means two things – it means word and it means reason. Jews were entirely familiar with the all-powerful word of God. ‘God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light’ (Genesis 1:3). Greeks were entirely familiar with the thought of reason. They looked at this world; they saw a magnificent and dependable order. Night and day came with unfailing regularity; the year kept its seasons in unvarying course; the stars and the planets moved in their unaltering path; nature had her unvarying laws. What produced this order? Greeks answered unhesitatingly: the Logos, the mind of God, is responsible for the majestic order of the world. They went on: what is it that gives human beings power to think, to reason and to know? Again they answered unhesitatingly: the Logos, the mind of God, dwelling within an individual makes that person a thinking rational being.
John seized on this. It was in this way that he thought of Jesus. He said to the Greeks: ‘All your lives you have been fascinated by this great, guiding, controlling mind of God. The mind of God has come to earth in the man Jesus. Look at him and you see what the mind and thought of God are like.’ John had discovered a new category in which Greeks might think of Jesus, a category in which Jesus was presented as nothing less than God acting in human form.
(b) They had the conception of two worlds. The Greeks always conceived of two worlds. The one was the world in which we live. It was a wonderful world in its way but a world of shadows and copies and unrealities. The other was the real world, in which the great realities, of which our earthly things are only poor, pale copies, stand for ever. To the Greeks, the unseen world was the real one; the seen world was only shadowy unreality.
Plato systematized this way of thinking in his doctrine of forms or ideas. He held that in the unseen world there was the perfect pattern of everything, and the things of this world were shadowy copies of these eternal patterns. To put it simply, Plato held that somewhere there was a perfect pattern of a table of which all earthly tables are inadequate copies; somewhere there was the perfect pattern of the good and the beautiful of which all earthly goodness and earthly beauty are imperfect copies. And the great reality, the supreme idea, the pattern of all patterns and the form of all forms was God. The great problem was how to get into this world of reality, how to get out of our shadows into the eternal truths.
John declares that that is what Jesus enables us to do. He is reality come to earth. The Greek word for real in this sense is alēthinos; it is very closely connected with the word alēthēs, which means true, and alētheia, which means the truth. The Authorized and Revised Standard Versions translate alēthinos as true; they would be far better to translate it as real. Jesus is the real light (1:9); Jesus is the real bread (6:32); Jesus is the real vine (15:1); to Jesus belongs the real judgment (8:16). Jesus alone has reality in our world of shadows and imperfections.
Something follows from that. Every action that Jesus did was, therefore, not only an act in time but a window which allows us to see into reality. That is what John means when he talks of Jesus’ miracles as signs signs (sēmeia). The wonderful works of Jesus were not simply wonderful; they were windows opening on to the reality which is God. This explains why John tells the miracle stories in a quite different way from the other three gospel writers. There are two differences.
(a) In the Fourth Gospel, we miss the note of compassion which is in the miracle stories of the others. In the others, Jesus is moved with compassion for the leper (Mark 1:41); his sympathy goes out to Jairus (Mark 5:22); he is sorry for the father of the epileptic boy (Mark 9:14); when he raises to life the son of the widow of Nain, Luke says with an infinite tenderness: ‘He gave him to his mother’ (Luke 7:15). But in John the miracles are not so much deeds of compassion as deeds which demonstrate the glory of Christ. After the miracle at Cana of Galilee, John comments: ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory’ (2:11). The raising of Lazarus happens ‘for God’s glory’ (11:4). The blind man’s blindness existed to allow a demonstration of the glory of the works of God (John 9:3). To John, it was not that there was no love and compassion in the miracles; but in every one of them he saw the glory of the reality of God breaking into time and into human affairs.
(b) Often the miracles of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are accompanied by a long discourse. The feeding of the 5,000 is followed by the long discourse on the bread of life (chapter 6); the healing of the blind man springs from the saying that Jesus is the light of the world (chapter 9); and the raising of Lazarus leads up to the saying that Jesus is the resurrection and the life (chapter 11). To John, the miracles were not simply single events in time; they were insights into what God is always doing and what Jesus always is; they were windows into the reality of God. Jesus did not merely once feed 5,000 people; that was an illustration that he is forever the real bread of life. Jesus did not merely once open the eyes of a blind man; he is forever the light of the world. Jesus did not merely once raise Lazarus from the dead; he is forever and for everyone the resurrection and the life. To John, a miracle was never an isolated act; it was always a window into the reality of what Jesus always was and always is and always did and always does.
It was with this in mind that the great scholar Clement of Alexandria (about AD 230) arrived at one of the most famous and true of all verdicts about the origin and aim of the Fourth Gospel. It was his view that the gospels containing the genealogies had been written first – that is, Luke and Matthew; that then Mark, at the request of many who had heard Peter preach, composed his gospel, which embodied the preaching material of Peter; and that then ‘last of all, John, perceiving that what had reference to the bodily things of Jesus’ ministry had been sufficiently related, and encouraged by his friends, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote a spiritual gospel’ (quoted in Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 6:14). What Clement meant was that John was interested not so much in the mere facts as in the meaning of the facts, that it was not facts he was after but truth. John did not see the events of Jesus’ life simply as events in time; he saw them as windows looking into eternity, and he pressed towards the spiritual meaning of the events and the words of Jesus’ life in a way that the other three gospels did not attempt.
That is still one of the truest verdicts on the Fourth Gospel ever reached. John did write, not a historical, but a spiritual gospel.
So, first of all, John presented Jesus as the mind of God in a person come to earth, and as the one person who possesses reality instead of shadows and is able to lead men and women out of the shadows into the real world of which Plato and the great Greeks had dreamed. The Christianity which had once been clothed in Jewish categories had taken to itself the greatness of the thought of the Greeks.
The Rise of the Heresies
The second of the great facts confronting the Church when the Fourth Gospel was written was the rise of heresy. It was now about seventy years since Jesus had been crucified. By this time, the Church was an organization and an institution. Theologies and creeds were being thought out and stated; and inevitably the thoughts of some people went down mistaken ways, and heresies resulted. A heresy is seldom a complete untruth; it usually results when one facet of the truth is unduly emphasized. We can see at least two of the heresies which the writer of the Fourth Gospel sought to combat.
(a) There were certain Christians, especially Jewish Christians, who gave too high a place to John the Baptist. There was something about him which had an inevitable appeal to the Jews. He walked in the prophetic succession and talked with the prophetic voice. We know that in later times there was an accepted sect of John the Baptist within the orthodox Jewish faith. In Acts 19:1–7, we come upon a little group of twelve on the fringe of the Christian Church who had never got beyond the baptism of John.
Over and over again, the Fourth Gospel quietly, but definitely, relegates John to his proper place. Over and over again, John himself denies that he has ever claimed or possessed the highest place, and without qualification yields that place to Jesus. We have already seen that in the other
