John 1-11

An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture

Gerald L. Borchert

• Publisher: Holman Reference
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780805401257
• eBook ISBN: 9781433675638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

THE NEW AMERICAN COMMENTARY is for the minister or Bible student who wants to understand and expound the Scriptures. Notable features include:* commentary based on THE NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION;* the NIV text printed in the body of the commentary;* sound scholarly methodology that reflects capable research in the original languages;* interpretation that emphasizes the theological unity of each book and of Scripture as a whole;* readable and applicable exposition.

SECTION OUTLINE

I. AN ENCOMPASSING BEGINNING (1:1-51)

1. The Magnificent Prologue (1:1-18)

2. The Baptizer's Witness (1:19-28)

(1) John's Witness under Interrogation (1:19-22)

(2) The Witness's Ambition (1:23-28)

3. Three Cameos of Witness (1:29-51)

(1) John's Witness in Proclamation (1:29-34)

(2) John's Witness and the Coming of the First Disciple (1:35-42)

Excursus 1: John's Order

(3) Philip's Witness to Nathanael (1:43-51)

I. AN ENCOMPASSING BEGINNING (1:1-51)

We turn from general introductory matters to the text of this vibrant book. In doing so the reader should quickly sense why John's God-given Gospel has had such a central role in the way the church through the centuries has formulated its thoughts about Jesus Christ and embodied those ideas in the doctrine we designate as Christology.

This introductory chapter of John serves a threefold function. It begins with a magnificent Prologue (1:1-18) which describes the introduction of Jesus, the eternal Word of God, into the realm of humanity. In this Prologue the Word is compared briefly to John the Baptizer, who functions in the role of a witness. He is more precisely introduced in the second section (1:19-28), where he is under investigation by a committee of the Jewish leadership. The introduction then concludes with three cameos of witness (1:29-51) in which the focus moves from John to Jesus and specifies a series of confessional designations that are applied to Jesus as testimonies concerning who he is.

1. The Magnificent Prologue (1:1-18)

¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning.

³Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In him was life, and that life was the light of men. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

⁶There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. ⁸He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. ⁹The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

¹⁰He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹²Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

¹⁴The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

¹⁵John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’” ¹⁶From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.

¹⁷For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known.

The Gospel opens with one of the most elevated statements about Jesus found in the New Testament. Only the texts of Col 1:15-20 and Heb 1:1-13 come close to approximating the profound view of God's Son presented in John 1:1-18. These first eighteen verses of the Gospel, which have a wonderful poetic ring, have been labeled by scholars with the unpoetic title “The Prologue.” But in spite of its poetic ring, the reader should be forewarned that this Prologue is one of the most complex theological statements in the Bible. An entire seminary semester's course could be taught on these eighteen verses. Study of this text takes time, but those who ponder these magnificent words will learn that God will reward his children who diligently and prayerfully seek for understanding. The reader is welcomed to an intellectual, spiritual, and life-challenging pilgrimage with an evangelist who continues to call us to new dimensions of believing.

Both the nature and the function of this Prologue have been debated by scholars. J. T. Sanders argued that it is poetry.¹ R. Brown likened it to a hymn in four strophes (vv. 1-2; vv. 3-5; vv. 10-12; vv. 14-16) with some interspersed prose comments that enhance John's goal of introducing Jesus to the reader.² C. F. Burney earlier thought that one could recover an Aramaic hymn lying behind the Greek of all except v. 12 of the hymn and the Greek prose reflections on John the Baptist.³ C. K. Barrett was content to settle for calling the text poetic prose while R. A. Culpepper posited a chiastic structure.⁴ Whatever one may call the form of the passage, it is a masterful statement with a poetic sound.

In terms of style and theology scholars in this century have likewise strongly debated the existence and kind of a foundational document (Grundschrift) that may have stood behind the Prologue.⁵ The reason scholars have sought for such a foundational document is that the Prologue contains some of the most tightly reasoned patterns of theological reflection in the New Testament and because it contains a number of terms whose particular meanings appear only here in the entire Gospel—for example, “Word” (logos) as a title, “fullness” (plēroma), “grace” (charis), “only Son” (monogenēs), and “tent” or “tabernacle” (skēnoun). In trying to deal with these factors, J. A. T. Robinson firmly concluded that, with the exception of verses concerning John the Baptist, the Prologue was added by another writer.⁶

R. Bultmann argued a little differently. In the incipient stage of Mandean studies during the 1920s and 1930s that emphasized the figure of John the Baptist, Bultmann posited that the original Logos hymn arose out of a Gnostic circle that highlighted the Baptizer. He concluded that the hymn was taken over from a Gnostic source and was edited to fit the needs of the Johannine writer.⁷ More recently, however, with the work that has been done on early Christian hymns, E. Käsemann has argued strongly that the basis for the Prologue was not Gnostic or Jewish in origin but a pre-Johannine Christian hymn that was incorporated into the Gospel.⁸ B. Witherington has argued for a hymn constructed in the style of a Jewish wisdom hymn.⁹ We may tentatively conclude that even if parts of the Prologue might have been rooted in an earlier hymn, the entire format is now a forthright reflection of Johannine thought concerning this unique Son who came to earth from God.

The style of the Gospel is a tightly woven argument that moves the reader in stair-step fashion from point to point and provides the rationale for the Johannine testimony concerning the incarnation of Jesus—namely, the assertions that “the Word became flesh” and that “we have seen his glory” (1:14). With the use of “we” and “us” in the text at 1:14,16 there is a recognition of a community sense of witness in the testimony of the Gospel, particularly in the strong Christological assertions of the Prologue. The reader will meet an implied community again in the affirmation of the plural witness at the cross (19:35) and in the clear assertion of the community's authentication of the gospel witness in the Epilogue (21:24). Given this phenomenon, it is perhaps not out of place to note here that this Gospel asserts a witness to one of the most crucial theological confessions of the Christian church—namely, that God entered humanity in his Son. The explanation of that confession is the strategic point of the Prologue.¹⁰

Under divine guidance, then, John was not content to begin his Gospel story as Mark did with the testimony of John the Baptist (Mark 1:1-8). Nor was it enough to go back with Luke to the birth narratives of the Baptizer and Jesus (Luke 1:1-2:20). John did not even go back with Matthew in his genealogy to Abraham and the beginning of the people of Israel (Matt 1:1) nor with Luke back to Adam and the beginning of the human race (Luke 3:38). John started at the very beginning as Gen 1:1 does, when there was just God. He linked the incarnation with the Word that was present at the very beginning of time (John 1:1). In Christian theology you cannot go back further than God. In the ancient world there were creation stories of the gods, but in the Bible there is no possibility of a cosmogony involving the creation of God. God is the beginning!

1:1 The first verse of the Gospel contains three basic affirmations that are fundamental to Christian theology. As E. Haenchen noted, the reader might well anticipate that John's first statement would be an affirmation that links God and the beginning. The surprise is that he began by linking the Logos (Word) with the beginning.¹¹ This statement asserts that the Logos existed before creation began. John confirms this assertion in the two following verses.

Now in singing the praises of the Logos, John was not the least bit interested in displacing God, as the very next affirmation makes clear.¹² In this second statement of v. 1 the focus is on the relationship of the Word to God. Most translators render this statement “and the Word was with God.” Actually it is difficult to translate the Greek phrase pros ton theon (in both vv. 1 and 2) into English. Literally it means “toward God.” Such a translation has the advantage of emphasizing a differential in the Godhead between the parties, but it must not be understood to highlight either ontological change in the Godhead or an oversubjectionism that makes the Logos less than God.¹³ As B. M. Newman and E. A. Nida have advised translators, this expression should not be read merely as connoting that the Word was in the presence of God but rather that there existed a kind of interactive reciprocality between the Word and God.¹⁴ A similar expression occurs in 1 John 1:2, where eternal life is first personalized as being pros ton patera, “with [or toward] the Father,” and then made known on earth through the Son. In that case the writer used the relationship between the Son and the Father as a key to proclaiming the basis for the joyous news of our relationship (koinonia) with (meta) the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3—4).

Whereas the second theological affirmation of John 1:1 has emphasized a relational differential betw...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Editor Information
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editors Preface
• Authors Preface
• Abbreviations
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4