John 1:1:—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
THE first verse of the Gospel of John contains one of the most weighty statements of the deity of our Lord in the New Testament. It is not the only weighty statement, much less the only distinct statement, of the deity of our Lord in the New Testament. Rather, the whole New Testament is a testimony to our Lord’s deity; and we can read no part of it sympathetically without catching this note sounding through it.
Particularly we need to disabuse our minds of the banality by which the Synoptic Gospels used to be distinguished as the Gospels of the human Jesus, from the Gospel of John as the Gospel of the Divine Jesus. The Synoptic Gospels teach the deity of Jesus as truly and, indeed, as emphatically as the Gospel of John, though not in precisely the same manner. Whatever else William Wrede did or did not do with his book on the Gospel of Mark, he made it impossible forever afterwards to look upon Mark as a naïve collection of all that His followers could recall of the human Jesus; and Johannes Weiss will not be gainsaid when he points out that the Jesus of “the oldest Gospel” has already advanced far toward the Jesus of the latest Gospel. He is to be criticized only for speaking of an “advance” in this connexion, and of that “advance” as not quite complete. Recent critics are fairly falling over one another in their rush to recognize that the conception of a Divine Messiah was not only Primitive-Christian, but Pre-Christian, and that belief in the deity of Jesus, was, therefore, already included in acceptance of Him as Messiah.
We meet no new thing, then, when we read in the first verse of John’s Gospel a crisp declaration that Jesus is God. But we do meet something new in the manner in which this declaration is made. It would not be quite exact to say that it is new that John begins his Gospel with a declaration of the deity of Jesus. Mark also begins his Gospel with a declaration of the deity of Jesus; if, at least, the reading is right which makes him use the term, “the Son of God,” in his opening sentence—“The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It can hardly be maintained that the “Son of God” is not to be understood here in its ontological sense. The difference between the Synoptics and John here is only a difference in what we may call their mode of approach to the common theme. It would not be misleadingly expressed if we said that in the Synoptics the divine nature of the man Jesus is exhibited, while in John the human life of the divine Word is portrayed. In this sense, John does take his start from the deity of our Lord as the Synoptics do not. The deity of our Lord is made by John his point of departure in his delineation of this divine life in the world, while the Synoptics take their start from the birth of Jesus, or the opening of his public ministry.
It is due to this difference that John’s Gospel alone opens with a prologue, which takes us back at once into the depths of Eternal Reality, and tells us who and what that being actually was, whose life-history in the world is about to be depicted. There is probably no more pregnant piece of writing in the world than this prologue to John’s Gospel. And there is no part of this pregnant prologue more pregnant than its first verse. There are just seventeen words in it; we can count only eight different words in it: but these few words are simply bursting with significance. In the first place, our Lord is designated here by a unique name, and that a name big with meaning. And then, under this unique name, three declarations are calmly made of Him—so calmly as almost to betray us into taking them as mere matters of course—each of which, separately considered, is of tremendous import, and the three together, in combination, of more tremendous import still. When we have read these three limpid sentences—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—we have read things which even the angels, desiring to look into them, might well despair of plumbing.
When we say that the name given here to our Lord—the “Word”—is unique, we have, of course, the New Testament only in mind. And even so, to be absolutely exact, we must note that John repeats it a little lower down in this prologue, when he tells us of this Word, here declared to have been in the beginning, with God, and Himself God, that he became flesh; and indeed echoes it in the opening words of his first Epistle and in a splendid description of the conquering Christ in the Apocalypse. These instances, however, do not abate the fact that this designation belongs in a very special sense to these opening clauses of John’s prologue. There is nothing to prepare us for it here: it just suddenly appears before us in these three great declarations in unrelieved startlingness. And perhaps the most striking thing about it is that John does not present it to us as a mysterious designation of Jesus, as a remarkable designation of Him, or, we must add, even as a new designation of Him. He employs it quite simply and without apparent consciousness that he is doing anything either startling or new.