How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (36 page)

But is it correct? My view for many years was that the second translation was the right one and that the passage does not call Jesus God. My main reason for thinking so, though, was that I did not think that Paul ever called Jesus God anywhere else, so he probably wouldn’t do so here. But that, of course, is circular reasoning, and I think the first translation makes the best sense of the Greek, as other scholars have vigorously argued.
¹³
It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship. And so I now have no trouble recognizing that in fact Paul could indeed flat-out call Jesus God, as he appears to do in Romans 9:5.

If someone as early in the Christian tradition as Paul can see Christ as an incarnate divine being, it is no surprise that the same view emerges later in the tradition. Nowhere does it emerge more clearly or forcefully than in the Gospel of John.

I
WAS IN GRADUATE
school when I first came to realize just how different John is from the other Gospels. Before that, when I was in college, I read the Gospels as if they were all saying basically the same thing. Sure, there may have been different emphases here or there, but on the whole, I thought, they had the same basic views about most everything.

In my master’s degree program I decided to do a kind of thought experiment by reading only Matthew, Mark, and Luke (not John). I did this for three years. At the end of my third year, to complete the experiment, I sat down to read John. In Greek. In one sitting. It was a revelation. Having grown accustomed to the language, style, themes, stories, and perspectives of the Synoptic Gospels, I simply couldn’t believe how different John was. In every respect. With John we are dealing not just with a different author, but with an entirely different world. Among other things, in this Gospel there are not simply allusions to Jesus’s divine power and authority. There are bald statements that equate Jesus with God and say that he was a preexistent divine being who came into the world. This view is not simply like Paul’s, in which Jesus was some kind of angel who then came to be exalted to a higher position of deity. For John, Jesus was equal with God and even shared his name and his glory in his preincarnate state. To use the older terminology (which I favored back then), this was an extremely high Christology.

Already at that early point in my research career, I had reasons to doubt that this Christology was the earliest one known among Jesus’s followers. On one hand, it was not the Christology of the earlier Gospels—and that itself was obviously highly significant. If Jesus really were equal with God from “the beginning,” before he came to earth, and he knew it, then surely the Synoptic Gospels would have mentioned this at
some
point. Wouldn’t that be the most important thing about him? But no, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke he does not talk about himself in this way—nor does he do so in their sources (Q, M, and L).

On the other hand, I was taken aback when I realized that all the perspectives in John’s Gospel are shared by Jesus himself and the author. Let me explain. Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education. Yet there are passages in John in which the narrator sounds just like Jesus, so much so that you cannot tell, in places, who is doing the talking.
¹⁴
Jesus sounds just like the narrator and the narrator sounds just like Jesus. But how can that be, if Jesus was from a different time and place, living in a different culture, speaking a different language, and without having the advantages of what we today would call a higher education? And so I realized with breathtaking suddenness what the answer was. It is because in John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself
and
he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.

One of the most striking features of John’s Gospel is its elevated claims about Jesus. Here, Jesus is decidedly God and is in fact equal with God the Father—before coming into the world, while in the world, and after he leaves the world. Consider the following passages, which are found only in John among the four Gospels:

• In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the unique one before the Father, full of grace and truth. (1:1, 14; later this Word made flesh is named as “Jesus Christ,” v.17)
  
• But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I also am working.” This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God. (5:17–18)
  
• [Jesus said:] “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” (8:58)
  
• [Jesus said:] “I and the Father are one.” (10:30)
  
• Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (14:8–9)
  
• [Jesus prayed to God:] “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” (17:4–5)
  
• [Jesus prayed:] “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” (17:24).
  
• Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28)
  

I need to be clear: Jesus is not God the Father in this Gospel. He spends all of chapter 17 praying to his Father, and, as I pointed out earlier, he is not talking to himself. But he has been given glory equal to that of God the Father. And he had that glory before he came into the world. When he leaves this world, he returns to the glory that was his before. To be sure, Jesus comes to be “exalted” here—he several times talks about his crucifixion as being “lifted up”—a play on words in reference to being “lifted onto the cross” and being “exalted” up to heaven as a result. But the exaltation is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both “God” and “with God” in his preincarnate state as a divine being. Nowhere can this view be seen more clearly than in the first eighteen verses of the Gospel, frequently called the Prologue of John.

In the Prologue we find the clearest expression in the New Testament of Christ as a preexistent divine being—the Word—who has become a human. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that God’s Word—or
Logos
in Greek—was sometimes understood to be a divine hypostasis, an aspect of God that came to be thought of as its own distinct being. Since it was the Word of God, it was an entity that could be imagined as being separate and distinct from God (just as the words that I am typing come from inside my head but then take on their own existence). At the same time, since this Word was the Word of “God,” it perfectly manifested the divine being of the Father and for that reason was itself rightly called “God.” The idea of the divine Logos could be found not only in Jewish literature, but also in Greek philosophical circles connected with both Stoicism and Middle Platonism. All of these may have affected the most poetic and powerful expression of the Word to come down to us from early Christian literature—the first eighteen verses of John.

It is widely held among scholars that the Prologue is a preexisting poem that the author of John has incorporated into his work—possibly in a second edition.
¹⁵
This is because it has the earmarks of a preliterary tradition as a self-contained, poetic piece and because its key term—the
Word
, or
Logos
—occurs nowhere else in reference to Christ in the entire Gospel. If it is a preexisting piece, then the author of the Gospel—or its later editor—found its Christological views highly compatible with his own, even if the terms used in expressing those views were different from the ones he customarily used. And so he began his Gospel narrative with it.
¹⁶

The poetic character of the passage can be seen in its use, in places, of what is called
staircase parallelism
, in which the final word of one line is also the beginning word of the next line. And so, for example, we have the following (key words are in italics):

           
In the beginning was
the Word

           
And
the Word
was with
God
.

           
And
God
was the Word. (John 1:1)

           
In him was
life
,

           
And the
life
was the
light
of humans.

           
And the
light
shines in the
darkness
.

           
And the
darkness
did not overcome it. (1:4–5)

Inserted into the poetic passage of vv.1–18 are two prose additions, which do not seem to fit with the flow of the poem, which is otherwise all about the Logos; both additions deal not with Christ, but with John the Baptist as his forerunner (vv.6–8 and v.15). If you remove these verses, the poem actually flows better. Probably, the author (or the editor) who added the poem in the first place made these additions himself.

Without the addition of the comments on John the Baptist, the poem is all about the Logos of God that existed with God in the beginning and that became a human in Jesus Christ. Christ is not named until near the end, in v.17. But there is no doubt that the poem is about him, as is clear once you read it through from start to finish. Still, it is important to be precise in how one understands this poem and its presentation of Christ. The poem is decidedly not saying that Jesus preexisted his birth—and there is nothing about him being born of a virgin here. What preexisted was the Logos of God through whom God made the universe. It was only when the Logos became a human being that Jesus Christ came into existence. So Jesus Christ is the Logos that has become a human; but Jesus did not exist before that incarnation happened. It was the Logos that existed before.

Quite elevated things are said of this Logos, the Word. The very beginning of the poem quickly calls to mind the beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. Here in John we are told, “In the beginning was the Word,” and that it was through this Word that “all things were made,” including “life” and “light.” How could a Jewish reader not immediately think of the creation story in Genesis? Genesis also starts with the words: “In the beginning”—the same Greek words later used in John. This opening of Genesis is all about creation. And how does God create the world and all that is in it? By speaking a word: “And God
said
, ‘Let there be light. And there was light.” It is God who creates light, and eventually, life, and he does so with his word. Now in the Prologue to John we have a reflection on that Word as a kind of hypostasis of God.

As in other Jewish texts, the Word is a being separate from God, and yet since it is God’s word, his own outward expression of himself, it fully represents who he is, and does nothing else, and in this sense it is itself God. So John tells us that the Word was both “with God” and “was God.” This Word was that which brought all life into existence and brought light out of darkness—just as in Genesis.

A careful reader at this point will be reminded of what some Jewish texts say about Wisdom, as the divine agent through whom God created the world, as in Proverbs 8. This comparison is indeed apt. As Thomas Tobin, a scholar of ancient Judaism, has summarized the matter, the following things are said both about Wisdom in various non-Christian Jewish texts and about the Logos in the Prologue to John:
¹⁷

• Both were at the beginning (John 1:1; Prov.8:22–23).
  
• Both were with God (John 1:1; Prov.8:27–30; Wis. 9:9).
  
• Both were the agent through whom all things were made (John 1:3; Wis. 7:22).
  
• Both provide “life” (John 1:3–4; Prov.8:35; Wis. 8:13).
  
• Both provide “light” (John 1:4; Wis. 6:12; 8:26).
  
• Both are superior to darkness (John 1:5; Wis. 7:29–30).
  
• Both are not to be recognized by those in the world (John 1:10; Bar. 3:31).
  
• Both have dwelled among people in the world (John 1:11; Sir. 24:10; Bar. 3:37–4:1).
  
• Both have been rejected by the people of God (John 1:11; Bar. 3:12).
  
• Both have tabernacled (i.e., dwelt in a tent) among people (John 1:14; Sir. 24:8; Bar. 3:38).
  

The Logos in the Christ poem of the Prologue of John, then, is being understood very much like Wisdom in other Jewish texts. As Tobin points out, the things said of the Logos here in John are also very similar to the portrait of the Logos found in the writings of Philo. In both cases, the Logos is reminiscent of Wisdom. In both, the Logos existed with God before the creation, “in the beginning”; and in both, it is called “God.” For both, it is the instrument of creation and the means by which people become children of God.

No one should think that Philo, or the Jewish writings about Wisdom, are the actual literary source for the Prologue’s poetic celebration of the Logos. My point instead is that what is said about the Logos here at the beginning of John is very similar to what Jewish authors were saying about both Logos and Wisdom. There is a crucial difference, however. In John’s Gospel—and only there, among the texts I have been considering—the Logos becomes a specific human being. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the Logos.