[CatherineTorpey]

Merry Christmas! Yes we meet on Christmas morning around the manger!

Rev. Jacqui’s text is the first chapter of the Gospel According to John.

Briefly – John’s gospel is the last of the four written, and it is very, very different from the other three. It has a much more spiritualized idea of who Jesus the Christ was. One can think of it as a “more developed” theology, since it comes later, and one can say that it shows a more advanced understanding. Or one can just think of it as different, reflecting a different Christology (theology of Christ). It was written around the year 100, so a generation after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

I will use the translation by David Bentley Hart. Here are the first 14 verses of his translation, and below I have pasted an excerpt where Hart describes the difficulty in conveying the ambiguities in John 1.

John 1:1-14
1 In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD,(a) and the Logos was god; 2 This one was present with GOD in the origin. 3 All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. 4 In him was life, and this life was the light of humanity. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.
6 There came a man, sent by GOD, whose name was John; 7 This man came in witness, that he might testify about the light, so that through him all might have faith—8 But only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light. 9 It was the true light, which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos.

10 He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be, and the cosmos did not recognize him. 11 He came to those things that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. 12 But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become GOD’s children—to those having faith in his name, 13 Those born not from blood, nor from a person’s desire, but of GOD. 14 And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.

I have edited this excerpt of an essay by Hart a bit to take out some of his most abstruse explanations. It still might be too dense, but might be of interest.

The truth is that, in Greek, and in the context of late antique Hellenistic metaphysics, the language of the Gospel’s prologue is nowhere near so lucid and unequivocal as the translations make it seem. For one thing, the term logos really had, by the time the Gospel was written, acquired a metaphysical significance that “Word” cannot possibly convey; and in places like Alexandria it had acquired a very particular religious significance as well. For the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, for instance, it referred to a kind of “secondary divinity,” a mediating principle standing between God the Most High and creation. In late antiquity it was assumed widely, in pagan, Jewish, and Christian circles, that God in his full transcendence did not come into direct contact with the world of limited and mutable things, and so had expressed himself in a subordinate and economically “reduced” form “through whom” (δι᾽ αὐτοῦ [di’ avtou]) he created and governed the world. It was this Logos that many Jews and Christians believed to be the subject of all the divine theophanies of Hebrew scripture.

Many of the early Christian apologists thought of God’s Logos as having been generated just prior to creation, in order to act as God’s artisan of, and archregent in, the created order. Moreover, the Greek of John’s prologue may reflect what was, at the time of its composition, a standard semantic distinction between the articular and inarticular forms of the word theos: the former, ὁ θεός (ho theos), where the article and noun (“the god”) was generally used to refer to God in the fullest and most proper sense: God Most High, the transcendent One; the latter, however, θεός (theos) (“god”), could be used of any divine being, however finite: a god or a derivative divine agency, say, or even a divinized mortal. And so early theologians differed greatly in their interpretation of that very small but very significantly absent monosyllable.

Now it may be that the article is omitted in the latter case simply because the word theos functions as a predicate there, and typically in Greek the predicate would need no article. Yet the syntax is ambiguous; and one might even translate καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος as “and [this] god was the Logos.” But the issue becomes at once both clearer and more inadjudicable at verse 18, where again the designation of the Son is theos without the article, and there the word is unquestionably the subject of the sentence. Mind you, in the first chapter of John there are also other instances of the inarticular form where it is not clear whether the reference is the Father, the Son, or somehow both at once in an intentionally indeterminate way (as though, perhaps, the distinction of articular from inarticular forms is necessary in regard to the inner divine life, but not when speaking of the relation of the divine to the created realm). But, in all subsequent verses and chapters, God in his full transcendence is always ho theos; and the crucial importance of the difference between this and the inarticular theos is especially evident at 10:34–36. Most important of all, this distinction imbues the conclusion of the twentieth chapter with a remarkable theological significance, for it is there that Christ, now risen from the dead, is explicitly addressed as ho theos (by the Apostle Thomas).
Even this startling profession, admittedly, left considerable room for argument in the early centuries as to whether the fully divine designation was something conferred upon Christ only after the resurrection, and then perhaps only honorifically, or whether instead it was an eternal truth about Christ that had been made manifest by the resurrection.

In the end, the Nicene settlement was reached only as a result of a long and difficult debate on the whole testimony of scripture and on the implications of the Christian understanding of salvation in Christ (not to mention a soupçon of imperial pressure). Anyway, my point is not that there is anything amiss in the theology of Nicaea, or that the original Greek text calls it into question, but only that standard translations make it impossible for readers who know neither Greek nor the history of late antique metaphysics and theology to understand either what the original text says or what it does not say. Not that there is any perfectly satisfactory way of representing the text’s obscurities in English, since we do not distinguish between articular and inarticular forms in the same way; rather, we have to rely on orthography and typography, using the difference between an uppercase or lowercase g to indicate the distinction between God and [a] god. This, hesitantly, is how I deal with the distinction in my translation of the Gospel’s prologue, and I believe one must employ some such device: it seems to me that the withholding of the full revelation of Christ as ho theos, God in the fullest sense, until the Apostle Thomas confesses him as such in the light of Easter, must be seen as an intentional authorial tactic. Some other scholars have chosen to render the inarticular form of theos as “a divine being,” but this seems wrong to me on two counts: first, if that were all the evangelist were saying, he could have used the perfectly serviceable Greek word theios; and, second, the text of the Gospel clearly means to assert some kind of continuity of identity between God the Father and his Son the Logos, not merely some sort of association between “God proper” and “a god.” Here, I take it, one may regard chapter twenty as providing the ultimate interpretation of chapter one, and allow one’s translation to reflect that.

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