In this post we will examine the prologue to John’s gospel. Our analysis here is heavily dependent upon work we have done in previous posts, so if you are coming to this post without having read posts 6-10, I encourage you to go back and read those before continuing here.

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. This was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. . . . The true light, which enlightens everyone, was continually coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Logos 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. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the unique Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1:1-5, 9-18)

I have left “Logos” untranslated here because there are multiple possible translations. Logos can mean Word. It can also mean Reason, Logic, or Order. It can refer to a Plan. It can be specific and local or even cosmic in scope. In Jewish thought, it can carry connotations of Wisdom. Moreover, anyone familiar with Philo’s ideas (and Philo, although not representative of all Judaism, was certainly not idiosyncratic) may hear in “Logos” a reference to an archangel, to a second, subordinate God, and/or to the “heavenly man,” the incorporeal human prototype of whom Adam was a copy. To translate Logos as “Word” is immediately to make an interpretive choice without sufficient warrant. John may have had a very specific meaning in mind, or he may have wished to allude to multiple senses of Logos.

The first thing we need to note about the prologue to John’s Gospel is that it is highly poetic, almost hymn-like. Good exegesis will be mindful of this fact. It would be inappropriate to mine a poet’s verse for doctrinal precision. Poetry is allusive, and often elusive. Precision is the aim in legal material, in academic debates, in creedal conferences. But poetry is meant to be evocative. It is loose, and it alludes. It is not designed to be clear to the non-initiate. To understand good literature, one has to know the history of literature, because good literature often alludes to other literature, but not in a way that is obvious to those who are not familiar with it. Good allusions however are unmistakable to those who inhabit the same literary universe as the author. To the non-initiate, what is intended to be poetic can sometimes appear flat and literal. The non-initiate will misunderstand. To those on the inside, overstatement and hyperbole are not shocking, because they understand what is being said. To the non-initiate, such language may be read too rigidly.

We know this. This is common sense to us. Take these lines:

But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I’m rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

Nobody who knows what poetry is would read this and conclude that Faulkner literally believed there was a spot of land somewhere which possessed magical properties capable of resuscitating him from death. Yet that is what he says on a flat reading. We know, rather, that Faulkner speaks of a love for nature so strong that it sustains him when he despairs even of his own life.

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.”
(Prov 8:1-4)

Again, no one reads this and concludes that Wisdom is the name of a female person who literally stands at the crossroads, at the gates, and calls out in an audible voice. This is poetry. It expresses the idea that wisdom is available to all but many do not attempt to become wise, but the way this very obvious fact is expressed gives it power and evokes sensations in the hearer that the flat statement of the bare idea could not. It uses imagery that creates anguish and longing, sympathy and remorse. The truth that human beings usually reject wisdom becomes more true when it is expressed in a fiction. It becomes more true to the hearer than it would be if the simple fact of the matter were relayed.

John’s prologue is poetic, richly symbolic, highly evocative and pervasively allusive. That is to say, allusions to earlier Jewish poetry pervade John’s prologue. This is so obvious, it would hardly need be pointed out, were it not for the fact that an “orthodoxy” established two hundred some years after John wrote has imposed a flat, literal, doctrinaire reading upon the text. To us, just the mere suggestion that John might not be speaking entirely literally sounds to our ears like a cheap cop out, a watering down of “the gospel truth.” Why is this so? Why does a less than literal reading of the text constitute a watering down of its truth, while a literal reading of the text’s “plain sense” (to whom?) is just taken for granted as hermeneutically sound? This is so because our creeds require it. The arguments men had several hundred years after John wrote, and the conclusions (some of) those men came to, sealed for all time what the text could and could not mean. Now anyone suggesting a metaphorical reading is castigated as a “theological wimp”—someone who is afraid of admitting the truth that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.

Can you imagine if Nicaea decided that Proverbs 8 meant that the Holy Spirit was Lady Wisdom, and that she sometimes took human form and called out from street corners? Imagine Nicaea had decided that the Holy Spirit was a female, based on Proverbs 8 and some other texts, and seventeen hundred years later, some arrogant over-educated son-of-a-bitch suggested that Proverbs 8 was a metaphor. Wisdom really isn’t female (or male), isn’t really a person at all. Proverbs 8 is just a metaphorical personification of God’s wisdom, which is not a person but a property—a virtue God possesses. Now imagine that the response of the creedalists was to castigate this person as a theological wimp—afraid of the truth—and a heretic who (consciously or not) is out and about to deceive God’s people.

That would be ridiculous. Wouldn’t it? The joke would be on the creedalists. But their creeds are blinding them to what seems so obvious to those who are not committed to the creeds.

I am arguing that John’s prologue would have been immediately read as poetic language, evoking common Jewish poetic motifs, and that the truth John wished to express, and the truth John’s earliest audience would have understood, was a truth presented in metaphor. John was not using the language of doctrinal precision, nor should he be faulted for not having done so. John’s prologue is a beautiful and powerful testament to the early Christian belief that in Jesus of Nazareth, the fullness of God’s plan for the ages has been revealed, and through Jesus it was now being accomplished. Just as God spoke at the beginning and by the logos of his mouth created all things, so now, through Jesus of Nazareth, God is speaking a new beginning. Jesus is the logos that God is now speaking, and the mystery is that it is the very same logos God spoke at the beginning. This does not mean that Jesus preexisted in some form (human or non-human). It means that the logos (plan, reason, design, order) according to which God created the world in the beginning, is the same logos that is being revealed now in Jesus. Through Jesus, God is restoring the world to its original logos.

To many ears attuned to orthodox Christianity, this will of course sound flagrantly reductionistic. “Of course that’s what it means, but it also means that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity! Why the one at the expense of the other?” But remember that it is emphatically not reductionistic to read metaphor as metaphor. It is an act of hermeneutical violence to do otherwise.

To help further my case that this is how we should read John’s prologue, let’s revisit some of the parallels between the “Logos” in John 1, and personified Wisdom in Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch and elsewhere. Remember, as well, that John’s Bible, and the Bible his audience used, contained all of these books. They would be intimately familiar with the wisdom literature from which John is drawing. This means that John’s original audience would have been “initiates” in the literary world within which John wrote. They would have had no trouble understanding his allusions. It was only later, when John’s Gospel was read outside of the context of second temple Judaism that these allusions would no longer have been readily accessible. Flat readings developed and became dominant once non-initiates became the dominant readers.

So let’s go over some of these parallels:¹

(1) Preexistence is common to both the Johannine Logos and Jewish Wisdom (John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word” // Proverbs 8:22: “Yahweh created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old”; Sirach 1:4: “Wisdom was created before all things”; 24:9: “In the beginning, he created me”).

(2) Both are said to be “with God” (John 1:1: “and the Word was with God” // Proverbs 8:30: “then I was beside him, like a master workman”; Wisdom of Solomon 9:4: “the wisdom that sits by your throne”).

(3) Both are said to be divine (John 1:1: “and the Word was God” // Wisdom of Solomon 7:25-26: “For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; . . . she is a reflection of eternal light, . . . and an image of his goodness”).

(4) Both are described as the instrument of creation (John 1:3: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing anything was made that was made” // Prov 8:30: “I was beside him like a master workman”; 3:19: “Yahweh by Wisdom founded the earth”; Wisdom of Solomon 7:22: “Wisdom, the fashioner of all things”; 9:1-2: “who has made all things by your Word, and by your Wisdom has formed man”).

(5) Both are called the source of life (John 1:4: “In him was life” // Prov 8:35: “he who finds me finds life”; Baruch 4:1b: “All who hold her fast will live”) and light (John 1:4: “and that life was the light of men” // Wisdom of Solomon 7:26: “she is a reflection of eternal light”; Sirach 24:27: “It makes instruction shine forth like light”; Baruch 4:2: “walk toward the shining of her light”).

(6) Neither can be overcome by darkness/evil (John 1:5: “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it” // Wisdom of Solomon 7:29-30: “Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail”).

(7) Both continually come into the world (John 1:9: “The true light that enlightens everyone was continually coming [present tense, periphrastic participle] into the world” // Wisdom of Solomon 6:13, 16: “She hastens to make herself known . . . she goes about seeking those worthy of her”; 7:27: “in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God”; Sirach 24:6-7: “in the whole earth, and in every people and nation, I have gotten a possession. Among all these I sought a resting place; I sought in whose territory I might pitch my tent”; 1 Enoch 42:1: “Then Wisdom went out to dwell with the children of the people”) and are in the world (John 1:10: “He was in the world” // Wisdom of Solomon 8:1: “She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other”).

(8) Both are rejected by humans generally (John 1:10b: “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not”; 1:11b: “and his own people received him not” // 1 Enoch 42:2: “but she found no dwelling place. So Wisdom returned to her place and she settled permanently among the angels”; Baruch 3:20-21: “they have not understood her paths, nor laid hold of her. Their children strayed far from her way”).

(9) Both create a relation with God among those who are receptive (John 1:12-13: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” // Wisdom of Solomon 7:27: “she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets, for God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with wisdom”; “because of her I shall have immortality”), saving humans (Wisdom of Solomon 9:18: “and were saved by wisdom”).

(10) Both appeared on earth and lived among humans, tabernacling among them (John 1:14a: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” // Baruch 3:37: “she appeared upon earth and lived among humans”; Sirach 24:8, 11-12: “Then the Creator of all things gave me a commandment, and the one who created me assigned a place for my tent. And he said, ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob’ . . . in the beloved city he gave me a resting place. So I took root in an honored people”).

(11) Both possess glory as monogenēs/unique (John 1:14, 18: “we have beheld his glory, glory as of the unique son from the Father . . . the unique son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” // Wisdom of Solomon 7:22, 25: “Wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me. For in her there is a spirit that is . . . unique. . . . For she is . . . a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty”).

(12) Both know God and make him known (John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God; the unique son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” // Wisdom of Solomon 8:4: “For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God”; 9:9-10: “With you is Wisdom, who knows your works and was present when you made the world, and who understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments. Send her forth . . . that she may be with me . . . and that I may learn what is pleasing to you”).

Thus, it is clear that with reference to the Logos, John intends to allude to the Wisdom tradition, as he does on a number of levels, and frequently. John uses Logos rather than Sophia because he is identifying Wisdom with Jesus: Logos was a masculine noun, Sophia a feminine noun. Since Jesus is male, the masculine noun was more appropriate.

Remember with me that in Baruch 3:22-4:4 and in Sirach 24, personified Wisdom is identified as Torah. Or, in other words, Torah is personified Wisdom incarnate (to borrow an apt term). Remember also that, just as Wisdom was believed to have been the first creature, the Torah was said to have existed “before the foundation of the world” by the rabbis. This did not mean that they believed that before God created the world, he sat down and wrote a book. It means that in the Torah all the secrets of the cosmos are revealed: the logic, the logos by which God created all things is explicated in the pages of the Torah. In the same way, when Baruch and Sirach claim that Wisdom came to “tabernacle among us” in the form of Torah, they did not mean that a divine person or entity literally came down from heaven and took on the form of a set of scrolls. What they meant is that God’s wisdom is manifested in Torah.

In precisely the same way, as John alludes to, evokes and invokes this wisdom tradition and these traditions about Wisdom being embodied in Torah, John is speaking the same language about Jesus. When he says that the “Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us,” he does not mean that the second person of the Trinity (or even that a “second God”—in Philo’s turn of phrase—or the oldest of the archangels) left heaven and took on human flesh. This is the language of Wisdom poetry, and what John is doing is evoking the metaphor of Wisdom-become-Torah and replacing it with Wisdom-become-Jesus. Just as Sirach and Baruch do not literally mean that a divine person or the preeminent agent thereof literally became a book, John does not mean that there was really a person called Logos who literally became the human being Jesus. Like Sirach and Baruch say of Torah, John is saying that God’s ancient wisdom is manifest in the man Jesus. Jesus explicates God’s wisdom. That “the Logos” is said to have been “with God in the beginning” does not mean that Jesus was with God in the beginning. It means that the wisdom that has been made manifest now in Jesus was part of God’s creative process from the beginning. What God began to speak with his “word” in the beginning, God is finishing as he speaks through Jesus: thus a new beginning.

An interesting question is how John understands that this Wisdom came to be associated with Jesus. We recall our discussion in post #09 (Wisdom). Two texts display our possibilities here:

All wisdom is from the Lord,
and with him it remains forever. . . .
Wisdom was created before all other things. . . .
There is but one who is wise, greatly to be feared,
seated upon his throne—the Lord.
It is he who created her;
he saw her and took her measure. . . .
To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
she is created with the faithful in the womb.
(Sirach 1:1, 4, 8-9, 14)

O God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy,
who have made all things by your word,
and by your wisdom have formed humankind
to have dominion over the creatures you have made,
and rule the world in holiness and righteousness,
and pronounce judgment in uprightness of soul,
give me the wisdom that sits by your throne,
and do not reject me from among your servants. . . .
With you is wisdom, she who knows your works
and was present when you made the world;
she understands what is pleasing in your sight
and what is right according to your commandments.
Send her forth from the holy heavens,
and from the throne of your glory send her,
that she may labor at my side,
and that I may learn what is pleasing to you. . . .
Who has learned your counsel,
unless you have given wisdom
and sent your holy spirit from on high?
And thus the paths of those on earth were set right,
and people were taught what pleases you,
and were saved by wisdom.
(Wisdom of Solomon 9:1-4, 9-10, 17-18)

Note in the first passage that wisdom is said to be “created with the faithful in the womb.” This was the answer to the question offered by Matthew and Luke. At what point did God give his unique (monogenēs) wisdom (Wis. Sol. 7:25) to Jesus? Matthew and Luke say, from conception. The holy spirit (which is synonymous in the wisdom tradition for the spirit of wisdom) came upon Mary and wisdom was “created with the faithful in the womb.” The faithful is Jesus, God’s chosen instrument, to whom God gave his unique spirit of wisdom.

Note in the second passage that the king asks for “the holy spirit/wisdom” to descend from heaven, to be sent from on high. This seems to be the answer to the question given by Mark and John, namely, that the spirit of wisdom descended upon Jesus at his baptism. In Mark especially (the earlier of the two gospels), this is the equivalent of Jesus’ coronation ceremony, when—in parallel to God’s adoption of David in Psalm 2—Jesus is identified as God’s special “Son” (read: king). It is appropriate for God’s king to be granted the spirit of wisdom upon his coronation. This alludes to Solomon.

Now, it is possible that John is just assuming the virgin birth narrative, but I think this is unlikely. If John wanted his readers to understand the time at which the “word became flesh” to be at Jesus’ conception, he would have done so explicitly. John would not have been able to simply assume that all of his audience would have been familiar with the tradition of the virgin birth. Moreover, especially since the virgin birth was such a controversial subject (denied by many Christians), John would have stressed it if that’s what he wanted his audience to think. It seems, rather, that the narrative in John 1 itself points to Jesus’ baptism as the point at which the spirit of wisdom descends upon Jesus and marks him as God’s unique Son. Either way, the result is the same. I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Whether the spirit of wisdom came to Jesus in the womb or at his baptism, the message is the same: Jesus is God’s elect, holy agent—the one dedicated to the task of manifesting God’s creative wisdom in his teaching and in his obedient, subservient action.

Recall our discussion of John 10 in post #06 (God’s Name). Just as it was appropriate to speak of the Israelites at Sinai as “gods” and “sons of the Most High,” precisely because they had “received the word of God” (i.e. the Torah), so now it is appropriate for Jesus and his followers to be called “sons of God,” because the word of God is being spoken again: its final installment. The Torah/Jesus parallels permeate John’s gospel from beginning to end. The imagery is evocative, and highly metaphorical, but it demands real response. The truth is expressed often poetically (and the world of second temple Judaism was a richly symbolic world with ample metaphors from which to draw), but the response required is very literal: God demands obedience from us, which necessitates belief that God’s will is revealed through Jesus’ own obedience to the Father. What Jesus does, God wills us all to do. God’s wisdom is made manifest through Jesus’ actions. For John, belief in Jesus is not belief that Jesus is God, but the belief that in Jesus, God’s word is truly manifest.

Note, finally, that Jesus himself distinguishes himself from God, even in John’s Gospel. Jesus in fact does this all throughout, especially in chapters 5, 8 and 10 in which the issue of Jesus’ “equality with God” is paramount, but also very clearly in 20:27: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Here Jesus identifies God as “my God” on equal terms with the disciples. Jesus’ achievement was to incorporate the rest of humanity within his unique relationship to his Father and God.

Jesus also distinguishes himself from God in 17:3: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Here Jesus identifies God as “the only true God,” and refers to God as other than himself in so doing. Then he distinguishes himself as the one whom God has sent—the anointed one, anointed with a mission, namely, to explicate God through his perfect obedience to God’s will. The Johannine Jesus is always at pains to stress that what he does he does in submission and subservience to God. He does not act on his own. Rather, his authority is only valid insomuch as he remains subservient, obediently doing the things God has shown him to do. It is precisely because of Jesus’ obedience to God’s will that John is able appropriately to draw from a plush stock of metaphors and identify Jesus as the eschatological embodiment of God’s original creative logos.

1. I’m drawing here from Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles, rev. ed., pp. 71-73. [BACK]