The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel: Wisdom, Word, and Unity

The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel: Wisdom, Word, and Unity

The Fourth Gospel begins with one of the most beautifully written passages in the whole of the Bible and sets the tone for the encounter with Jesus.  Using language laden with symbol and scriptural parallel, the authors of the Fourth Gospel paint a picture of Jesus as connected to God in a uniquely revelatory way.  As Genesis begins with the Word bringing life, so does the Fourth Gospel.  However, Jesus brings life not as a creative force, but as revelation of life’s potential fullness and the divine connectedness that can make such expanded life possible.  In understanding the “Word,” the scriptural parallels that convey the author’s understanding of Jesus, and the Jewish context of the Gospel, we can bring out the mystical meaning of the text that offers expanded life to those who can widen their circles of compassion and seek the divine within themselves.  The Prologue also hints at the tensions and real-world issues that challenged the community from which this text comes: tension with their synagogue community, whom they feel wronged by and whom they considered suppressors of the Jesus narrative who missed the truth manifest in the life of Jesus.  The Fourth Gospel is a unique theological perspective not offered by the synoptic authors and often missed by modern Gentile interpretation.

The Prologue’s most obvious literary parallel is with that of the first chapter of Genesis. Both documents begin with the words, “In the beginning.”  The author, calling Jesus the “Word,” connects him to the voice that speaks creation in Genesis.  John Ashton argues that “creation is indeed one of [the Prologue’s] themes, but it would be closer to the mark to say that it is a hymn about revelation that culminates in incarnation– the incarnation of the revealing logos” (Ashton, 528).  I would like to suggest that Ashton is indeed correct about the revelatory nature of Jesus in the gospel, but that Jesus revealed not incarnation but the fused nature of God with Humanity.  In calling to the books of Proverbs and Genesis, the author fuses the identity of Jesus with the feminine Wisdom, God-as-verb, and the scriptures of the Jewish tradition and their ongoing capacity for life-giving creativity.  

While many Christian circles emphasize the use of “Word” as a sign of Jesus’ fulfillment of scripture, such a suggestion is a misleading representation of the Prologue.  The Greek word Logos, translated as “Word,” is “the divine principle of reason that gives order to the universe and links the human mind to the mind of God” (Meeks, 2013). This mystical understanding of divine connection is expanded upon and is a major theme of the Fourth Gospel.  Jesus uses “I Am” sayings (the divine name of God) and is called “light” (a common symbol of God in scripture) throughout the gospel narrative, two of the most obvious connections made between the identities of Jesus and God.  While such symbols are often interpreted as evidence of incarnation, given the signs of the Jewishness of the author and the consideration that the community from which the text came was primarily Jewish-identifying, it makes more sense to give precedence to a Jewish explanation of such language.  The Jewish mystical tradition offers an alternative paradigm that more aptly encompasses the themes and symbols used in the Gospel.

Continuing to dissect the “Word” identified in the prologue, we can further delve into its meaning for the theology put forth by the author.  Dabar, the Hebrew corollary of logos, “had power to shape the world, to reveal the presence of God, to call people to a heightened sense of selfhood, a heightened consciousness” (Spong, 44).  Again, the Hebrew understanding of the word supports an understanding which sees Jesus not simply as preexistent, but intimately connected to the mind of God and revealer of the presence of God.  Jesus’ work “has two aspects, life and light, and these correspond to the two facets of God’s work: creation and revelation” (Ashton, 528).  This revelation through Jesus, as the author will show through sign and symbol throughout the rest of the Gospel, breaks down the barriers between human life and the ultimately life-giving light of God, enfolding us into the creative verb, into the oneness of God.  Jesus represents the height of human potential.  “…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (1:4) (Meeks, 2013).  In essence: what is manifest in the person of Jesus, the divine quality of selfless love and a deep connection to God, is within each of us and is the ultimate truth toward which Jesus’ life points and which is revealed through his person in the Fourth Gospel.  In Jesus, Wisdom, Word, and God are flesh.  The boundary, the distance we perceive between God and ourselves, dissipates.  

The narrative form of the Prologue calls to Proverbs and parallels the Word with Wisdom.  Wisdom, in the Jewish tradition, is feminine.  I believe that this connection offers yet another barrier to be broken: the conception of gender.  The author here brings together the masculine Word with the feminine Wisdom, bringing their sentiments into a singular form.  While Jesus may have been male, the light, the divinity which he reveals, encompasses the feminine.  The author of John challenges us to rid ourselves of our dualistic ideas regarding divinity and life and to open ourselves to the reality of a God that is “all and more,”– a God that brings fullness of life and is yet beyond our capacity, unboxed.  “God must be understood as a verb, calling, informing and shaping us and all creation into being all that we were created to be” (Spong, 57).  

Without considering the narrative form of the Prologue and the claims made by these connections, “we are not in the world of the Fourth Gospel” and we miss the intent of our author (Ashton, 249). Bultmann proposes that “Jesus does not reveal the mysteries of God or man or the cosmos, but one thing and one thing only: that he is the revealer” (Bultmann in Ashton, 53).  Jesus does not reveal these “noun” qualities– literalistic understandings– of God.  Jesus does not draw a map of the universe or the pathway to Heaven, nor does he box God in an easily digestible way.  Instead, the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel displays the life-giving power of God by continually destroying the barriers we’ve constructed and living in the reality of God.  This light, this God within, cannot be extinguished or overcome.  

Opening our eyes to these ways of interpreting the Gospel allows us to adopt a non-literalistic framework that compels us to see the Fourth Gospel as primarily symbolic in nature.  Kasemann asserts that “… John is ‘the first Christian to use the earthly life of Jesus merely as a backdrop for the Son of God proceeding through the world of man and as the scene of the inbreaking of the heavenly glory’” (Kasemann in Ashton, 72).  Indeed the author’s goal in storytelling is to offer us a transcendent truth beyond the narrative creations of his Gospel. By drawing from the Genesis creation narrative and the Proverbs Wisdom, we are offered a clearly nonliteral lens through which to find a theology that breaks down our constructs of God and asks us to seek God within ourselves.   

While this message is appealing to our modern Christian ears, the evidence in the Prologue is clear: the Johannine community was rejected by their parent Jewish community.  The author tells us that “his own people did not accept him” (1:11, Meeks, 2014).  Despite the reality that the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel continues to pour out compassion and love even through his crucifixion, the Johannine authors clearly feel betrayed and hurt by their Jewish brothers and sisters whose “darkness” it seems tried to overcome the light of the Jesus story.  Throughout the Gospel we find an unfortunate dichotomy drawn between “the Jews” and the followers of Jesus, who were also decidedly Jewish, although the text does much to suggest that Judaism need not be a qualifier for the path of Jesus.  We can see, however, the Jewishness of the text and the flaws of a deeply hurt population whose community rejected their deeply-held convictions.  With the distance we have from the time that the document was written, we can see that the Johannine community, while at odds with the orthodoxy of their synagogue, was none the less a Jewish community who certainly did not reject the whole of Judaism.  We see believers hurt by their friends and family who react in human ways that have had a damaging impact on Christian relationship with our Jewish brothers and sisters and has led to anti-Semitism and an unfair portrait of the Jewish faith.  

Despite the flaws of the author/s, they still convey a deeply Jewish identity and interpretive framework.  In 1:17 of the Prologue, the Word is paralleled with Mosaic Law.  As the Law entered the Jewish narrative in a particular time and place, so did Jesus (the Word).  Jesus is clear that his glory must manifest only at the proper hour.  An author without Jewish connection and respect for the Jewish tradition would certainly not draw a connection between Jesus and the paramount figure of Judaism.  Jesus is, however, continually wrapped into the trappings of scriptural figures.  It is impossible to reject Judaism and interpret the Fourth Gospel.

The Fourth Gospel’s Prologue offers a unique Christology and an interpretive framework often missed by modern readers, ignorant of the Jewish themes present in the text.  Using language that overflows with layered symbolic meaning, the authors of the Fourth Gospel unveil a manifestly connected Jesus in whom is offered a pathway to seek the divine.  The Prologue connects Jesus to the Genesis creation narrative, to the Wisdom of the book of Proverbs, and presents through him the great “I Am,” the light that exists within us and was revealed through the life of Jesus– a life overflowing with love and interpreted symbolically through the framework of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus shows us a God that is in us and yet beyond.  Connecting with the spirit of God, living aligned with the holy, we approach oneness with the totality; we break artificial, constructed barriers; we become part of God in a new and unique way.  The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel offers us a God that is all and more and through which we can find the all and more within ourselves.  

Works Cited

1. Ashton, John. Understanding the Fourth Gospel. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
2. Meeks, Wayne A. The Harpercollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocryphal/deuterocanonical Books. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
3. Spong, John Shelby. The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. 1St ed. New York: HarperOne, 2013.