href="#ulink_7f9e3718-d36c-5b72-bc15-0b6f91cfb5ca">6. Whether or not they were a despised class of society in the first century, as is sometimes said, is a matter of debate. Bailey, Good Shepherd, 33–65.
7. Luther, Sermons II, 25.
8. Ibid., 37.
9. Augustine, Sermon 189, Sermons III/6, 36.
Instigating Word
By the year 500 BC, the decisive moments in Israel’s foundational history could do no more than dust up distant memories. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Miriam, David, and Solomon had long since entered the halls of immortal glory. The twelve tribes had risen and dissolved. Jerusalem had existed as a city for over 400 years. The major drama of the Hebrew Old Testament had fizzled out even though some of its books like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were still undergoing composition.
Meanwhile, in the intellectually fertile soil of Greece’s Mediterranean colonies, the first buds of philosophy began to appear. These showings initially proved fragmentary and timid, but nevertheless persistent—first appearing and retreating, then appearing again. The success of the Greeks economically, politically, and militarily had opened breathing room for the philosophically minded to stretch and inhale. We read in the pages of Herodotus the historian that the Greeks of this time sailed wine-dark seas, crossed volcanic ridges, dragged through desolate wastelands, and stumbled upon verdant oases. They discovered exotic foreigners beyond their borders and ambitious neighbors nearby. They imagined cloven-hoofed satyrs and nymphs in the woods and scaly creatures in the blue waters. The world had become an immense and strange place, and they had questions.
The first Greek philosophers obsessed over one question in particular. This single question proved as elusive as the saltwater spray off the beaches of the Aegean: the question of the arche, that is, the “origin,” “principle,” “base,” or “beginning” of all things. What was the rock-bottom nature of stuff? Whatever it was, it was arche. Did the cosmos consist of one long chain of this changing into that and that turning into something else? Was there one substance for stones, another for plants and trees, one for water and another for wind, or was everything made up of the same stuff? Thales, Anaximenes, and others offered a variety of answers. Some philosophers suggested that everything was composed of water, which can exist in a variety of states such as gas, liquid, and solid. Others suggested that air compressed into rock and thinned out into clouds and could be found in everything. Each new generation offered increasingly sophisticated solutions to the problem of the arche. Even so, no one could have prepared for the arrival of Heraclitus.
Heraclitus worked and wrote in the coastal city of Ephesus around the year 500 BC. What remains of Heraclitus’s musings can be found in canny aphorisms, clever epigrams, and curious fragments:
It is not good for men to get all they wish.
It is hard to fight against impulsive desire. Whatever it wants it will buy at the cost of the soul.
Nature loves to hide.
War is the father and king of all.10
No wonder posterity remembered Heraclitus as “the obscure.”
He took up the question of the arche—what is the principle and original substance within all things? But, Heraclitus thought that this was a difficult question to answer because everything seemed to be unstable and ever-changing. He pictured the universe as a tumultuous and quick-flowing river. “You cannot step into the same river twice,” he said.11 Every time someone steps into a stream, the waters are different, having moved downstream and been replaced by new waters. “All things come into being through opposition, and all are in flux, like a river.”12 The universe exists as change, flux, and disruption.
Nevertheless, above the fray and ruckus of the ever-changing river of life, Heraclitus perceived that order and unity persevere. “To those who are awake the cosmos is one, common to all; but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”13 Famously, Heraclitus was prepared to give a name to this eternally organizing principle that “steers all things through all things”: he called it the logos.14 The Greek term logos carries a wide range of meaning and can be translated a number of ways. It can refer to a “word,” to the “thought” or “message” expressed by the words, to the “wisdom,” “rationale,” or “argument” behind the thought, to the overarching logic of the argument. For Heraclitus, logos pulled together all the vagrancies and contingencies of the cosmos. It gave structure to the random and boundaries to the chaos.15
In these fragments of Heraclitus it is easy for Christian theologians (like myself) to spy the visage of John the New Testament Gospeler. John, the most philosophical and weighty of the four Gospel writers, testifies that “in the beginning was the logos” and that “all things came into being through him [the logos], and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1, 3). There is correspondence between Heraclitus’s philosophy of logos and the Gospel of John’s Prologue on the Word to be sure.
New Testament scholars seriously doubt that John consulted Heraclitus or derived his ideas from Heraclitus. To find philosophical reflections on the Word and personifications of Wisdom, John needed only turn to the rich Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic traditions of Palestine, or the writings of Philo of Alexandria.16 Even so, an intellectual kinship exists between the obscure philosopher and the fourth Gospeler. It is as if John picked up the loose strands of Heraclitus’s conjectures and pulled them across 600 years of loom work and sewed them onto their natural end: “the logos was made flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
The Chaos of John
In recent years John has undergone a major reexamination by New Testament specialists. Because the Gospel of John was written so late and because its theology is so sophisticated and developed, scholars long assumed that for those reasons it must be the least historically reliable of the Gospels. New investigations and insights have compelled biblical experts to reevaluate the authorship, date and reliability of the text.17 More and more scholars have reason to believe that John’s gospel expresses the veritable recollections of Jesus’ close friend and disciple, what he saw and heard and touched with his own hands. The Gospel itself gives evidence that its author was an eyewitness to the events and not someone removed by a hundred years or more (see John 19:35 and 21:24).
New Testament scholars previously presumed the beloved disciple John could not have written the work because he was a simple and unlettered fisherman from the Lake of Genesareth. New research shows that he and his family were probably well connected to the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem. John’s family may have been related to the high priest (John 18:15). Henri Cazelles suggests that John’s father, Zebedee, served as a priest in Jerusalem but did not reside there exclusively.18 Beyond his required presence in the city twice a year, he maintained residence in Galilee where his fishing business was located. John would have helped his father in Galilee and traveled with him to Jerusalem where he undoubtedly absorbed the knowledge, rites, and culture of the Jewish tradition. It is even
