It may certainly be said that, on this showing, little is left by the Synoptists to John, in the way of ascribing essential deity to Jesus. This is true enough. Those who are familiar with the recent literature of the subject will not need to be told that the contradiction which used to be instituted between the Synoptists and John in this matter tends of late to be abandoned. Not only does Dr. Sanday, for example, speak of the teaching of John as only “a series of variations upon the one theme which has its classical expression in the cul- “minating christological passage of the Synoptists,1 and remark that it is in Matthew rather than in John that the only approach to a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity” occurs in the Gospels;² but, as we have already seen, purely naturalistic critics like Bousset are emphatic in asserting that between the Syncptists and John, in the matter of the ascription of deity to our Lord, there exists only a difference of degree, not of kind. Whatever else we must say of
Wilhelm Wrede’s work on the Gospel of Mark, he has certainly rendered it impossible hereafter to appeal from the christology of John to that of the Synoptists.2 Those who will not have a divine Christ must henceforth seek their human Jesus outside the entire evangelical literature. It is not merely his own individual opinion, then, which Professor Shailer Mathews is - giving when he declares that generally speaking, outside the references to the early Messianic career of Jesus, the Fourth Gospel contains nothing from Jesus that is new’: and that, after all, the differences between the Synoptists and John are “a question of degree rather than of sort of treatment.””⁵ He might have omitted, indeed, the qualification with respect to the references to the early Messianic career of Jesus. We have already seen that to the Synoptists also Jesus was consciously the Messiah from the very inception of His work; or rather, in their case, let us say, from the very beginning of His life. After all, it is the Synoptists, not John, who tell us of the proclamation of the Messianic character of this Child before His birth: and it is Luke, not John, who tells us that He was conscious of His unique relation to God as in a very special sense His Father from His earliest childhood.
The Synoptists and John certainly stand on the same level in their estimate of the person of Jesus, and differ in their presentation of it only in the ¹ relative emphasis they throw on this or the other aspect of it. In the Synoptists it is the Messiahship of Jesus which receives the primary emphasis, while His proper deity is introduced incidentally in the course of making clear the greatness of His Messianic dignity. In John, on the contrary, it is the deity of our Lord which takes the first place, and His Messiahship is treated subsidiarily as the appropriate instrumentality through which this divine Being works in bringing life to the dead world. The differences in point of view between them receive a fair illustration in the introductions which the evangelists have severally prefixed to their narratives. Luke begins his Gospel with a short paragraph designed to establish confidence in the trustworthiness of his account of the life and work of the world’s Redeemer. Mark opens his with a few words which connect Jesus’ career with the subsequent expansion of the religion He founded. Matthew’s commences with a reference to the previous development of the people of God, and presents the apparition of Jesus as the culminating act of the God of Israel in establishing His Kingdom in the world. All these take their starting-point in the phenomenal, and busy themselves with exhibiting the superhuman majesty of this man of God’s appointment, the Christ of God. John, on the other hand, takes his readers back at once into the noumenal; and invites them to observe how this divine Being came into the world to save the world, and how His saving work was wrought in the capacity of the Messiah of Israel. It is in his prologue, therefore, that John sets forth the platform of his Gospel, which is written with the distinct purpose that its readers may be led to believe that Jesus is not merely the ‘ Christ,” but the Son of God (20³¹); for, that the term ‘ Son of God here has a metaphysical significance is scarcely open to question. In this sense John’s Gospel is the Gospel of the deity of Christ; although it is clear that we can call it such in contrast with the Synoptists only relatively, not absolutely. In a sense not so fully true of them, however, it was written to manifest the deity of Christ.
In his prologue, then, John tells us with clear and even crisp distinctness what in His essential Being he conceives the Jesus to be whose life and teaching in the world he is to give an account of in his Gospel. And what he tells us is, in one word, that this Jesus is God. In telling this he makes use of a phraseology not only not found in the other evangelists, but absolutely peculiar to himself. The person of whom he is speaking he identifies at the close of the prologue (1¹⁷) by the solemn compound name of Jesus Christ,’ as Mark and Matthew also at the opening of their Gospels had made use of the same great name to identify the subject of their discourse; and, like them, John also makes no further use of this full name in his Gospel (cf., however, 17³). The particular designation he applies to this person in order to describe His essential nature is the Word (0 26r0c). Of this Word he declares that He was in the beginning, that is, that He is of eternal subsistence; that He was eternally “” with God,” that is, that He is in some high sense distinct from God; and yet that He was eternally Himself God, that is, that He is in some deep sense identical with God (1¹,¹,¹); and nevertheless that in due time He became flesh, that is, that He took upon Himself a human nature (1¹⁴), and so came under the observation of men and was pointed out by John the Baptist as the ‘ Coming One,’ that is, the Messiah. In further elucidation of His essential nature, He is described as the ‘ only begotten from the Father (1¹⁴) or even more poignantly as ‘ God only-begotten (1¹⁸).