ridderbos points out, however, Wisdom and the Logos cannot simply be identified with each other, since the former is a creation of God (Sirach 1:9), while the Logos is said to be pre-existent and Divine.7 At the same time, the Evangelist’s use of such language within a first century Mediterranean setting could scarcely have avoided associations with current Hellenistic thought, where the term "Logos" played a key role both in Stoic thought and in the work of Hellenistic Jewish thinkers such as Philo.


Some have argued that the Greek world provides the main source for its interpretation. Indeed, Bultmann stresses Hellenistic sources to the virtual exclusion of Hebraic antecedents for John’s use of the word "Logos."8 While recognizing both influences, C. H. Dodd argues that John’s adoption of the term deliberately reflects the ambiguity of the word in Judaism, employing a Greek philosophical term that captures both immanent and transcendent dimensions of meaning, all within a decidedly Christian framework.9 Others, such as Ladd, Morris, Beasley-Murray, and Ridderbos, extensively develop Old Testament and Wisdom backgrounds.10


They argue, moreover, that while the Hellenistic connotations are inevitable and useful for drawing the attention of a wide range of first-century audiences, these associations are secondary and in some respects incidental, since the Fourth Gospel’s employment of the term turns out to be quite contrary to a Hellenistic worldview, as well as in some ways quite distinct from previous Jewish uses. Leon Morris puts it this way:


John could scarcely have used the Greek term without arousing in the minds of those who used the Greek language thought of something supremely great in the universe. But though he could not have been unmindful of the association aroused by the term, his thought does not arrive from the Greek background. His Gospel shows little trace of acquaintance with Greek philosophy and even less dependence on it. And the really important thing is that John, in his use of the Logos, is cutting clean across one of the fundamentals of Greek ideas.11


Beasley-Murray agrees, and sees Johannine usage as indicative of the Evangelist’s acumen in communicating the Gospel and its distinctive message within the philosophical and cultural context of his time:


The remarkable feature of this presentation is that it employs categories universally known, possessing universal appeal, which would attract and have attracted alike Jews, Christians, pagans, Hellenists and Orientals in their varied cultures, followers of ancient and modem religions, philosophers and people of humble status who were seekers after God.12


Here we might also notice the relationship of the Prologue to the rest of the Gospel. It is unmistakable that a number of Johannine terms are being introduced here ("life," "light," 1:5; "believe," 1:7; "world," 1:9; "children of God," 1:12; "flesh," 1:1:14; "truth," 1:14). The author of the Prologue incorporates these important concepts in an introductory fashion, and also identifies their relationship to the Logos, whose portrayal is decidedly at the centre of his concern.


The Prologue also introduces the figure of John the Baptist (1:6). He is apparently known by the community being addressed and held in high regard by them, so that a clear delimitation of his role and status in relationship to the Logos is needed (1:6-8, 15, and later 1:19-28). Yet in some ways these explanatory comments interrupt the flow of the earlier liturgical sections, raising questions of composition. If we accept Brown’s explanation that the Gospel was composed in several stages,13 and see the hymn material of the Prologue (1:1-5, 10-12, 14, 16) as a late addition of a final redactor to a work that originally began with 1:6 and 19, a possible explanation emerges. That is, it becomes possible to see the interspersing of these comments regarding the Baptist within the hymn-like material of the Prologue as an attempt to interweave together the earlier and later introductory materials. While such a proposal is necessarily speculative, the logical progression of thought between 1:6-8 and 19 appears to support such a suggestion.14 In addition, there are Old Testament parallels for beginning narrative accounts with a construction similar to the one we find in 1:6 (e.g., Judges 13:2; 1 Sam 1:1). This leaves open the possibility that in its earliest form, the introduction to John’s Gospel may have begun with 1:6-8.




Notes 

  1. R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 110-11.
  2. See F. F. Bruce, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 8; Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 71-72.
  3. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 1.22.
  4. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 1.18-23. On the incorporation of early Christian confessional material, particularly in hymnic or lyric form, into New Testament writings, see R. N. Longenecker, New Wine into Fresh Wineskins (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 6-13.
  5. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 18.
  6. Herman Ridderbos, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 30-31.
  7. Ridderbos, The Gospel According to John, ibid.
  8. Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 21.
  9. C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 294-296.
  10. See G. E. Ladd, "The Fourth Gospel," in A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 237-242; Morris, Studies in the Fourth Gospel, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 119 ff.; George Beasley-Murray, John (Waco: Word, 1987), 9-10; Ridderbos, The Gospel According to John, 28-30, 35.
  11. Morris, ibid, 116-117; cf. Ridderbos, The Gospel According to John, 122-24.
  12. Beasley-Murray, John, 5.
  13. Raymond E. Brown, "The Gospel According to John," in An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 374-76.
  14. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 1.27.

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