Christology, the study of who Jesus is, has to do with a reasoned statement about the relation of Jesus to the One God of Israel. There is no doubt that for the early Christians Jesus “had the value and reality of God.” This, however, does not mean that they thought Jesus “was God.” It has been held by some that John presents Jesus in metaphysical terms which would appeal to people in the Greek world who thought in terms of abstract ideas familiar to Hellenistic thought. “Orthodoxy” claims John as its bridge to the world of Greek metaphysics — the metaphysics which helped to mold the Jesus of the Church Councils.
We suggest that we should first see if John can be readily understood in terms of his otherwise very Jewish approach. Why should we attempt to read John as though he were a student of the Jew Philo or of Gentile mystery religion? Why should John be claimed as a supporter of the dogmatic conclusions of the much later Church Councils? Should we not make sense of him from the Old Testament world of ideas? “What we do know,” says a leading Bible scholar, “is that John was steeped in the Old Testament Scriptures. If we wish to understand the historical ancestry of John’s Logos [word] concept as he himself understood it, we have to go back to those Scriptures” (C.J. Wright, “Jesus the Revelation of God,” in The Mission and Message of Jesus: An Exposition of the Gospels in the Light of Modern Research, 1953, p. 677).
It is a considerable mistake to read John 1:1 as though it means “In the beginning was the Son of God and the Son was with the Father and the Son was God.” A similar very misleading paraphrase in the Living Bible reads: “Before anything else existed, there was Christ, with God. He has always been alive and is Himself God. He created everything there is — nothing exists that He did not make” (John 1:1-2). THIS IS NOT WHAT JOHN WROTE! The German poet Goethe wrestled with a correction in translation: “In the beginning was the Word, the Thought, the Power or the Deed.” He decided on “deed.” He comes very close to John’s intention. What the evangelist wanted to say was: “The Creative Thought of God has been operating from all eternity.”
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Author: Anthony Buzzard & Charles F. Hunting
Keywords: The word, Jesus is the word, Jesus was the word, The word is Jesus, Logos, Trinity, Trinitarian
Bible reference(s): John 1:1-2
Source: Anthony Buzzard & Charles F. Hunting, The Doctrine of the Trinity (Lanham, Md.: International Scholars Publications, 1998), pp. 174-178, 190-200.
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