and the Johannine prologue. Those who have studied John’s Gospel more closely know what is the exegetical crux of the prologue. It is concrete and palpable in vv. 6–8 and v. 15. These verses deal with a John, John the Baptist, as is plain in the rest of the chapter. They tell us that the author wants to show us at once what is the relation of this John to the Word, to the light about which vv. 1–5 and vv. 9–13 speak, to the incarnate Word that is seen by us (v. 14), to Jesus Christ, as will at last be openly stated in v. 17. He, this John, is not himself this Word; he is a man sent by God (v. 6). He is not himself the light; he is a witness to it (v. 8). He bears witness that the one who comes after him surpasses him, as he is before him in principle (v. 8). But v. 7 makes the same point in a positive way. He, this John, has come to bear witness to the light that all might come to faith through him.
There can be no question but that these four verses, above all, cause difficulty to readers and expositors. Vv. 6–8 and v. 15 constitute an interruption which we should like to expunge in the interests of a smoother reading. If they were not there, then for all the other obscurities and ambiguities, understanding the prologue would be a relatively simple task. But they are in fact there, and there can be no doubt but that it is they that give the prologue the concrete appearance with which we have to reckon. They are important. The author has an urgent concern to say what they say. This is true even if, as Bultmann has assumed,3 they are to be viewed as marginal corrections or strengthenings which the author added to an older work that he adopted and revised. He certainly did not want to see the prologue go out and be read without these verses. In their concreteness, and materially in their significant relation to the real beginning of the Gospel in v. 19, they stand out strangely from the verses around them, and precisely in so doing they bring to light the practical purpose of the introductory statement. Whatever we may think about this purpose, whatever view we may take of the literary relation of these verses to the verses around them, whatever may be our position vis-à-vis the textual and historical4 questions raised by these verses, one thing is certain, namely, that the problem of the relation between revelation and the witness to revelation, which is the issue in Augustine’s exordium, is precisely what the author undoubtedly wanted to pinpoint in these verses (and not, perhaps, in these verses alone), his aim being to make readers of the Gospel aware of their situation and to put them in the right place in this situation.
He is speaking about John the Baptist as a witness to revelation. But only later, after the prologue, does he make this express distinction even though he, the author, is also called John, or wants to be called John, or is supposed to be called John according to the tradition. As though it did not matter much if there is a temporary confusion between the two Johns in the minds of readers, as though such a confusion or conflation might even be welcome, he first leaves a certain haziness around the name John which he removes only later. We follow a clue first noted by Franz Overbeck5 when we stress the remarkable proximity of the two Johns in the mind of the author. According to Overbeck this answers the question why the author wanted to be called John or to rely on the authority of John. Overbeck believed that in relation to Jesus the apostle John serves6 as another witness alongside the Baptist John. “As the Baptist is the witness of the Logos, the mediator between him and the world prior to the completion of his epiphany in the world, before the Logos is at the point of perfectly showing the world [by]7 himself the glory of God on earth, so John the apostle is the mediator for the Logos after his departure from the world.” “He is called John on account of his calling in the Gospel and the inner relationship of this calling to that of the Baptist in the whole economy of the divine light in the world according to the basic conception of this economy on which the whole of the Fourth Gospel rests according to the prologue” (p. 417).
As for the narrower issue of the name in the Fourth Gospel, one might question this hypothesis and still not affect the excellence of the observation on which it rests. There is in fact an inner relationship of calling between the two Johns. There is also perhaps—I am less certain of this—a parallelism, as Overbeck suggests, between the witness before and the witness after. One certainly cannot say that the Fourth Evangelist has only a negative or polemical interest in the one who bears his name. Note that in contrast to the Synoptists he is not content to assign to the Baptist merely the position of a forerunner in the sense of a prophet who simply predicts the Messiah, of one who proclaims him that is to come. No, with houtos ēn he at once stresses the Baptist’s word of witness (v. 15). He has him bear express witness to the one who has already come (vv. 26, 29ff., and then again in 3:27ff.). He is the first to point to the one who was then living unrecognized in the midst of Israel before there was ever a disciple or an “apostle” insofar as this word is to be distinguished from the term prophet. Note also that as compared with the Synoptics the Fourth Gospel enhances, as it were, the position of the Baptist by understanding and interpreting his function of preaching repentance and remission in direct reference to Jesus and claiming his baptism directly as Christian baptism (Overbeck, p. 419). The statement of Walter Bauer8 that the attitude of the Evangelist to the Baptist and his followers is to be regarded as one of “intentional contradiction” can hardly be viewed as a happy one in the light of these theses. But there is more. The Baptist is the man who in v. 32 bears witness to the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus from heaven. If the Evangelist now bears witness also to Jesus and his mission, he is not therewith opening a new, let alone an opposing, series. He is placing himself in the series that opens already with John the Baptist. To be sure, he is critical in relation to the Baptist. He shows reserve. He makes distinction. He sets him in his place. Yet we do not find criticism alone. Or, one might say, the criticism is positive. It is also—inevitably—criticism of himself in the same series. If the assumption is correct that according to the author’s intention we are to find in the unnamed disciple among those mentioned in v. 35 and v. 40 either the author himself or the one who vouches authoritatively for him, the one in whose name he speaks, then with the ambivalence that is fitting in this matter he is stating that the Baptist was his first teacher, his human master, through whose witness: “Behold, this is the Lamb of God” (v. 36), he was led to the eternal Word and light, to Jesus. By way of the Baptist he introduces himself, and he is at once on the most significant path to Jesus. And is he doing anything other, in writing the Gospel, than what this teacher of his has done? Does he have this teacher say anything less in v. 29, and especially in 3:35–36, than the sum of his own Gospel? Does he call himself, or his companions in 15:27, or the author, his later editor of 21:24, anything greater than simply a martyrōn. precisely as John the Baptist was? “I have greater witness than that of John,” says Christ in 5:36, but not his disciple! Often in the Gospel the words of Jesus as the incarnate Word are called martyrein or martyria. This fact obviously illuminates the relative dignity of him who in the prologue is called a mere witness, but who is set in contrast as such. Is it not noteworthy and significant, even if exegetically mistaken, that the entire exposition of the early church regarded vv. 16–18 as a continuation of v. 15, and therefore as the words of the Baptist rather than the words of the Evangelist, and that they could do so, things being as ambivalent as they are, with a claim to no little probability? What support have we even in v. 14 for excluding the Baptist from the hēmeis that is presupposed in the etheasametha? No, there is proximity or solidarity here. In Overbeck’s phrase, there is here an “inner relationship of calling.” In John the Baptist John the Evangelist—no matter how this may relate to the question of the name of the Gospel—recognizes and understands himself as well, and his own problematical status. Aware that I am probably trying to say something too precise to do justice to the complex material, but seeking to point in the direction in which, as I see it, the real significance lies, I might venture the paradox that John the Evangelist is wrestling with himself when he wrestles with John the Baptist; with himself, i.e., with his existence and function as the human witness who stands between revelation and humanity. He instructs his readers concerning his own relation to this subject when in the same context he instructs them concerning John the Baptist. He wants to make it clear what he, the Evangelist, does and does not do as such, what he can do and cannot do, what he is and is not. He does this by means of the one who for himself and his contemporaries is the great and most significant paradigm of the concept of the “witness,” namely, the figure of the Baptist.
Within this view, if the presuppositions are correct, there might be truth in all that Richard Reitzenstein9
