In addition to linking Jesus with the divine Glory, John also portrays
Jesus as a theophany through his christological interpretation of scriptural
theophanies. In other words, John interprets at least some theophanies from
Jewish Scripture as being “Christophanies,” or instances in which people saw
Jesus. The clearest example of this Johannine tendency emerges in chapter 12,
directly before Jesus summarizes his ministry with the words “whoever sees me
sees the one who sent me” (John 12:45). Jesus’s words follow on the heels of
the narrator’s comment that the prophet Isaiah saw “his Glory” (12:41), which
is an allusion to Isaiah’s famous theophanic encounter in Isaiah 6. (At the
beginning of this encounter, which became foundational in Jewish apocalyptic and
mystical traditions, Isaiah says that “I saw the Lord [κύριον] sitting upon a throne, high and lifted
up, and the house was full of his Glory [δόξης αὐτοῦ]” [Isa 6:1 LXX].)
Yet while the prophet sees God’s anthropomorphic form and Glory in Isaiah 6,
John interprets Isaiah’s vision to suggest that he actually saw Jesus. In this
reinterpretation, John includes the prophet’s words in Isaiah 53:1 and 6:10 to
explain why people do not believe in Jesus (John 12:37–40), and he claims that,
unlike those who cannot “see” Jesus (12:40; cf. Isa 6:10), Isaiah “saw his
Glory and spoke about him” (John 12:41). Even though people saw Jesus perform
“many signs in their presence” (12:37), Isaiah is the one who is able to see
Jesus’s Glory. John thus applies Isaiah’s words and vision in his summative
reflection on the rejection of Jesus and his ministry, and in doing so,
suggests that “the Lord” (κύριος) whom Isaiah sees is in fact “the Lord” Jesus (John 12:41; cf. Isa
6:1 LXX). When John says that Isaiah saw “his Glory,” then, he means that
Isaiah saw Jesus’s Glory, especially since Jesus is the referent of the pronoun
“his” (αὐτοῦ) in the surrounding
comments (John 12:37, 42). Just as John claims in his prologue that we have
seen “his Glory [τὴν
δόξαν αὐτοῦ]” (1:14), so too does he suggest that
Isaiah saw “his Glory [τὴν
δόξαν αὐτοῦ]” (12:41).
Because of John’s suggestion that Isaiah saw Jesus when he saw “his
Glory,” many commentators claim that this sight involved Isaiah’s vision of the
preexistent Jesus (cf. John 17:5). The interpretation of “Old Testament”
theophanies as instances in which people saw “the Son” or the preexistent
“Word” (and not God) can be found as early as Justin Martyr and became a
popular tradition among the church fathers in particular up until the fifth
century CE.46 Such interpretations enabled at least some early
Christians to preserve their belief in God’s essential invisibility by
redirecting the object of sight in theophanies to Jesus in his preexistent
state. As Catrin Williams observes, however, it is difficult to restrict
Isaiah’s view of Jesus’s “Glory” in 12:41 to only the preexistent Word.
Instead, it may be that Isaiah had a vision of future events, a vision that
involved Isaiah foreseeing Jesus’s incarnate
divine Glory. (Again, just as John claims that we have seen “his Glory” in the
flesh [1:14], so too may Isaiah have seen this future fleshly reality when he
saw “his Glory.”) This interpretation finds corroboration in 8:56 when Jesus
says that Abraham saw “my day,” a reference to Abraham foreseeing Jesus’s
earthly ministry (“Abraham rejoiced that he would see [ἴδῃ] my day; he saw [εἶδεν] it and was glad”). Like Abraham, Isaiah
is a visual witness to Jesus, and like Abraham’s vision, Isaiah’s vision likely
involves foresight into Jesus’s future ministry and earthly existence, an
interpretation that is all the more plausible since John situates Isaiah’s
vision within his summary of Jesus’s ministry (12:36b–50), and since he
interprets Jesus’s rejection as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s words (12:38). With
this reading, then, John maintains that Isaiah’s vision of Jesus’s Glory
involves a vision of the earthly Jesus. John interprets Isaiah’s theophany as a
vision of Jesus’s future Glory and earthly ministry, and in doing so, suggests
that seeing the fleshly Jesus is tantamount to experiencing a theophany.
Yet while it is likely that John reads Isaiah’s theophany in Isaiah 6
as a Christophany, it is not necessarily the case that John wholly replaces
Isaiah’s vision of God with a vision of Jesus. Instead, the very ambiguity of
John’s language suggests that it can be read in reference to both Jesus and God: the title “Lord” (κύριος) often applies to both God and Jesus, and
the pronoun “his” (αὐτοῦ)
could technically apply to both God and Jesus as well (i.e., the narrator does
not specifically say that it is “Jesus’s Glory” but only “his Glory”). John’s
statement that Isaiah “saw his Glory,” therefore, could be read in relation to
Jesus and God simultaneously. As Irwin explains, John is not necessarily
contradicting Jewish Scripture by intimating that Isaiah saw Jesus during his
theophanic encounter. Instead, “if Jesus is the subject of the theophanies and
if one understands that Jesus is God, then no contradiction need exist.… Jesus
does not replace God in the theophanies; rather, he is present because God is
present.”52 Williams further explains that John’s interpretation of
scriptural theophanies may also illuminate his rejection of Jewish apocalyptic
claims that individuals such as Abraham and Isaiah ascended into heaven and
experienced visions of God (cf. John 1:18; 3:13). She writes that, for John,
“it is a real ‘seeing’ of the earthly Jesus, not heavenly ascents and visions,
that is required in order to experience a ‘vision’ of God’s glory.” Thus
instead of rejecting the tradition of visionary experiences wholesale, John
redirects this tradition to Jesus himself (see also, e.g., 1:51). To see the
earthly Jesus, John claims, is to have a vision of God, and in this sense, the
patriarchs and prophets like Abraham and Isaiah did experience a vision of God.
Once again, seeing Jesus and seeing God overlap; one does not replace the
other. (Brittany E. Wilson, “Seeing Jesus, Seeing God: Theophany and
Divine Visibility in the Gospel of John,” in Early High Christology: John
among the New Testament Writers, ed. Diane G. Chen, Joel B. Breen, and
Christopher M. Blumhofer [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024], 60-62)
