or withdrew.”63 Thus far Schleiermacher rightly observed concerning this verse that “John the Baptist is close to the Redeemer as the instrument that God uses.”64
8. But now we come very definitely to the caveat with which alone all this can be said. Ouk ēn ekeinos to phōs, all’ hina martyrēsē peri tou phōtos. Only now, if very vigorously (for note the emphatic place of ouk ēn), do we find polemic, not against the Baptist, but against a false evaluation of the Baptist. The Baptist must not be confused with the Revealer; he must be respected in his position as a witness. The existence of a false evaluation of the Baptist is presupposed not only here but also in v. 15, in vv. 19ff., in ch. 3, and elsewhere in the New Testament. Luke 3:15 tells us that the people were musing in their hearts whether John was the Christ. In his address at Antioch Paul has John issue the disclaimer: “I am not the one you suppose me to be” (Acts 13:25). The statement of John that all the Synoptics record (Mark 1:7; Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16): “A mightier than I comes after me,” and the related sayings about the shoelaces and the baptism that is more than water baptism, are also to be understood in connection with this presupposition. The same is true of the doubting question of the Baptist from prison as it is recorded in Matt. 11:3: “Are you he who is to come, or do we look for another?” We are also told in Acts 18:24f. that the Alexandrian Apollos, whom we also know from 1 Corinthians but who was then in Ephesus, was “an eloquent man, well versed in the scriptures, instructed in the way of the Lord, and fervent in spirit,” but also that although he edidasken akribōs ta peri tou Iēsou, he knew only the baptism of John. And we are then told in Acts 19:1ff. that there were “some disciples” in Ephesus who had never even heard of a Holy Spirit, and who explain this by the fact that they have been baptized only with John’s baptism. This deviation, which the author of Acts obviously judges very mildly and thinks is easily remediable, clearly presupposes both here and in the Synoptics and John an alleged superiority of the Baptist to Christ. This is obvious from what Paul says to these disciples in Acts 19:4: that John taught the people that they should believe in him who was to come after him, namely, in Jesus. Not, then, in John, who plainly stands in the background. Apart from the question in Luke 3:15, the thesis that Jesus is the Christ is presupposed in John 1:20 and 3:28. The New Testament itself never says expressly that such and such people presented and championed this thesis. But the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions in 1.60 tell us: “Ecce unus ex discipulis Ioannis affirmabat Christum loannem fuisse et non lesum.” [“Behold, one of the disciples of John asserted that John was the Christ and not Jesus.”] And the fact that there was a messianic glorifying of the Baptist and hence a related polemic in his favor and against Jesus seems to be confirmed in an interesting way by recent Mandean research. I will quote a remarkable passage from these works as it is given by W. Bauer (op. cit., p. 15): “When John lives in that age of Jerusalem, goes to the Jordan, and baptizes, Jesus Christ comes, goes thither in humility, receives the baptism of John, and is taught by the wisdom of John. But then he twists the words of John, changes baptism in the Jordan, perverts the words of Kušta and preaches wickedness and deception in the world.” If it is a long way from the disciples of John in Acts, whose chief representative, Apollos, is so finely eulogized even prior to his Christian baptism, to those whose voice is heard here, there can be no mistaking the fact that the vigor and urgency with which John’s Gospel presents the counterthesis seems to point to a very much sharper mood than that presupposed in the disciples of John in Acts 18–19.
No matter how things might have been with the history and structure of this rival church, we obviously have to reckon with a religio-historical and ecclesiastico-political background to this verse. John’s Gospel belongs to a specific historical situation, although we can, of course, form only a partial and hypothetical picture of it with the help of occasional inferences. Clearly by no means the least important part of this situation was the need to say that John the Baptist was not the light, not the Christ (1:20; 3:28), not the returning Elijah, not the awaited prophet of later Jewish hopes (1:21), not the bridegroom (3:29), not the one who comes from above, from heaven (3:31). Vv. 1–5 prepare us for these negations as they cause us, at least with side-glances, to look around and consider where we stand. The full deity of the Word (v. 1), the reference to Jesus (he is the Word, v. 2), the subordination of everything that has come into being to the Word (v. 3), the restriction of the concept of light or revelation to the life that was in the Word (v. 4), and the opposing of revelation to the darkness as the sphere in which we human beings live (v. 5)—when we consider the place of the problem of the Baptist in the prologue, none of these things can be asserted without the Baptist also being in view. But as we were careful then not to allow the amply justified side-glance to lead us to neglect the far richer content of the presentation in which those references are embedded, so now, when the red thread is plain to see and takes a central place in the text itself, we must be careful not to see in the text only the practical historical background. In modern exposition that inclines in this direction the text takes on a remarkably petty and spiteful character that the author would not have tolerated. All honor to the Mandeans and all that is connected with them! But the possible correction of the squabblings of a Near Eastern sect is not the only thing or the final thing that we must see here.
We should certainly remember that any criticism there might be here either of the Baptist or of a sect of the Baptist has universal and typical significance for the author. In putting the witness in his place he surely recalls that he himself could have only the function of a witness, so that all that he wrote about the Baptist was automatically written about himself as well. In principle the same misunderstanding or confusion to which he sees the sect of the Baptist fall victim is the danger that besets every witness of the light. Luther was undoubtedly right when he said of this verse that the world suffers from the affliction of being full of masters and know-alls, of sages and lights, who seek their own way to heaven and want to be lights of the world and teach and lead us how to come to God; John is warning us against such.65 Wherever we have this confusion, the witness, instead of remaining a witness, begins to pose as the Revealer, points to himself instead of to Christ, and makes God’s cause his own. And wherever, as commonly happens, the disciples of the witness, out of pure gratitude and enthusiasm, do him the wrong of putting him in a place where he does not belong (although probably in a more refined way than in that Mandean text), there John 1:8 is apposite, for there we have a sect of the Baptist which cannot be too plainly or sharply refuted. The practical historical background of the text should not cause us to lose sight of the universal and typical nature of the problem that it raises.
A second point is even more definite and important. We have stressed from the very outset that the criticism of the Baptist is positive, i.e., that the No carries with it dialectically a Yes which is openly and non-dialectically expressed and which is thus to be heard no less attentively. We distort the meaning of the text if with W. Bauer66 we put an “only” in brackets before the eis martyrian (v. 7) and the hina martyrēsē (v. 8). A witness who is really a witness, from all that we have heard in vv. 6–7, is not “only” a witness. In doing justice to the polemical element in the verse we have to allow that the “only” has some validity, but in reading and interpreting v. 8 in context, with vv. 6–7 preceding it and vv. 9ff. following, we have no reason to view it merely as polemic, vigorous though the polemic may be. The second and positive part of the statement is certainly not just an amplification of the first and negative part, where Bauer’s “only” would be in place (although not in a translation). The second part is related in content to vv. 6–7, which are so positive that no one would think of limiting them by an “only” were it not for v. 8a. What they say is already limited and needs no further limitation. All that is said in vv. 6–7, within the limitation, applies also to what is said in v. 8a. Because the Baptist is not the light he is no less what he is and can be, a witness. What v. 8a affirms in definition of the term “witness” is the servant-relationship, the subordination, the dependence which applies to the one thus named over against revelation. But what vv. 6–7 affirm on behalf of v. 8b is that being a witness (even if only a witness) means a positive share [in revelation]67 even if this share be only indirect and on a lower level. John the Baptist is a mountain peak which is visible in the valley and which is lit up by the morning sun when the sun is not yet seen in
