Seeing and Not Seeing
God in John
Before turning to how John applies the language of divine
visibility to Jesus, it is first important to demonstrate that John does not
present God as an invisible entity in a strictly Platonic sense. Although John
does arguably adapt Platonic principles when it suits his purposes, on the
whole, he seems unconcerned to craft his portrayal of God in accordance with
firm Platonic notions of divine transcendence and invisibility. For one, John
never calls God “invisible” (αορατος)
unlike Philo who frequently speaks of God’s invisibility, or even unlike texts
such as Colossians 1:15, 1 Timothy 1:17, and Hebrews 11:27. Moreover, the
statement at the end of John’s prologue, which echoed in 1 John (1 John 4:12,
20), does not claim that God cannot be seen (cf. 1 Tim 6:16). Instead,
John 1:18 simply says that “no one has ever seen God.” In other words, John
1:18 says that God is unseen by human eyes, not that God is invisible in an
ontological sense or that God is empirically unavailable to human sight.
Jesus’s statement in chapter 5 about how his interlocuters have never seen
God’s form reflects a similar idea, for Jesus does not claim that God lacks a
form. He instead continues his critique of his Jewish interlocuters by
asserting that they have never seen God’s form, not heard God’s voice (5:37).
The fact that he even mentions God’s “form” (ειδος) suggests that God does have a form
that can be seen, just as God has a voice that can be heard. Again, his point
is that his headers simply have not seen that form.
Second, John’s ostensible denial that specific people
from Israel’s past saw God does not “prove” God’s invisibility in the Fourth
Gospel. As I noted earlier, John situates his two references to people not
seeing God within the context of John situates his two references to people not
seeing God within the context of Sinai allusions. John mentions Moses and the
law (which was given to Moses on Sinai) in both of these contexts (John 1:17;
5:45-47), and in his prologue, he says that “we have seen his Glory [δοξαν]” (1:14), referring, however, not to
God’s Glory, which was seen on Sinai, but to “the Word’s” Glory. In chapter 5,
John’s statement that Jesus’s Jewish hearers have never heard God’s voice nor
seen God’s form may also allude to Deuteronomy 4:12 LXX, where Moses explains
to the Israelites that they are prohibited from making “idols” because “you saw
no likeness [ομοιωμα]
when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb [or Mount Sinai] out of the fire.” With
this latter potential allusion to Deuteronomy 4:12, it is important to note
that, once again, the text does not say that God lacks a form, Moses instead
claims that the Israelites did not see God’s form, or more precisely
God’s “likeness” (ομοιωμα).
According to Moses and Jesus, God may be hidden from their hearers’ eyes, but
this does not mean there is nothing to see. More importantly, with both of the
allusions to Sinai in the prologue and in chapter 5, John seems less concerned
to refute the idea that Moses and the Israelites saw God and more concerned to
situate Moses as a witness to Jesus, or someone who can testify to Jesus’s
claims. Moses’s role as a witness to Jesus is especially clear in chapter 5,
since Jesus says, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote
about me” (John 5:46), and the reference to the law being given through Moses
in the prologue may serve a similar function (1:17). It is not necessarily the
case, then, that John is rejecting scriptural accounts of seeing God, for he
marshals Moses and Scripture (e.g., 10:35) in an effort to support Jesus’s
claims about himself. (Brittany E. Wilson, “Seeing Jesus, Seeing God: Theophany
and Divine Visibility in the Gospel of John,” in John Among the New
Testament Writers: Early High Christology, ed. Christopher M. Blumhofer,
Diane G. Chen, and Joel B. Green [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024], 55-56)
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