One day a theological storm is likely to erupt over the translation of John 1:1-3 in our standard versions. At present the public is offered a wide range of renderings, from the purely literal to the freely paraphrased. But do these translations represent John’s intention? Have they sometimes served as a weapon in the hands of Christian orthodoxy to enforce the decisions of post-biblical creeds and councils?
According to the findings of a recent monumental study of the origin of Christ in the Bible (Karl-Josef Kuschel, Born Before All Time? The Dispute over Christ’s Origin, New York: Crossroad, 1992) Bible-readers instinctively “hear” the text as follows: “In the beginning was Jesus and Jesus was with God and Jesus was God.”
This understanding of the passage provides a vital support for the traditional doctrine of the Godhead, shared equally by Father and Son from eternity. The Contemporary English Version goes way beyond the Greek and gives us: “The Word was the One who was with God.” No doubt, according to that version, that Word means an eternal Son.
But why, Kuschel asks, do readers leap from “word” to “Son”? The text reads “In the beginning was the word,” not “In the beginning was the Son.” The substitution of “Son” for “word” has had dramatic consequences. But the text does not warrant the switch.
There is no direct mention of the Son of God until we come to verse 14, where “the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of a unique Son, full of grace and truth.”Consider this very remarkable and informative fact: If one had a copy of an English Bible in any of the eight available English versions before the appearance of the King James Version in 1611, one would gain a very different sense from the opening verses of John: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. All things came into being through it, and without it nothing was made that was made.”
“All things were made through it [the word],” not “through him.” And so those English versions did not rush to the conclusion, as does the KJV and its followers, that the word was a person before the birth of Jesus. If all things were made through “the word,” as an “it,” a quite different meaning emerges. The “word” would not be a person existing alongside God, the Father from eternity. The result: one of the main planks of traditional systems about members in the Godhead would be removed.
“In the beginning was the word.” There is no justification in the original Greek for placing a capital “W” on “word,” and turning it into a person. The question is, what would John and his readers understand by “word”? Quite obviously there are echoes of Genesis 1:1, 3: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and God said [using his word], ‘Let there be light.’” “God said” means “God uttered His word,” the medium of His creative activity. And so in John 1:1 God expressed His intention, His word, His self-revealing, creative word. But absolutely nothing in the text (apart from the obtrusive capital letter on “word” in our versions) would make us think that God was in company with another person. The word which God spoke was in fact just “the word of God.” And one’s word is not another person, obviously.
Sensible Bible study would require that we see in the background of John’s thinking what “word” would mean. “Word” had appeared many times in the Hebrew Bible known so well to John and Jesus. On no occasion did “word” ever mean anything other than an utterance, promise, command, etc. Never a personal being. Always the index of the mind — an expression, a word.
It would be a serious mistake of interpretation to discard the massively attested meaning of “word” in the Hebrew matrix from which John wrote and attach to it a meaning it never had — a “person,” or even “spokesperson.” No lexicon of the Hebrew Bible ever listed “davar” (Hebrew for “word”) as a person, God, angel or man.
“And the word was with God.” So read our versions. And so the Greek might be rendered, if one has already decided, against all the evidence, that by “word” John meant a person, the Son of God, alive before his birth.
Allowance must be made for Hebrew idiom. Without a feel for the Hebrew background, as so often in the New Testament, we are deprived of a vital key to understanding. We might ask of an English speaker, “When was your word last ‘with you’?” The plain fact is that in English, which is not the language of the Bible, a “word” is never “with” you. A person can be “with you,” certainly, but not a word.
But in the wisdom literature of the Bible and other Jewish sources a “word” certainly can be “with” a person. And the meaning is that a plan or purpose — a word — is kept in one’s heart ready for execution. For example Job says to God (10:13): “Yet these things You have concealed in your heart; I know that this is ‘with you.’” The NASV gives a more intelligible sense by reading, “I know that this is within you.” In Job 23:13, 14 it is said of God, “What His soul desires, that He does, for He performs what is appointed for me, and many such decrees are with Him,” meaning, of course, that God’s plans are stored up in His mind. God’s word is His intention, held in His heart as plans to be carried out in the world He has created. Often what God has “with Him” is the decree He has planned: “This is the portion of the wicked man with God, and the inheritance which tyrants receive from the Almighty.” With this we may compare a similar thought, “This is the portion of a wicked man from God and the heritage appointed for him” (Job 20:29).
Or take the related concept of “Wisdom.” In Job we find this: “The deep says, ‘It [Wisdom] is not in me.’ And the sea says, ‘It is not with me’” (Job 28:14). To have wisdom or word “with” one is to have them in one’s mind and heart. “With Him is wisdom and strength. To Him belong counsel and understanding” (Job 12:13).
In Genesis 40:14 we read “Keep me in mind when it goes well with you,” and the text reads literally “Remember me with yourself…” From all these examples it is clear that if something is “with” a person, it is lodged in the mind, often as a decreed purpose or plan.
Thus in John 1:1, “In the beginning God had a plan and that plan was within God’s heart and was itself ‘God.’” In other words the plan was the very expression of God’s will. It was a divine Plan, reflective of His inner being. John is fond of the word “is,” which is not always an “is” of strict identity. Jesus “is” the resurrection (“I am the resurrection”); “God ‘is’ spirit.” “God ‘is’ love and light.” Well, God is not actually one-to-one identical with light and love, and Jesus is not literally the resurrection. “The word was God” means that the word was fully expressive of God’s mind. A person “is” his mind, metaphorically speaking. Jesus is the one who can bring about our resurrection. God communicates through His spirit. The word is the index of God’s intention and purpose. It was in His heart, expressive of His very being. As the Translators’ Translation senses the meaning, “the Word was with God and shared His nature,” “the Word was divine.” The word, then, is the divine expression, the very self of God revealed. This came to perfect expression in the human being, Jesus.
Of course, if one has taken a first false step by assuming that the “word” in the beginning was “the Son,” then the phrase “the word was God” can only confirm the impression that there are two members of the Godhead, both of whom are God. However problematic and illogical this (very unJewish) leap into a duality in God may be, Bible-readers have been conditioned to make that leap painlessly, though John and Jesus elsewhere prove themselves to be believers in the unitary monotheism of the great Jewish heritage: Addressing the Father, Jesus says unequivocally, “You, Father, are the only one who is truly God” (John 17:3). He refers again to the Father as “the one who alone is God” (John 5:44). These are echoes of the pure monotheism of the Hebrew Bible. God remains in the New Testament “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Jesus had and has a God, and that is the Father, the One God of John 17:3. How exactly like the OT: “Have we not all One Father? Has not One God created us?” (Malachi 2:10). How beautifully this harmonizes with Paul’s great creedal declaration: “For us Christians there is One God, the Father and none other than He” (see I Cor.8:4, 6).
“In the beginning there was a divine word and it was stored in God’s heart and was His own creative self-expression. All things came into being through that divine word and without it nothing was made that was made…And the word/plan became flesh — was realized in a human person — and dwelt among us.” That living expression of God’s intimate purpose for mankind was Jesus Christ, the human person supernaturally conceived as the Son of God. Luke had no doubt about the reason and basis for Jesus being entitled to be called the “Son of God.” It was as a consequence of the supernatural miracle wrought in the womb of Mary that Jesus is truly “the Son of God.” “For that reason indeed (dio kai) he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Indeed, as Matthew, Luke and Paul agree, Jesus “is” wisdom, wisdom embodied in a living breathing person, who entered the world and conscious existence through birth from his mother — truly a man, the last Adam, Son of David, Son of God and Messiah. Jesus is the unique and final revelation of God.
If we read John and his introduction in this fashion, we find him proclaiming, unitedly with the other Gospel writers, the supremely important fact that Jesus is the Messiah, Son of God. On that great truth, the church is to be founded (Matt. 16:15-18) and united, and for that single purpose — to demonstrate and urge belief in Jesus as the Messiah — John wrote his whole Gospel (John 20:31).
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