John
1:1c: “What YHWH Is (in His Action of Creating Time), the Logos Was”
Just as John holds Elohim to
be identical with YHWH in Gen 1, he holds the θεος is a reference to YHWH in John
1:1c (and indeed YHWH is identical with ο θεος in John 1:1b). This is the Johannine (New Testament) counterpart to the
Priestly writer’s (Old Testament) precedent. John holds them to be identical,
with exactly the same sense and hence with exactly the same ramifications (the
is of identity, in other words). YHWH and Elohim are the same and YHWH
and (o) θεος are the same. This should not be
surprising since Elohim and (ο)
θεος are Hebrew and Greek counterparts
for God, translatable one to the other in a way foreign to YHWH that, as
something akin to a proper name, is comparatively speaking essentially untranslatable,
notwithstanding onomatological origins. Accordingly, when John writes θεος ην ο λογος he cannot in fact mean “The Logos
is (predicatively) God” (and hence “the Word was God” in this sense) because
this would mean that “the Logos is YHWH” (“the Word was YHWH”) in this sense.
In other words, we have something like a necessary condition constitutive of a
bulwark against the presumption that the “is” of prediction is operative here.
In fact, it is only the is of identity that makes sense of the claim that John
superimposed this Logos conceptuality on to his heavenly Son of Man
Christology, thus augmenting the persons symmetrically in terms of a
rudimentary conception of “numerically the same nature.” This makes for a
final, balanced, symmetrical relation of the Father and the Son to the Logos.
Philip Harner argued for a number
of years back that the anarthrous nominative singular θεος of 1:1c preceding the verb
semantically signified the qualitative force of θεος: It spoke of the nature or a
character of θεος rather than referring to the θεος whose nature this was. This is
consistent with the kind of constraint imposed by John’s traditional Jewish
monotheism as long as one does not anachronistically endorse the is of
predication as Harner appeared to do. The NEB translates 1:1c, “What God was,
the Word was.” The referent here is YHWH: hence, “what YHWH was, the Word was.”
But the inclusion that John 20:28 enacts with 1:1 originates in what
YHWH is in his action, and specifically in what YHWH is in his of action of
creating time. The most conservative construal of Johannine intentionality may
be: “What YHWH (in his action of creating time), the Logos was.” (Neil B.
MacDonald, “The Risen Jesus’s Sovereignty over Time and the Logos Conceptuality:
Origin, Identity, and Time in John 20:24-29,” in The Identity of Israel’s
God in Christian Scripture, ed. Don Collett, Mark Elliott, Mark Gignilliat,
and Ephraim Radner [Resources for Biblical Study 96; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020],
285-87)
On the claim of Dunn in Christology in the Making that the “Word”
in John 1:1-18 does not necessarily intend the Logos to be thought of as a
personal being, MacDonald noted that
Since the Logos poem’s rendering
of 1:1 and its final form in the Gospel are textually the same, it seems to
follow that prima facie a nonpersonal interpretation of the Johannine intentionality
behind 1:1 is valid. (Ibid., 285 n. 33)
Elsewhere, he writes that
When I claim that the
intentionality behind 1:1c is best rendered by something like “what God (YHWH)
was, the Logos was,” I am not thereby committed to the historical thesis that John
was thinking explicitly in terms of the language of physis and hypostasis. For 1:1c
does not preclude the possibility that John is operating in the mode of what philosophers
call opaque reference. He is constrained to make a conceptual distinction that
is at least inchoately or rudimentarily that of physis and hypostasis (person)
since he is making transparent reference to something akin to action and given
this of compelled to a strategy of semantic ascent to avoid the affirmation of
the incarnation of YHWH. (Ibid., 286 n. 35)
