The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (24 page)

It is true that the allusion to Genesis 1 in John’s Prologue is restricted to the opening words, “In the beginning”; but Newsom’s analysis of the passage from the 
Community Rule
 shows how easy it was for a Jewish author to suggest that the creator God of Genesis should be seen rather as a God of knowledge, carefully planning the future of humankind as a whole and of human beings individually. Her remark that “what endows the world with meaning is . . . that set of structured relationships called מחשבת כבודו, ‘His glorious plan,’ ” could equally well have been said of the Logos in the Johannine Prologue.

In the light of all this evidence, Phillips’s conclusion that “Ashton’s attempt to move away from the dominance of creation language seems misguided”
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is unwarranted. A quarter of a century after the publication of my article, Phillips is still, to the best of my knowledge, the only scholar to have argued against my rejection of the standard interpretation of the Prologue as a hymn about creation. Yet of my four arguments he dealt with only two. His dismissal of the first of these, the meaning of the verb γίνεσθαι, is misconceived. Not only does he attribute to me an argument I did not make, but he finds problems in my suggested translation that are simply not there. When he comes to the fourth argument, based on a passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls in which many other scholars besides myself (including Lamarche, Bultmann, Brown, Lindars, and Schnackenburg) have seen a conceptual parallel to the Prologue, he disagrees. Here, as with all such suggested parallels, there is indeed room for disagreement, but this in any case was a supportive argument, buttressing the main case, which is strong enough to stand without it.

The same might be said for the evidence of the Syriac version, which does no more than confirm that some early readers took γίνεσθαι to mean “come to pass” or “happen” (which of course is what it does mean) and were not put off by the early allusion to the opening of Genesis. The fourth argument, however, based on the difference in meaning between πάντα and τὰ πάντα, is substantial enough to merit serious consideration: to ignore it completely is, in current jargon, unacceptable.

This little puzzle has more to do than may appear at first sight with the question we have just been considering. Why do the critical editions of the Greek text refuse to go along with the traditional verse numbering and place the stop not at the end of v. 3 but before its last two words, so that they read (a) 
³
πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν 
⁴
ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν instead of (b) 
³
πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γένονεν. 
⁴
ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν? It is because the traditional verse numbering was put in at a time when the standard reading of the day was the second of these two alternatives. But the oldest manuscripts (P
⁷⁵
 C* D L W), the early versions (Latin, Syriac, and Sahidic Coptic), and most of the fathers (e.g., Hippolytus, Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius) place the stop earlier—before ὃ γέγονεν. Since modern editors of the Greek text attach great importance to the manuscript evidence, it is not surprising that they generally follow the best manuscripts; and in fact the two most recent critical editions are agreed on this point.
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One notable textual critic, Kurt Aland, who was the leading editor in both of these, has written an important article defending this reading.
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Most English translations of the Bible render the variation I have labeled (b). This is no doubt because they derive from the Authorized Version, which worked from the 
textus receptus
, the standard text in the seventeenth century. So, for instance, the RSV has, “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

But what about the commentators? Not all of them go into the question in any depth. Those that do are divided. Aland has provided irrefutable evidence that the earliest reading was (a). But he also showed that many of the Fathers were uneasy with this reading, which lends itself readily to heretical interpretations. The attribution of ὃ γέγονεν to v. 3, he tells us, “began to be carried out in the fourth century in the Greek Church. This transfer arose with the Arians, and functioned to guard the doctrines of the church. Its secondary character is unmistakable.” Lindars gives an illustration of the danger: “If 
all
 things came through him, what about the Holy Spirit? Is he one of the creatures? To exclude this interpretation it was necessary to show that verse 3 applied only to that which has been made, as opposed to what is uncreated.”
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Hence the shift of punctuation from (a) to (b).

This is not the only difficulty with (a). As long as we are thinking in terms of creation, it is extraordinarily difficult to find a satisfactory sense for v. 4: “That which has been made was life in him [the Logos].” As Rudolf Schnackenburg pertinently inquires, “what kind of life is that?”—
 Was is das
 
für eine ζωή?
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For this reason some commentators, flying in the face of the manuscript evidence, go for (b). Ernst Haenchen is one of them. Arguing against Aland, he declares: “One misconstrues the facts when one connects ὃ γέγονεν to verse 4 by invoking the oldest manuscripts, to say nothing of the fact that one does not thereby achieve a meaningful text.”
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(Just how Aland is misconstruing the facts Haenchen does not say.)

Barnabas Lindars, working from the RSV, suggests rather hesitantly that (b) might after all be the best reading: “The ancient reading [a] may be a false inference on stylistic grounds, whereby each verse can consist of two balanced clauses.” But (like Haenchen) his main reason for preferring (b) is the difficulty of making sense of (a).
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C. K. Barrett agrees. He offers a couple of stylistic arguments, but, like Haenchen and Lindars, he opts for (b) chiefly because it is the reading that makes the most sense. He says almost nothing about the manuscript evidence, simply remarking that Kurt Aland disagrees with him.
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Rudolf Bultmann, almost alone among the major commentators, adopted the older punctuation (a) without discussion, presumably because he could see no reason not to; but he had great difficulty in finding a plausible translation for v. 4a: “the vitality of the whole creation has its origin in the Logos: he is the power which creates life. And it does not matter here whether one understands the text as: ‘What has come to be—in him (the Logos) was the life (for it)’; or as: ‘What has come to be—in it he (the Logos) was the life.’ In both cases it is stated that life was not inherent in creatures as creatures.”
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As Barrett remarks about these suggestions (though without naming Bultmann), they are almost impossibly clumsy.
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More seriously, the first of Bultmann’s alternative translations, despite his disclaimer, attributes life to the created universe, and in my view the second is hardly possible as a rendering of the Greek text.
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Every one of these scholars, convinced that the Prologue is about creation, translates the words ὃ γένονεν as “what has been made,” a mistranslation that is at the root of all their difficulties.
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For once ὃ γένονεν is understood to refer not to the created universe but to God’s plan for humankind and the enactment of this plan in human history, then a perfectly intelligible sense emerges. Here is a translation of the Greek text with the correct rendering of ἐγένετο and with the ancient punctuation:

“Everything came to pass through him [δι’ αὐτοῦ], and apart from him not even one thing came to pass. What came to pass in him [ἐν αὐτῷ] was life, and the life was the light of men.”

Of course this too has to be interpreted; here is my own interpretation, first proposed nearly thirty years ago:

From the very beginning God held his thought (the Logos) close to him, and his thought was a facet of his divinity. All human history, every single thing that has ever happened, took place through the mediation of the Logos, but what has come about 
in
 the Logos (that is, the special events of God’s intervention on behalf of his people), this was life, a life that it was God’s prerogative to bestow, a life that was also light—illumination and revelation.