When Did The Word Become Flesh?

When Did The Word Become Flesh? June 2, 2009

I will be preaching this coming Sunday at my church, and the text I’ve chosen is John 1:1-18. I’ve devoted quite a bit of scholarly attention to that familiar and well-worn passage (two chapters in John’s Apologetic Christology, for instance), but in the past I’ve avoided preaching on it, perhaps out of a concern that I might not be able to resist going into more detail than anyone in the congregation was likely to find interesting.

One subject related to the prologue that I’ve looked at before, but probably won’t bring up in the sermon, is the question of when the author of this Gospel believed the incarnation had taken place. Scholars as different as Reginald Fuller, Charles Talbert and Frances Watson have all suggested that, whereas the classic canonical reading understands the decisive moment to be Jesus’ conception, in the context of the Gospel of John, it is more natural to understand the decisive moment to have been at Jesus’ baptism.

This was a common interpretation among early Christians (although rejected by developing orthodoxy, it was maintained in the Jewish-Christian Pseudo-Clementine literature, which regularly uses Johannine language in reference to Jesus). But more importantly than that, in the context of Jewish and developing Christian thought in the time when this Gospel was written, concepts like Word, Wisdom and Spirit were not clearly distinguished, and so many readers would have found “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) a natural equivalent to what we are told slightly later, namely that the Spirit descended and remained on him (John 1:32).

Also relevant is the first of the Johannine epistles, which says that Christ came not “by water” only but “by water and blood” (1 John 5:6). Some claimed that the pre-existent one descended upon Jesus at his baptism and left him before suffering on the cross. If the statement in 1 John is a response to such views, it denies the latter while affirming the former.

Obviously one can object to this reading on the basis of later creeds and Christological affirmations. But setting aside such anachronistic concerns, is there anything else within the Johannine literature itself or its historical setting that seems to strongly favor or discount this understanding of Johannine Christology?


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