The Gospel of John

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning. 3All things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing that has come into being was made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of humans, 5and the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

The story to be told in this Gospel begins with the words, “A man came, sent from God. John was his name” (1:6). This means that the five preceding verses must be taken as a kind of preface or preamble, in keeping with the principle stated by John himself that “The One coming after me … was before me” (v. 15; see also v. 30). This will be new to generations of readers who are accustomed to setting the first eighteen verses of the Gospel apart as “The Prologue.” In identifying the first five verses of John as “preamble,” rather than the first eighteen as “prologue,” we are breaking with tradition, and within these five verses we break with tradition again by accenting “the light”1 rather than “the Word” as their major theme. John’s Gospel is classically remembered as a Gospel of the Word (ho logos), and its christology as a “Logos” christology to be placed alongside other New Testament christologies. But the significance of “Word,” or Logos, as a title for Jesus, real as it is, must be kept in perspective. It appears only four times in the Gospel, three times in the very first verse, once in verse 14, and never again in the rest of John.2 “Light,” on the other hand, is a dominant image through at least the first half of the Gospel.3 The preamble begins with “the Word” (v. 1) and finishes on a triumphant note with “the light” (v. 5), giving away at the outset the ending of the story, and succinctly describing the world as the Gospel writer perceives it: “And the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” The Gospel of John is about revelation; the text begins with audible revelation (“Word”), moving on to visible revelation (“light”), and thence back and forth between the two (embodied in Jesus’ signs and discourses) as the story unfolds.

1–2 Each of the four Gospels begins, appropriately enough, with a reference to some kind of beginning. Mark’s heading is “Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mk 1:1). Matthew opens with an account of the origin of Jesus Christ” (Mt 1:1). Luke acknowledges the traditions of “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Lk 1:2). John’s “beginning” (archē) is the earliest of all, for the vocabulary of John’s preamble is decisively shaped by the opening verses of Genesis. Why this is so has puzzled interpreters for centuries. The Gospel of John is not particularly interested in creation. Like the other Gospels, its focus is on revelation and redemption, the new creation if you will. But at the outset, attention is drawn to the beginning of all beginnings, the story of creation in Genesis. Whether or not the purpose is to counter a group in or on the fringes of the Christian movement that denigrated the old creation (Gnosticism comes immediately to mind), we do not know. As interpreters, our best course is to defer judgment for the moment, and wait to see if subsequent evidence in the Gospel sheds light on why the writer has begun in this way.

In any event, the words “In the beginning”4 unmistakably echo Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” Yet the differences are more striking than the similarities. God is the solitary Creator in the Genesis account, while in John creation is jointly the work of God and the Word. Genesis, moreover, is interested in God’s act, not God’s being or existence, which is simply presupposed: “God made the heaven and the earth.” John’s Gospel, by contrast, focuses on being, in three clauses: (1) “In the beginning was the Word,” (2) “the Word was with God,” and (3) “the Word was God.”5 Perhaps this is because God in the book of Genesis needs no introduction. God can be safely presupposed, but the same is not true of the Word in the Gospel of John. The Word must be identified, and can only be identified in relation to God, the God of Israel.

After introducing “the Word” in the first clause, the verse presents an interplay between “the Word” (ho logos) and “God” (ho theos) in two different ways, and in chiastic fashion: the Word was “with God”6 and, following the order of the Greek text, God was what the Word was.7 The solemn repetition—Word, Word, God, God, Word—captures the reader’s attention from the outset by giving the language a poetic or hymnic quality that immediately sets John apart from the other three canonical Gospels. Because this quality is not typical of John’s Gospel as a whole, the impression is given that John will be more different from the other Gospels than is actually the case.

What then is the relationship between the Word and God? The signals are mixed, in that the two are viewed first as distinct entities (“the Word was with God”), and then in some way identified with each other (“the Word was God”). “God” in the first instance has the definite article in Greek (ho theos), which is not used in English when speaking of the Jewish or Christian God, but in the second instance it stands without the article.8 But the placement of “God,” or theos, first in its clause,9 before the verb, gives it a certain definiteness, warning us against reducing it to a mere adjective.10 At the same time, the absence of the article alerts the reader that “the Word” and “God,” despite their close and intimate relationship, are not interchangeable. While the Word is God, God is more than just the Word.11 Even though it stands first in its clause, “God” is the predicate noun and not the subject of the clause, that is, “the Word was God,” not “God was the Word” (compare 4:24, “God is Spirit,” not “Spirit is God”). Even when the subject stands first, the definite article is often used to distinguish the subject from the predicate, as in 1 John 1:5 (“God is light”) and 4:8 and 16 (“God is love”).12 In our passage, “God” is virtually an attribute of the Word, just as spirit and light and love are attributes of God in these other texts. To some, this makes theos almost adjectival (as in James Moffatt’s translation, “the Logos was divine”),13 but it is no more an adjective than “spirit” or “light” or “love” are adjectives. To say “God is Spirit” is not the same as saying God is spiritual, and “God is love” says more than that God is loving. In the same way, “the Word was God” says more than “the Word was divine.” While “the Word was deity” is possible, it sounds too abstract, losing the simplicity and style of “the Word was God” with no corresponding gain in accuracy.14

God will emerge in this Gospel as “the Father,” with the Word as the Father’s “only Son” (see vv. 14, 18) or simply “the Son.” To express this relationship, later Christian theology introduced the Hellenistic notions of “nature” and of “person”: the Father and the Son are two distinct Persons sharing a common nature as God. A classic “Johannine” opening to the Gospel, and one wholly congenial to later Christian theology, would have been, “In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with the Father, and the Son was God. He was in the beginning with the Father.” Instead, the Gospel writer has opted to postpone speaking of “the Son” and “the Father” until after the narrative proper has begun, with the appearance of the “man sent from God. John was his name” (1:6). This is appropriate because elsewhere in the Gospel tradition the Father is defined as Father and the Son as Son precisely in the setting of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River (Mk 1:9–11 and parallels). The choice of different vocabulary in the preamble has contributed to the widespread (but questionable) view among modern scholars that not only the first five verses but much of what is commonly known as the prologue (vv. 1–18) belongs to a pre-Johannine, possibly pre-Christian, hymn.

The first and second clauses of verse 1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”) are echoed more briefly, like an antiphonal response, in verse 2: “He was in the beginning with God.”15 The point is that the Word was God’s companion in the work of creation (see v. 3). The writer will not let us bypass the “beginning” and Genesis 1:1 too quickly. Ptolemy, the earliest known commentator on the Gospel of John, in the mid-second century elevated archē to the status of a christological title. “John the Lord’s disciple,” Ptolemy wrote, “desiring to tell of the origin of the universe by which the Father produced everything, posits a certain Beginning [archēn] which was first generated by God, which he called Only-Begotten Son and God, in which the Father emitted all things spermatically. By this the Logos was emitted, and in it was the whole substance of the Aeons, which the Logos itself later shaped.… First he differentiates the three: God, Beginning, and Logos; then he combines them again in order to set forth the emission of each of them, the Son and the Logos, and their unity with each other and with the Father. For in the Father and from the Father is the Beginning, and in the Beginning and from the Beginning is the Logos.”16 Creation, the work of one divine entity in Genesis, God (Heb. ʾĕlōhîm), and the work of two in John (God and the Word), becomes in Ptolemy the work of three (God, the Beginning, and the Word).

In this way Ptolemy, a Valentinian Gnostic, created a kind of “trinity” out of the opening verses of John long before trinitarianism became dominant in the church. Nor is his interpretation quite as far-fetched as it sounds, given that archē was already a title for Jesus Christ in Asia Minor before the end of the first century.17 Yet Ptolemy has moved too far from the world of Genesis to be convincing. The “beginning” in Genesis 118 is clearly intended in a temporal sense. The same is true in John 1:1, just as “from the beginning” (or apʾ archēs) is also consistently temporal in the New Testament.19 John’s Gospel has moved beyond Genesis in its own ways, however, first by its transformation of the refrain, “and God said”20 (Gen 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 29), into the noun “word” or logos,21 and second by its personification of “word” as “the Word.” Personification is evident not so much in the pronoun “he”22 as in the characterization of the logos as “God,” understood as a personal Being. But if the Word is personal in John 1, is the reader expected to know that the Word is specifically Jesus Christ? Probably so, in view of the fact that when the name “Jesus Christ” is finally introduced (1:16), it is as a given, without explanation or fanfare. Moreover, when “Jesus” makes his appearance as a living character in the story, he does so very abruptly and through the eyes of the baptizer, John, who “sees Jesus coming toward him” (1:29). Evidently the reader knows who Jesus is, and therefore, in all likelihood, that the story is about him from the start. He is first “the Word” (vv. 1–3, 14), then “the Light” (vv. 4, 5, 7–8, 9–10), then the “One and Only” (vv. 14, 18), and finally, in much of the rest of the Gospel, “the Son.”23

3–4 As soon as the Word has been introduced, “was” gives way to “came” or “came to be” (egeneto), a verb conspicuous in the LXX of the Genesis account.24 Divine being gives way to divine action, starting with the creation of the world. This is the verb the Gospel writer will use not only for creation (vv. 3 and 10) but for the coming of John as “a man sent from God” (v. 6), for the coming of the Word himself in the flesh of Jesus Christ (v. 14) and for the “grace and truth” that Jesus Christ brings (v. 17). Regarding creation, the same thing is stated twice for rhetorical effect, first positively and then negatively. “All things” came into being through the Word, and “not one thing” came into being without him.25 The construction is similar to that of verse 1, where the repetitions, “Word, Word, God, God, Word,” carried the thought forward in similar chainlike fashion (sometimes known as “staircase parallelism”), except that here strong contrasts are introduced: “through him” and “apart from him”; “all things” and “not one thing.”

The classic problem of the verse is that the symmetry is broken by the seemingly redundant clause, “that which has come to be” (ho gegonen), at the end of the verse. Traditional English versions convey the sense of redundancy quite well; for example, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (RSV); “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (NIV). Not all English versions agree, however. Some have followed instead an ancient precedent in reading this clause not as an anticlimax to verse 3 but as the beginning of verse 4: for example, “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 all people” (NRSV); “Through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him. All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men” (NEB).26 Such a verse division is supported by Kurt Aland, who demonstrated thirty years ago from ancient versions and citations of the fathers that this way of reading the text enjoyed almost universal support in the second and early third centuries.27

Is Aland’s reading correct? I once thought so,28 but now I am not so sure. This was a rare point at which Bruce Metzger disagreed with the committee that edited the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament. The UBS Editorial Committee read ho gegonen with verse 4 in keeping with Aland’s argument, but Metzger filed his own minority report in his Textual Commentary, arguing that the relative clause belonged with verse 3.29 The awkwardness Metzger noticed is evident in the NRSV (“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people”), where the perfectly accurate rendering, “what has come into being,” seems to require “is life.”30 The present tense, “is” (estin), does in fact appear as a variant reading in verse 4 in several ancient manuscripts and versions.31 But Metzger, this time in agreement with the UBS Editorial Committee, comments, “In order to relieve the difficulty … the tense of the verb was changed from imperfect to present.”32

Peter Cohee, in an attempt to resolve the problem, argues that the seemingly redundant clause was not original, but rather “introduced into the text as a gloss.”33 But even if it is a gloss, the same question remains. Was it added to the end of verse 3, or to the beginning of verse 4? Whether one agrees with his conclusion or not, Cohee’s answer is instructive. If it is a gloss to verse 3, he infers that “Someone wished to point out that the absolute statement in the verse proper applied to the mortal sphere of created things, but that there were things—or at least one thing—uncreated.”34 In effect, Cohee is attributing the gloss to a scribe whose interpretation of John 1:3–4 precisely matched that of Ptolemy. Irenaeus quotes Ptolemy as claiming that “ ‘all things’ came into existence ‘through’ it [diʾ autou], but Life ‘in’ it [en autō]. This, then, coming into existence in it, is closer in it than the things which came into existence through it.”35 There is no textual evidence for excluding the clause “that which has come to be” as a gloss, and to do so is precarious.36

If it is not a gloss, but part of the original text, then Cohee’s mention of a view “that there were things—or at least one thing—uncreated” takes on added significance, for it could as easily be the view of the Gospel writer himself as of a later scribe. As soon as he had written, “All things came into being through him,” and “not one thing was made without him,” it may have occurred to the writer that some things did not come into being at all, but had always existed.37 Among these were the two things of immediate concern in these opening verses, eternal “life” and the “light” of human beings. Other examples would have been divine wisdom, truth, and love. Such things are not creations of God but attributes of God. They exist wherever and whenever God exists. The Gospel writer, therefore, had to add the words “that which has come into being” as a qualification: “All things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing that has come into being was made” (my italics).38 Not all things were created, but all things created were created through the Word. The contrast is not, as Ptolemy thought, between things created through the Word and things created in the Word, but between things that came into being through the Word and things that did not come into being at all, but always were. The latter, being attributes of God, are also attributes of the Word.

The first of these is “life,” probably not physical life (which according to Genesis 1 was created), but spiritual life, or what the Gospel of John elsewhere calls “eternal life.” One definition of “eternal,” after all, is having neither end nor beginning. Here the Gospel writer moves past “life” quickly to get to the theme of light, which will be developed at greater length in the verses to follow, but in 1 John “life” takes center stage at the start. There, having mentioned “the word [or message] of Life” (1 Jn 1:1), the writer adds, “and the Life was revealed, and we have seen, and we testify and announce to you that eternal Life which was with the Father [pros ton patera] and was revealed to us” (1 Jn 1:2).39 Clearly, “Life” is not something created, but, like the Word, is with God from the beginning. Near the end of 1 John the writer concludes, “And this is the testimony, that God has given us eternal Life, and this Life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has Life, and whoever does not have the Son of God does not have Life” (1 Jn 5:11–12). The Gospel of John makes the same point at the end of its first major section: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (Jn 3:36). Here in verse 4, “life” and “light” are equivalent expressions for salvation, and for the time being the preoccupation is with light. In stating that in the Word “was life,” and that “that life was the light of humans,”40 the writer is giving us a provisional definition of the “life” he has in mind. Salvation in the Gospel of John is defined as revelation or knowledge, something of which “light” is a most appropriate symbol. “This is eternal life,” we will read, even within Jesus’ last prayer to the Father, “that they may know you, the only true God, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ” (17:3). Life in this Gospel is light, “the light of humans.” Once again, physical light is not meant because in Genesis physical light was created as the first of all created things (“God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” Gen 1:3).41 In our text, by contrast, “the light of humans” is not something created, but is part and parcel of the life that is in the Word, and therefore eternal.42

Almost always, “light” in the Gospel of John is a metaphor,43 but the question here is whether the metaphor is to be understood universally, as the intellectual or emotional light distinguishing humans from the rest of creation, or more specifically as the “the light of the world” revealed in Jesus Christ (see 8:12). This question can perhaps be answered definitively only after taking into consideration verse 9 of this chapter (“The light was the True [Light] that illumines every human being who comes into the world”), and 3:19 (“This then is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and human beings loved the dark rather than the Light, for their works were evil”). The former points toward the general or universal understanding of verse 4, the latter toward the more redemptive-historical interpretation. But because there has been no mention of any specific “coming” of the light this early in the story, it is wise to give the phrase “the light of humans” the broadest possible application. It is fair to assume that “the light of humans” refers to a capacity for love and understanding given to every human being at birth. Despite the strong Johannine emphasis on another birth, “of God” (1:13) or “of the Spirit” (3:6) or “from above” (3:3), the testimony of verse 4 is that physical birth is also a source of “light” from God. At least the burden of proof is on those who would argue otherwise.

5 The tense of the verb changes from imperfect to present. The light “is shining” (phainei) in the darkness. Having looked at beginnings, and how “all things came into being” (v. 3), the Gospel writer returns to his own time and his own world. What is striking is that he passes over the whole “biblical” period (what Christians today call the “Old Testament”) in silence. Some modern interpreters have found this odd, and have tried to find allusions to the Old Testament, beyond Genesis 1, either in verses 1–5 44 or verses 6–13,45 or both. But these supposed allusions are not convincing. This book is a Gospel, not a survey of redemptive history. Having laid claim, briefly and decisively, to the whole created order on behalf of the Word (and implicitly, though only implicitly, to the entire biblical past), the writer moves on to tell the Gospel story, the good news of Jesus. As readers, we are not kept in suspense. We learn immediately that the story will have a happy ending. The light “is shining in the darkness,” we are told, not continually through time but specifically now, because something decisive happened. What that something was, we are not told. The Christian reader familiar with the rest of the New Testament already knows, and probably the Gospel’s original readers knew. But all we are told explicitly is what did not happen: “the darkness” did not “overtake” (katelaben) the light.46

This is the first we have heard of “darkness” (skotia), and the writer does not pause to address the philosophical question of where the darkness came from if “all things” were either created through the Word or existed in the Word. The perspective of John’s Gospel as a whole, however, suggests that “the darkness” is equivalent to “the world” (ho kosmos),47 and the writer will make clear in verse 9 that “the world came into being through him.” It is probably fair to assume that if “all things” include “the world,” they also include “the darkness.” Some translators (perhaps with the analogy between darkness and the world in view) have rendered the verb as “comprehend” or “understand,” anticipating verse 10 (“the world did not know him”).48 Others accent the idea of conflict, as I have done, with the verb “overtake” or “overcome.”49 Still others, combining the ideas of comprehension on the one hand and confrontation on the other, have proposed such alternatives as “seize,” “grasp,” or “master.”50 The verb is probably to be read as part of the imagery of darkness, hence “overtake.” The physical darkness of night falls quickly, “overtaking” those who stay too long in places where the night brings danger, and the same is true of the spiritual darkness of ignorance and unbelief.51 This is not what has happened, however, in the story to be told here, which was after all handed down in the Christian church as “gospel,” or good news. Right from the start it is clear that a confrontation between light and darkness has taken place once and for all, and that the light has emerged victorious. The light shines on in the darkness, and the writer will now proceed to narrate how this all came about.