can receive it.” In my view, this is saying too much, but materially it catches excellently the meaning of the verse. I need not stress the point that the verse, interpreted thus, is no longer superfluous as in earlier expositions. One has to read it in very close connection with v. 1c. With a backward reference the meaning is that he, Jesus, as the Logos who was theos, who partook of the divine nature, was in the beginning, because as such he belongs legitimately to God. Hence the concrete pointing to Jesus with the remarkable discretion that is proper to the author tells us both who was in the beginning with God, because he was theos, and that his being theos, his being in the beginning with God, is true. The answer to both questions is that it was he. If we view v. 2 in this way, we need not be surprised that the statement in v. 1c is not repeated, for v. 2 is related to it. We are then forced exegetically to understand the theos ēn ho logos of v. 1c, as we have done, as an identification by nature of two distinct persons. For alongside the person denoted by ho theos the houtos that partakes of the same theotēs, the Logos, has also come in person.
3. If vv. 1–2 undoubtedly form a first closed circle in the presentation, the same applies to v. 3: panta di’ autou egeneto kai chōris autou egeneto oude hen ho gegonen. I thus accept this demarcation of the verse. It is debated whether there should not be a period after oude hen. If so, ho gegonen goes with what follows. W. Bauer (op. cit., p. 11) offers four arguments that seem to favor this reading. (1) The rhythm comes out better (as Loisy points out). (2) There are other instances of what might seem to be the strange ending of the sentence with oude hen (as Eduard Schwartz and Bauer himself argue). (3) Citations of the verse in patristic and heretical writings from the second to the middle of the fourth century predominantly give it in this form, as Zahn (pp. 708ff.) shows. (4) One suspects that putting ho gegonen at the end of this verse was a measure taken in the struggle against Arian and Macedonian exegesis. Against ending the sentence at oude hen, however, is the linguistic difficulty of the expression ho gegonen … zōē ēn, which one then has to swallow in v. 4 whether or not one puts a comma after autō̧, and which very early witnesses try to avoid by substituting estin for the awkward ēn, just as ouden often replaces oude hen, which is certainly surprising at the end of a sentence. Zahn (p. 52) finds in this variant reading a reason to reject the ending with oude hen in spite of everything that seems to support it. W. Bauer, after firmly deciding against this ending in Hand-Commentar (p. 34),21 comes out for textual corruption in Handbuch (p. 11). The question stands indeed on a razor’s edge. If I decide with Zahn for ending v. 3 with ho gegonen, I do so (not without awareness of the great weight of external arguments against it) for the internal reason that the ending with oude hen, i.e., the meaning that it gives to v. 4, namely, that what came into being was or is life in the Logos—in other words, cosmogonic speculation in natural philosophy (which is not present in v. 3 except as a possible deduction in the margin)—then acquires a breadth and significance and orientation which it cannot possibly have according to the whole approach of the rest of the prologue and the Gospel. Just consider what would be the complexion of vv. 4b–5 if the light to which they refer were equated with the life that for its part is unequivocally equated with everything created! What was created was or is life, and this life is the light of men! What would such equations mean? If we cannot think that the author indulged in such speculations—as the church fathers seem to have done—if we try definitely to derive the meaning of life in v. 4a from the fact22 that in v. 4b the light of men is named, with a reference to history and not to nature, if we are right to regard v. 3, and later v. 10, as an indispensable link, but only a link, an episode, in the whole train of thought, then, without ruling out the possibility of textual corruption, we shall believe that, even apart from linguistic arguments, to begin v. 4 with ho gegonen is not original but an ancient misunderstanding.
If, although not without some remaining uncertainty, we conclude v. 3 with ho gegonen, then both positively and negatively (cf. 1 John 5:12) the verse actually ascribes to the Logos what Philo ascribes to it as an essential function, what is also ascribed to Logos Hermes, to Logos Thoth, to the sophia of Prov. 8:30, to Athena and Isis, to Vohu Manah and Mithra in the Zoroastrian religion, and finally to the Mandean Hibil-Ziwa. By it, making use of it, working through it as a representative, God made the world. As we read later in v. 10: ho kosmos di’ autou egeneto. As we read in 1 Cor. 8:6: di’ hou ta panta. As we read in Col. 1:16a: en autō̧ ektisthē ta panta, and in 16d: ta panta di’ autou … ektistai. As we read finally in Heb. 1:2: di’ hou kai epoiēsen tous aiōnas. The dia in all these passages denotes the role of the means or, rather, of the mediator whose existence and function, in the mind of the author and of that insightful age, explain the unheard-of fact that the dark, lower world is possible and actual alongside the pure and lofty God. Through him and only through him, through the Revealer, is this possible. Natural and revealed theology do not disagree but agree on this point. So great is God that it is only the Revealer who can originally bind him and the world together. So great is the riddle of the world that only the Revealer can secure its original relation to God. So great is the Revealer that in him we see not merely a later, ad hoc fellowship between God and the world, set up merely for the purpose of redemption, but a fellowship that is original. There would be no point in trying to contest the fact that in thus connecting the Revealer and the Creator, the Evangelist and the other New Testament writers entertain a thought that is not, it would seem, uncommon in their day. We do not reduce the value or significance of the New Testament witness if we acknowledge with some astonishment that many of its most important statements may be heard everywhere in a more or less clear form, that the time (which is said to be “fulfilled” [Gal. 4:4]) seemed to have a general awareness of what needed simply to be given its proper name and proclaimed as a reality by the Christian church. By way of distinction, however, we need to say, of course, that the New Testament authors are not primarily interested in this thought, as to a large extent non-Christian parallels seem to be, for the sake of giving an answer to the riddle of the world. Nor are they primarily interested in it in order to develop some prior doctrine of God. Their primary interest is that in this thought they found, in relation to God and the world, the word which they needed to bring into focus the reality of the Revealer as they believed they knew it in23 Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was their first concern, God and the world their second concern. I am not in a position to decide whether one can speak about a similar relation between God, the world, and the Revealer in any of the other speculations about the mediator. This is the relation, however, in the New Testament. The aim is to give Jesus Christ his place, and then to give God and the world their places. What Calvin rightly says about this verse applies to the other New Testament passages as well: haec practica est notitia.24
So much regarding the general meaning of the verse. Compared to the other New Testament passages mentioned it has three special nuances. First, it does not use ta panta but panta without the article. As a glance at passages like Rom. 8:28 and 1 Cor. 3:21 teaches us, and as the oude hen of the verse itself confirms, this means that the author is not looking at the world as a whole but at the world as the sum total of its individual parts. His point is that everything that has come into being, absolutely all things without exception, has come into being through the Logos. Again, he does not say that they were created, or that God created them, but egeneto, “they came into being.” The emergence of things is not seen from above but from below, in terms of themselves, as their own function. Yet this very quality of what they themselves do, their coming into being, is relativized. It is not their own. They have come into being not through themselves but through the Logos. Finally, the second and negative part of the saying underlines and sharpens it in a way that does not happen in the other New Testament sayings. Nothing, not one single thing, ne unum quidem, none of the many things that are (as the perfect gegonen is to be understood) came into being without the Logos, independently of him, or apart from him.
Supported by the establishment of these nuances, we obviously cannot be content with what we have said generally by way of understanding the thought. We must go on to ask in what further sense the Evangelist believed he had to say precisely this at this point. We might find many more or less true things stated in the verse. Thus Augustine25 took occasion to warn his listeners
