Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Neil B. MacDonald on John 1:1c

  

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)

 

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