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The Original Prologue to the Gospel of John

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2015

Martinus C. de Boer
Martinus C. de Boer*
Affiliation:
Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid, Vrije Universiteit / Faculty of Theology, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
*
Correspondence address: Aart van der Neerweg 4, 1191EE Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

John 1.1–5 constitutes the original Prologue to the Fourth Gospel. This passage can still be read as functioning in this way.

Keywords

PrologueGospel of JohnLogos
Type
Articles
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 448 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 J. A. T. Robinson ‘The Relation of the Prologue to the Gospel of St John’, in id., Twelve More New Testament Studies (London: SCM, 1984) 65–76, at 65 (= NTS 9 (1962–3) 120–9Google Scholar, at 120; quotations have been taken from the reprint).

2 This claim is an exegetical conclusion derived from considering the use of the term in its narrower and broader context. In v. 17, ὁ λόγος is explicitly identified as the person of ‘Jesus Christ’ and that identification already seems to be presupposed in v. 1. See further below.

3 V. l: οὐδέν (p66 א* D et al.).

4 V. l: ἐστιν (א D et al.).

5 I here follow the Greek word order (καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος), where the predicate θεός precedes the subject ὁ λόγος. This word order is obscured by the usual (and of course correct) translation ‘the Word was God’.

6 Besides ‘grasp’ either in the sense of ‘seize’ in a hostile sense or ‘understand’ (cf. 1.10–11), other possibilities for the Greek verb κατέλαβεν discussed in critical commentaries include ‘extinguish’ (which makes excellent sense in the context), or ‘overtake’ in the sense of ‘overcome’, ‘prevail over’ or ‘master’, which is the meaning in the near parallel found in 12.35 (‘walk while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you’). See BDAG 519–20. A choice is difficult, but not crucial for the argument of the present article.

7 See C. S. Keener, The Gospel according to John: A Commentary, vol. i (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003) 334.

8 See R. E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (i–xii) (Anchor Bible 29; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 6. Others think more of a chain or of keywords than of a staircase. See e.g. U. C. von Wahlde, The Gospel and Letters of John, vol. ii:A Commentary on the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 18; T. Thatcher, ‘The Riddle of John the Baptist and the Genesis of the Prologue: John 1.1–18 in Oral/Aural Media Culture’, The Fourth Gospel in the First-Century Media Culture (ed. A. Le Donne and T. Thatcher; London/New York: T&T Clark, 2011) 29–48, at 31 (sorites).

9 According to Thatcher (‘Riddle’, 32) οὗτος at the beginning of v. 2 has ὁ λόγος at the end of v. 1 as its antecedent. In his view v. 2 can then be regarded as the continuation of the staircase parallelism of v. 1.

10 For overviews, see especially de la Potterie, I., ‘De punctuatie en de exegese van Joh 1,3.4 in de traditie’, Bijdragen 16 (1955) 117–35Google Scholar (= ‘De interpunctione et interpretatione versuum Joh. i, 3.4’, Verbum Domini 33 (1955) 193–208Google Scholar); Aland, K., ‘Eine Untersuchung zu Joh. 1.3–4: Über die Bedeuting eines Punktes’, ZNW 59 (1968) 174 –209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; E. L. Miller, Salvation-History in the Prologue of John: The Significance of John 1:3/4 (Supplements to Novum Testamentum LX; Leiden: Brill, 1989) 17–44; H. Thyen, ’ Ὁ γέγονεν: Satzende von 1,3 oder Satzeröffnung von 1,4?’, Studien zum Corpus Johanneum (WUNT, 214; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 411–17.

11 See J. F. McHugh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on John 1–4 (ICC; London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2009) 104–7. The Textus Receptus, which came into existence with the editions of the Elsevier brothers in Leiden in the first half of the seventeenth century, depends primarily here on the manuscripts of the Byzantine (Koine) tradition (the so-called ‘Majority Text’ of Nestle–Aland), just as the earlier editions of Erasmus, Stephanus and Beza do; these editions provided the basis for the Textus Receptus.

12 The same is true of many translations into other modern languages, e.g. the Dutch versions known as the Statenvertaling (1637), NBG (1951), Willibrord (1978), and NBV (2005). The usual versification, which was introduced by the Parisian printer Robert Estienne (Stephanus) in 1551 and subsequently achieved a fixed place in the Textus Receptus, assumes the correctness of this punctuation.

13 For discussion, see B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft/United Bible Societies, 19942) 167–8. One can still toy with various translation possibilities of the Greek ὃ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν (for an overview, see H. N. Ridderbos, The Gospel according to John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) 37; McHugh, John, 14–15): (a) ‘What has come to be, in that was life’; (b) ‘What has come to be, in that he was life’; and (c) ‘What has come to be | in him was life’, i.e. ‘What has come to be was life in him.’ The most likely is (d): ‘What has come to be in him | was life’, where ‘in him’ is taken with what precedes rather than with what follows as in (c). The other translation possibilities arise from the inability to come up with a plausible or satisfying interpretation for this last possibility, which is the most natural (see e.g. Metzger, Textual Commentary, 168 n. 2; de la Potterie, ‘De punctuatie’, 117; R. Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971) 39 n. 4).

14 See Metzger, Textual Commentary, 167: ‘The punctuation adopted for the text is in accord with what a majority regarded as the rhythmical balance of the opening verses of the Prologue, where the climactic or “staircase” parallelism seems to demand that the end of one line should match the beginning of the next.’ Metzger himself pleads for the punctuation found in the Textus Receptus.

15 For an image, see http://www.earlybible.com/manuscripts/p66.html. The same applies to Papyrus 75 (ca. 225 ce), Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (א). See Williams, P. J., ‘Not the Prologue of John’, JSNT 33.4 (2011) 375–86Google Scholar.

16 British Library, Add. Ms. 8900-0. For an image, see http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000.

17 In evangelium Joannis tractatus centum viginti quattuor, Tractate 2.1 (from Williams, ‘Not the Prologue’, 379 n. 24).

18 Bultmann (John, 19, 45) represents a rare exception: for him vv. 1–4 and 5–13 form discrete sub-units of the Prologue. See n. 31 below.

19 M. Theobald, Die Fleischwerdung des Logos: Studien zum Verhältnis des Johannesprologs zum Corpus des Evangeliums und zu 1 Joh. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1988) 211.

20 A notable exception is now J. R. Michaels, The Gospel of John (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 45. Michaels labels John 1.1–5 ‘the preamble’ to the Gospel and declines to speak of the first eighteen verses as the Prologue, but he does so intuitively, without any real explanation or argument. See further n. 76 below.

21 Williams, ‘Not the Prologue’. According to Williams, John1.1–18 is regarded as an independent literary unit for the first time in the edition of the New Testament published by Griesbach in 1777 (‘it has a slight space after 1.18’): ‘John 1.1–18 has thus at last been regarded as a textual section. Thereafter it became practice in subsequent editions of the Greek New Testament to mark 1.1–18 as a section, even though other smaller divisions may have been marked too’ (p. 381). Williams lists the editions of Scholz (1830), Tischendorf (1841, 1869) and Westcott and Hort (1881). ‘Since the nineteenth century the view that 1.1–18 was a single section has become increasingly commonplace and [this passage] has been widely referred to as the Prologue [ever since]’ (p. 382). McHugh (John, 5) claims that the title ‘the Prologue’ for the ‘first 18 verses of the Gospel … goes back at least to Jerome’. In support he refers to Jerome's Praefatio in comm. in Matthaeum, as printed in K. Aland, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 199615) 562. But Jerome seems to use the designation only for John 1.1–2: ’ … in illud prohemium caelo veniens eructavit “In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud deum, et deus erat hoc verbum: hoc erat in principio apud deum.”’

22 Williams points out that ‘the transition from 1.5 to 1.6 involves a more significant break than those that follow’ (p. 383) in the manuscripts. This is reflected in the printed editions of the Greek New Testament surveyed by McHugh, John, 78. Williams concludes that it is probable that the archetype (the autograph) ‘contained a division after 1.5’ (p. 386). The archetype is no longer available and interpreters today can determine whether the first five verses were indeed intended to be an independent literary unit designed to serve as a prologue to the Gospel only on the basis of text-internal elements, i.e. on the basis of exegetical considerations.

23 As the title of his article indicates, Williams limits himself to a negative conclusion, namely that 1.1–18 is not the Prologue to John. My thesis is a positive one, namely that 1.1–5 is the original Prologue to the Gospel and, as a corollary, that this passage can still be regarded as the Prologue to the Gospel.

24 Ridderbos, John, 17 (emphasis added). In the original Dutch version the emphasis is the author's: Het evangelie van Johannes: Proeve van een theologische exegese (2 vols.; Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1987) i.29.

25 Translations follow the RSV (with modifications to make the language inclusive) unless indicated otherwise.

26 Ridderbos, John, 19.

27 See esp. E. Käsemann, ‘The Structure and Purpose of the Prologue to John's Gospel’, New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969) 138–67. Originally published as ‘Aufbau und Anliegen des johanneischen Prologs’, Libertas Christiana: Festschrift für F. Delakat (Munich: Kaiser 1957) 75–99.

28 Greek: αὐτόν, grammatically masculine. The antecedent is presumably the personified λόγος in v. 1, identified in v. 17 is as Ἰησοῦς Χριστός.

29 As v. 13 indicates, believers can be called ‘children of God’ because they ‘were begotten (ἐγεννήθησαν) by God’; cf. John 3.5–8; 1 John 2.29; 3.9; 4.7; 5.1, 4, 18.

30 Cf. 1 John 2.8: ‘the darkness is passing away and the true light [cf. John 1.9] is already shining’.

31 Bultmann, John, 45–8 (for this reason Bultmann places v. 5 with vv. 6–13); Ridderbos, John, 38–40. Also e.g. Käsemann, ‘Prologue’, 144; F. J. Moloney, The Gospel of John (Sacra Pagina 4; Collegevile: Liturgical, 1998) 36; Keener, John, 387; von Wahlde, Commentary, 5. Brown (John, 26) resists this interpretation because of ‘the clearer reference’ to the coming of the Word in vv. 10–11 and the introduction of John the Baptist in vv. 6–9.

32 For evidence of early Christian hymns, see Eph 5.19; Col 3.16; Pliny, Epist. 10.96.7: carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere. Cf. also 1 Cor 14.15; Jas 5.13.

33 Cf. Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.28.5: ‘And all the psalms and hymns which were written by faithful Christians from the beginning sing of Christ as the Logos of God and treat him as God’ (Loeb).

34 According to Bultmann (John), the hymn is pre-Christian, originally written in Aramaic, and derived from the circle around John the Baptist. The judgement of Käsemann (‘Prologue’, 150) over the peculiar views of Bultmann is still valid: ‘The pre-Christian character of the hymn is more than problematical, the Aramaic original incredible, the alleged Baptist hymn a pure hypothesis.’ Ever since the work of Ruckstuhl, the hypothesis that the Prologue might have a non-Johannine origin has lost ground (rightly in my view): E. Ruckstuhl, Die literarische Einheit des Johannesevangeliums (Freiburg: Paulus, 1951); id., ‘Johannine Language and Style: The Question of their Unity’, L’Évangile de Jean: sources, rédaction, théologie (ed. M. de Jonge; BETL XLIV; Gembloux/Leuven: Duculot/University Press, 1976) 125–47; E. Ruckstuhl and P. Dschulnigg, Stilkritik und Verfassersfrage im Johannesevangelium: Die johanneischen Sprachmerkmale auf Hintergrund des Neuen Testaments und des zeitgenössischen hellenistischen Schrifttums (NTOA 17; Freiburg/Göttingen: Universitätsverlag/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991).

35 With the designation ‘the Johannine Community’ is meant a small group of churches for which and to which both the Gospel (cf. the second person plural ‘you’ in 19.35 and 20.31) and the Letters of John were written (these three letters confirm the picture of a larger community made of up of several smaller house churches). The authors of these documents came forth from the Johannine Community as did the supposed hymn itself. See the classic work of R.E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1979).

36 J. H. Bernard, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St. John. (2 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928) i.cxxxviii–cxlvii.

37 Bultmann, John, 16–18. See n. 34 above.

38 Käsemann, ‘Prologue’, 151.

39 Haenchen, E., ‘Probleme des johanneischen Prologs’, ZTK 60 (1963) 305–34Google Scholar.

40 R. Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St John, vol. i (New York: Crossroad, 1982) 224–9.

41 Brown, John, 21–3.

42 Rochais, G., ‘La Formation du Prologue (Jn 1,1 –18 (i)’, Science et Esprit 37 (1985) 5–44, at 7–9Google Scholar. Cf. Theobald, ‘Fleischwerdung’, 71 (a survey of fifteen proposals); Miller, Prologue, 6 (a survey of seventeen proposals). See also the overview provided by H. Thyen, ‘Über die Versuche, ein Vorlage des Johannesprologs zu rekonstruieren’, Studien zum Corpus Iohanneum (WUNT 214; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007) 372–411; Keener, John, 334–7; McHugh, John, 78–90; and K. Pfuff, Die Einheit des Johannesprologs: Eine philologische Untersuchung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013) 9–12 (a survey of some recent German-language scholarship for which, according to Pfuff, the hypothesis of an incorporated hymn counts as the current communis opinio).

43 So also recently von Wahlde, Commentary, 19 n. 7. According to Ridderbos (John, 19), the consensus is limited to vv. 1, 3, 4, 10 and 11, but Rochais’ survey does not support this claim. According to Brown (John, 21), the consensus consists of vv. 1–5, 10–11 and 14. In the survey of seventeen proposals by Miller (Prologue, 6), there are only seven which do not include v. 12 (or a good part of it) and only four which do not include v. 16. According to Käsemann (‘Prologue’), the hymn contained only vv. 1, 3–5, 11–12. His proposal to limit the original hymn to these verses (whereby vv. 14–18 are attributed to the evangelist) has received occasional support (see Thyen, ‘Versuche’, 384–5). A new attempt to reconstruct the hymn may be found in the article by Gordley, M., ‘The Johannine Prologue and Jewish Didactic Hymn Traditions: A New Case for Reading the Prologue as a Hymn’, JBL 128 (2009) 781–802Google Scholar. Gordley argues that vv. 1–5, 9–14, 16–17 belonged to the original hymn.

44 See Rochais, ‘Formation’, 9–10, 20–1; id., ‘La Formation du Prologue (Jn 1,1 –18 (ii)’, Science et Esprit 37 (1985) 161–87, at 161–2Google Scholar. Rochais himself does not include v. 2 and v. 12c in his reconstruction.

45 One could regard these as footnotes that have been taken up into the main text.

46 See Brown, John, 28–9. He lists in this connection the work of Westcott, Bernard, Boismard and Schnackenburg.

47 Brown, John, 27 (the fall was ‘an attempt by darkness to overcome the light’); cf. Aland, ‘Untersuchung’, 217. Some scholars interpret v. 5 along these lines even apart from the hypothesis of an incorporated Logos hymn. Westcott, for example, sees here ‘one aspect of all human history’: B. F. Westcott, The Gospel according to St. John: The Greek Text with Introduction and Notes (ed. A. Westcott; Thornapple Commentaries; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980; originally 1908) 9. Similarly, U. Busse discerns a concern ‘für die weitere Schöpfungsgeschichte’ in v. 5: ‘Theologie oder Christologie im Johannesprolog?’, Studies in the Gospel of John and its Christology: Festschrift Gilbert Van Belle (ed. J. Verheyden, G. Van Oyen, M. Labahn, R. Bieringer; BETL CCLXV; Leuven: Peeters, 2014) 1–36, at 10. So also in the same volume J. Painter, ‘The Prologue as an Hermeneutical Key to Reading the Fourth Gospel’, 37–60, at 48.

48 See the discussion of Brown, John, 27–9. Brown himself chooses this route with respect to v. 5 but not with respect to vv. 10–12. See previous note.

49 See Bultmann, John, 45–60: vv. 5, 9–12 concerned the pre-existent Word in the original hymn but in the Prologue they concern the career of the incarnate Word.

50 See Käsemann (‘Prologue’, 150): ‘There is absolutely no convincing argument for the view that vv. 5–13 ever referred to anything save the historical manifestation of the Revealer.’ He is followed in this judgement by Brown (John, 28–30) with respect to vv. 10–12: ‘most of the phrases found in 10–12 appear in the Gospel as a description of the ministry of Jesus’ (John, 29, with supporting argument). In addition to Käsemann, Brown also lists Büchsel, Bauer and Harnack in this connection.

51 C. K. Barrett, ‘The Prologue of St John's Gospel’, New Testament Essays (London: SPCK, 1972) 27–48, and The Gospel according to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (Philadelphia: Westminster, 19782). Cf. Haenchen, ‘Probleme’.

52 Barrett, St John, 151.

53 Ridderbos, John, 22. For others, see Devillers, L., ‘Le prologue du quatrième évangile, clé de voûte de la littérature johannique’, NTS 58 (2012) 317–30, at 320 n. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Ridderbos, John, 22. See his earlier article ‘The Structure and the Scope of the Prologue to the Gospel of John’, NovT 8 (1966) 180–201Google Scholar.

55 See especially the influential work of Culpepper, R. A., ‘The Pivot of John's Gospel’, NTS 27 (1980–1) 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. e.g. the discussion in McHugh, John, 78–85; Thatcher, ‘Riddle’, 33; A. J. Köstenberger, John (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004) 20–2. See now Pfuff, Einheit, who opposes the perception of putative ‘Ungereimtheiten’ in the Prologue among scholars writing in German.

56 A good recent example is the comment of Busse, ‘Theologie’, 1 n. 4: ‘Die häufig vorgetragene These, die Verse 6–8 und 15 seien als sekundäre Einfügungen auszuscheiden, da in ihnen von der Zeugen Johannes geredet werde, übersieht m.E. deren literarische wie inhaltlich-theologische Funktion im Gesamtgefüge des Textes’. But the fact that these verses have a literary and theological function in the present form of the text (of course they do!) does not as such undermine, much less disprove, the hypothesis of incorporated hymnic material or that of editorial activity.

57 See Downing, F. G., ‘Word-Processing in the Ancient World: The Social Production and Performance of Q’, JSNT 64 (1996) 29–48, at 34Google Scholar.

58 On the use and abuse of appeals to ‘the Evangelist’ in Johannine scholarship, see M. C. de Boer, Johannine Perspectives on the Death of Jesus (CBET 17; Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996) 78–79, 81.

59 Meeks, W. A., ‘The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism’, JBL 91 (1972) 44–72, at 49Google Scholar. On the plausibility of communal authorship generally in the ancient world, see Last, R., ‘Communities That Write: Christ-Groups, Associations, and Gospel Communities’, NTS (2012) 173–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the basis of the evidence of associations, Last contends that ‘communities in antiquity wrote collaboratively, as a group in a manner that promoted self-reflexivity and self-interest and that made general readership an uninteresting and impractical goal‘(p. 198). See also Downing, ‘Word-Processing’.

60 Meeks, ‘Man from Heaven’, 48. The members of the Johannine School tinkered for a number of years, perhaps decades, on the Gospel, which seems to have gone through several editions. See the classic proposal of Brown, John, xxiv–xl, updated in R. E. Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John (ed. F. J. Moloney; New York: Doubleday, 2003) 40–89. For my views, see de Boer, Johannine Perspectives, 72–82.

61 M. de Jonge, Johannes: Een praktische bijbelverklaring (Kampen: Kok, 1996) 22. Or as Meeks observes: ‘The major literary problem of John is its combination of remarkable stylistic unity and thematic coherence with glaringly bad transitions between episodes at many points’ (‘Man from Heaven’, 48).

62 Cf. R. A. Culpepper, The Johannine School (SBLDS 26; Missoula: Scholars, 1975). The Johannine School is the group within the Johannine Community which considered itself responsible for the transmission and interpretation of the Johannine tradition concerning Jesus (cf. the use of ‘we’ in John 21.24–5; John 1.1–4).

63 Some of them possibly very traumatic (cf. 9.22; 12.42; 16.1–4a) according to J. L. Martyn's assessment of the evidence in his influential study History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 20033). See also Brown, Community. For my views, see de Boer, Johannine Perspectives, 53–71.

64 See Brown, John, lxvii; Introduction, 151–3.

65 Ridderbos, John, 21.

66 Ridderbos, John, 22.

67 Only John 6.37; 8.32; 13.20; 14.21. The Prologue itself does not provide an unambiguous example besides vv. 1–5. A possibility is the end of v. 11 together with the beginning of v. 12 (‘his own people received him not. But to all who received him …’). V. 12 as a whole is not poetry, however, but prose. V. 10ab (‘He was in the world, and the world was made through him’) and v. 11 (‘he came to his own home, and his own people received him not’) are poetic or rhythmic and seem to be instances of staircase parallelism but not in the Greek text where the second line repeats a word from beginning of the first line, not from the end of that line. The repetition of terms in the remaining verses (‘glory’ in v. 14; ‘full/fullness’ in vv. 14 and 16; ‘grace’ in vv. 16 and 17) have little in common with the staircase parallelism that is evident in vv. 1–5.

68 Brown, John, 19; cf. Miller, Prologue, 8–9, who refutes Barrett's view that there is no poetry in the Prologue.

69 1 Sam 1.1 LXX begins with the words Ἄνθρωπος ἦν instead of Ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος with which John 1.6 begins. The recension of Origen, however, reads: καὶ ἐγένετο ἄνθρωπος. Cf. Judges 13.2 LXX (Codex Alexandrinus: ἐγένετο ἀνήρ; Codex Vaticanus: ἦν ἀνήρ); 19.1 LXX (ἐγένετο ἀνήρ). See Bultmann, John, 48 n. 3.

70 E. Boismard, St John's Prologue (London: Blackfriars, 1957) 24–5; Brown, John, 27 (‘a normal opening for a historical narrative’). Robinson (‘Relation’, 71–2) comes to the same conclusion on the basis of a comparison of John 1.6 with Mark 1.4; Luke 1.5; 3.2. See also Miller, Prologue, 3–4; Devillers, ‘Le prologue’, 321.

71 V. 15 (‘John bore witness to him, and cried …’) remains difficult to explain. According to Robinson (‘Relation’, 74), this verse was also part of the original opening of the Gospel. Brown argues that there would then ‘be no apparent reason for the same statement in v. 30’ (John, 35). He suspects that ‘the final redactor, seeing that it might be useful here to emphasize the theme of pre-existence, copied into the Prologue the sentence from v. 30’ (ibid.).

72 Cf. R. T. Fortna, The Gospel of Signs: A Reconstruction of the Narrative Source Underlying the Fourth Gospel (SNTSMS 11; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 165: ‘John has not so much interrupted the hymn with an extraneous reference to the Baptist as added the hymn to the prose source; for the Baptist fragment here is not an isolated piece of tradition but the opening of an extended account of the Baptist and indeed the beginning of the narrative source as a whole. The prose account, not the hymn, is the fundamental literary stratum, for it is nothing less than the opening of the proto-gospel with which John starts’ (his emphasis). See also R. T. Fortna, The Fourth Gospel and its Predecessor: From Narrative Source to Present Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 22. Because Fortna limited himself in his 1970 monograph to the reconstruction of a semeia-source (a ‘Gospel of Signs’) and did not concern himself with the putative hymn, his insight has to my knowledge had no influence on this last question. See e.g. von Wahlde, Commentary, 17–24; Devillers, ‘Le prologue’, 327.

73 Note that this hymn has not been ‘reconstructed’ or ‘distilled’ from the existing text of John 1.1–5; the hymn is this text.

74 Why would a writer of the Gospel, or a school of writers, want to divide up an already existing and supposedly coherent hymn? More plausible in my view is that the first five verses formed a unity from the beginning independent of the remaining sections of the Prologue. The unparalleled staircase parallelism of the first five verses also points in this direction. See n. 67 above.

75 Miller (Prologue 108) appears to be on the same track when he writes: ‘John 1:1–5 contains hymnic materials and probably a complete Christological hymn [in vv. 1.1a–b, 3–5].’ For Miller, however, vv. 1c and 2 constitute interpolations into the hymn whereas ‘other short Johannine pieces and quotations (vv. 9–14, 16–18)’ were subsequently added to make a new whole (i.e. John 1.1–18) which ‘was eventually attached to the Fourth Gospel proper, and in time a sort of “splicing” occurred when the original opening of the Gospel appeared as vv. 1.6–8 and an overlapping with the Gospel occurred in v. 15’ (Prologue, 3–4). I am arguing that vv. 1–5 constitute the hymn and that these verses were attached to the Gospel to serve as the Prologue. In light of this thesis, a fresh examination of the origin and function of vv. 9–18 is required. I hope to deal with this matter in a future study.

76 See now also Michaels (John, 45) for whom v. 6 is the beginning of the story line of the Gospel (John 1.9–18 is regarded as an excursus concerning Jesus that interrupts the story of John the Baptist). As pointed out n. 20 above, Michaels (John, 31–32) labels the first five verses ‘the preamble’ to the Fourth Gospel and declines to refer to the first eighteen verses as the Prologue. In Michaels's view, however, the whole Gospel, including 1.1–18, has been written by one and the same master evangelist, making the notion of an incorporation of an already existing communal hymn and that of a Johannine School superfluous.

77 The verb occurs twenty-five times in Gen 1.1–2.4 LXX.

78 John prefers σκοτία (1.5; 6.17; 8.12; 12.35, 46; 20.1; also 1 John 1.5; 2.8, 9,11) but σκότος is used in 3.19. There is no discernible difference in meaning.

79 M. J. J. Menken, ‘Genesis in John's Gospel and 1 John’ (ed. M. J. J. Menken and S. Moyise; Library of New Testament Studies 466; London: Bloomsbury, 2012) 83–98, at 88–9; J. Painter, ‘Prologue’, 39–40.

80 Cf. de Jong, M., ‘De proloog van Johannes in de Bijbel in Gewone Taal’, Met andere woorden 31 (2012) 27–41Google Scholar, at 30: in Genesis 1 God's speaking is put into words exclusively with verbs (‘God said …’) whereas in the Prologue the λόγος is presented as an independent entity that ‘was’ (ἦν) in the beginning. The λόγος existed and was present, and therefore cannot be simply equated with the speaking of God in Gen 1.

81 The inseparability of Johannine Christology and soteriology is evident from the (self-)designations of Jesus as ‘the light (of the world)’ (1.7–8; 8.12; 9.5; 12.35–6) and as ‘the life’ (11.25; 14.6).

82 So also, correctly, de Jong, ‘De proloog’, 31–2: the readers are not holding their breath until v. 17 (or at least until v. 14) asking: ‘Who could the λόγος be?’ Rather, the text wants from the start to emphasise the divine identity and origin of Jesus Christ. See already E. Hennecke, ‘Jean 1,3–4 et l'enchainement du Prologue’, Congrès d'histoire du christianisme: Jubilé A. Loisy (ed. P.-L. Couchoud; Annales d'histoire du christianisme i; Paris: Rieder, 1928) 207–19 (summarised by Thyen, ‘Versuche’, 385); and De Ausejo, S., ‘Es un himno a Christo el prologo de San Juan?’, Estudios Biblicos 15 (1956) 223–77, 381–427Google Scholar (summarised by Brown, John, 23). Space prevents treatment of the origin, background and significance of the use of λόγος as an appellation for Christ.

83 Cf. 3.13, 31–6; 5.17–47; 6.36–40; etc.

84 The function of v. 2 then becomes clear: it serves to close off the first strophe (whose subject matter is Christology) and thus at the same time to separate it from the two that follow (whose subject matter is soteriology). The second strophe is joined to the third by the soteriological term ‘life’ at the end of the second strophe and the beginning of the third.

85 Pollard, T. E., ‘Cosmology and the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel’, Vigiliae Christianae 12 (1958) 147–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; id., Johannine Christology and the Early Church (SNTSMS 13; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 14; P. Lamarche, ‘The Prologue of John’, The Interpretation of John (ed. J. Ashton; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997) 47–66; I. de la Potterie, La Verité dans Saint Jean (2 vols.; Analecta Biblica 73; Rome: Biblical Institute, 1977) i.161–5 (he changed his mind about the objections he had in 1955); Theobald, Fleischwerdung, 224–7; McHugh, John, 11–20. The certainty with which they plead for this view varies.

86 See de la Potterie, ‘De punctuatie’, 118, 123–4.

87 It is noteworthy, and probably significant, that the verb ποιέω (‘to make’), used in Gen 1.1 with the meaning ‘to create’, is avoided in John 1.1–5. As the varied usage of the middle verb γίνομαι in both Gen 1 and John 1 bears out, this latter verb does not intrinsically mean ‘to create’ or ‘to make’, but ‘to happen’, ‘to take place’, ‘to become’, ‘to come into being’ and the like (BDAG 197 is misleading on this point). See n. 93 below.

88 One could also say: they concern not the old creation but the new creation. See the acute comment of E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (ed. F. N. Davey; London: Faber and Faber, 1947) 140: ‘Since the gospel is the record of the new creation, of the bringing into being of the sons of God, the opening verses of the prologue echo the style, vocabulary, syntax, and general sense of the opening verses of … Genesis.’ Also Boismard, Prologue, 109: ‘In the Prologue as in the rest of the Gospel, St. John, then, presents the work of the Messias [sic] as a new creation.’ My argument is that this is already the case in 1.1–5 and not merely subsequently.

89 The only real possibility is to be found in 1.10b, at least when read in isolation: ‘the world came to be through him’. But this interpretation presents difficulties in view of what precedes in 1.10a (‘he was in the world’) and what follows in 1.10c (‘the world did not know him’). At issue is the referent of ‘the world’ (ὁ κόσμος) in the three parts of this verse. See the discussion of Barrett, John, 161–3.

90 For a detailed discussion of the two terms as soteriological (or eschatological), see Miller, Prologue, 63–9. For natural life John uses ψυχή (10.11, 15, 17; 12.25; 13.37–8; 15.13; 1 John 3.16). For the juxtaposition of light and life, found in 1.4a (‘the life is the light of human beings’), see John 8.12, where Jesus says: ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life (τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς)’.

91 De la Potterie, ‘De punctuatie’; Aland, ‘Untersuchung’.

92 See e.g. Boismard (Prologue, 17–18), who ascribes two different meanings to the term ζωή in v. 4a (natural life) and vv. 4b and 5 (new/eternal life). As Miller (Prologue, 72) writes: ‘the assumption that lies behind most attempts to make sense of John 1:4 [with the alternative punctuation] … – ancient and modern, heretical and orthodox – is that ὅ γέγονεν [in v. 3c] must refer in some way or other to something created’ while that reading is impossible for vv. 4–5 (emphasis added). This ‘assumption’ finds its basis in another unexamined assumption, namely that the topic of v. 3ab must be creation. This is also true for Miller, whose own solution is equally forced: he regards the use of the perfect (γέγονεν) in v. 3c instead of an aorist (ἐγένετο) as in v. 3a as extremely significant; on this slender basis, he comes to the conclusion that v. 3a is cosmological and v. 3c soteriological (Prologue, 79). So also Moloney, John, 36. In my view, the perfect can be taken to point to the continuing reality of the salvation brought by Christ. The variant reading in John 1.4a (ἐστιν for ἦν) indicates that some scribes understood the last line of the second strophe to refer to present salvation: ‘What has come to be in him is life.’ The imperfect is probably original, however, and consistent with the past tenses used in the first two lines of the strophe where the focus lies on what came to be (salvation) through the Word in his historical manifestation.

93 See McHugh, John,13: ‘the verb γίνεσθαι occurs three times in this verse, each time with an indeterminate and neuter subject … Whenever this construction is found elsewhere in John, γίνεσθαι always applies to an historical event, which either happened, took place (1.28; 3.9; 13.19 [x2]; 14.22. 29 [x2]; 19.36) or which will come to pass (15.7). Verse 3, so interpreted, would then mean that every single event in the story of salvation which is about to unfold takes place only through the Logos, and that not one thing happens independently of him’ (emphasis removed). See also Pollard, ‘Cosmology’; de la Potterie, Verité, 162–4.

94 Elsewhere in the Gospel the term ‘all things’ (πάντα) is used to point to what has come to be through Christ (cf.. 3.35–6; 5.20; 13.3; 16.15; 17.7, 10; 19.28) and never to the universe as is commonly assumed here (McHugh, John, 13). Then one would normally expect τὰ πάντα (vgl. Wis 1.14; 9.1; 11.24; 1 Cor 8.6; Eph 3.9; 4.10; Col 1.16; Heb 2.10; Rev 4.11; see de la Potterie, Verité, 162–3; Pollard, ‘Cosmology’; Lamarche, ‘Prologue’) but this formulation never occurs in the Johannine writings. It is always simply πάντα without a definite article. And the latter is always brought into connection with the saving work of Christ. See e.g. John 3.35–6: ‘the Father loves the Son, and has given all things (πάντα) into his hand. He who believes in the Son has eternal life.’

95 See McHugh, John, 13: ‘Everywhere else in John διά with the genitive [as in John 1.3, 17], when used of Christ, refers to his mediatory role in the work of salvation (see especially 3.17; 10.9; 14.6; 1 Jn 4.9 …)’.

96 Cf. John 20.22 (‘And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”’) with Gen 2.7 (‘then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man become a living being’).

97 Cf. Bultmann, John, 13: ‘the Prologue is an introduction – in the sense of being an overture, leading the reader out of the commonplace into a strange and new world of sounds and figures, and singling out particular motifs from the action that is now to be unfolded’. The image has also been adopted by other interpreters of the Gospel.

98 An earlier Dutch version of this article served as my farewell address to the Faculty of Theology of VU University Amsterdam on 15 February 2013: ‘“Alle dingen zijn door Hem geworden”: de oorspronkelijke proloog van het evangelie van Johannes’. The text is available at http://hdl.handle.net/1871/41343.