Читать книгу New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John Vol. 1 - William Barclay - Страница 13

THE WORD BECAME FLESH

THE first chapter of the Fourth Gospel is one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved.

It was not long before the Christian Church was confronted with a very basic problem. It had begun in Judaism. In the beginning, all its members had been Jews. By human descent Jesus was a Jew; and, to all intents and purposes, except for brief visits to the districts of Tyre and Sidon, and to the Decapolis, he was never outside Palestine. Christianity began among the Jews; and therefore inevitably it spoke in the Jewish language and used Jewish categories of thought.

But although it was cradled in Judaism it very soon went out into the wider world. Within thirty years of Jesus’ death it had travelled all over Asia Minor and Greece and had arrived in Rome. By AD 60 there must have been 100,000 Greeks in the Church for every Jew who was a Christian. Jewish ideas were completely strange to the Greeks. To take but one outstanding example, the Greeks had never heard of the Messiah. The very centre of Jewish expectation, the coming of the Messiah, was an idea that was quite alien to the Greeks. The very category in which the Jewish Christians conceived and presented Jesus meant nothing to them. Here then was the problem – how was Christianity to be presented to the Greek world?

William Lecky, the nineteenth-century historian, once said that the progress and spread of any idea depends not only on its strength and force but on the predisposition to receive it of the age to which that idea is presented. The task of the Christian Church was to create in the Greek world a predisposition to receive the Christian message. As E. J. Goodspeed put it, the question was: ‘Must a Greek who was interested in Christianity be routed through Jewish Messianic ideas and through Jewish ways of thinking, or could some new approach be found which would speak out of his background to his mind and heart?’ The problem was how to present Christianity in such a way that it would be understandable to Greeks.

Round about the year AD 100, there was a man in Ephesus who was fascinated by that problem. His name was John. He lived in a Greek city. He dealt with Greeks to whom Jewish ideas were strange and unintelligible and even uncouth. How could he find a way to present Christianity to these Greeks in a way that they would welcome and understand? Suddenly the solution flashed upon him. In both Greek and Jewish thought, there existed the conception of the word. Here was something which could be worked out to meet the double world of Greek and Jew. Here was something which belonged to the heritage of both races and that both could understand.

Let us then begin by looking at the two backgrounds of the conception of the word.

The Jewish Background

In the Jewish background, four strands contributed something to the idea of the word.

(1) To Jews, a word was far more than a mere sound; it was something which had an independent existence and which actually did things. As Professor John Paterson, in his book The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets, has put it: ‘The spoken word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive . . . It was a unit of energy charged with power. It flies like a bullet to its billet.’ For that very reason, the Hebrew language was sparing of words. Hebrew speech has fewer than 10,000; Greek speech has 200,000.

One poet tells how a certain man who had performed a heroic act found it impossible to tell it to his fellow tribesmen for lack of words – whereupon there arose another ‘afflicted with the necessary magic of words’, and he told the story in terms so vivid and so moving that ‘the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of his hearers’. The words of the poet became a power. History has many an example of that kind of thing.

When John Knox preached in the days of the Reformation in Scotland, it was said that the voice of that one man put more courage into the hearts of his hearers than 10,000 trumpets braying in their ears. His words did things to people. In the days of the French Revolution, Rouget de Lisle wrote the ‘Marseillaise’, and that song sent men marching to revolution. The words did things. In the days of the Second World War, when Britain was bereft alike of allies and of weapons, the words of the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, as he broadcast to the nation, did things to people.

It was even more so in the middle east, and still is. To the people of this region, a word is not merely a sound; it is a power which does things. Once when the biblical scholar Sir George Adam Smith was travelling in the desert, a group of Muslims gave his party the customary greeting: ‘Peace be upon you.’ At first they failed to notice that he was a Christian. When they discovered that they had spoken a blessing to an infidel, they hurried back to ask for the blessing back again. The word was like a thing which could be sent out to do things and which could be brought back again. In ‘The First Settler’s Story’, Will Carleton, the poet, expresses something like that:

Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds;

You can’t do that way when you’re flying words:

‘Careful with fire,’ is good advice we know,

‘Careful with words,’ is ten times doubly so.

Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,

But God himself can’t kill them when they’re said.

We can well understand how to the people of the middle east words had an independent, power-filled existence.

(2) The Old Testament is full of that general idea of the power of words. Once Isaac had been deceived into blessing Jacob instead of Esau, nothing he could do could take that word of blessing back again (Genesis 27). The word had gone out and had begun to act, and nothing could stop it. In particular, we see the word of God in action in the creation story. At every stage of it, we read: ‘And God said . . .’ (Genesis 1:3, 6, 11). The word of God is the creating power. Again and again we get this idea of the creative, acting, dynamic word of God. ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made’ (Psalm 33:6). ‘He sent out his word and healed them’ (Psalm 107:20). ‘He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly’ (Psalm 147:15). ‘So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (Isaiah 55:11). ‘Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’ (Jeremiah 23:29). ‘You spoke at the beginning of creation, and said on the first day, “Let heaven and earth be made,” and your word accomplished the work’ (4 Ezra [2 Esdras] 6:38). The writer of the Book of Wisdom addresses God as the one ‘who have made all things by your word’ (Wisdom 9:1). Everywhere in the Old Testament there is this idea of the powerful, creative word. Even human words have a kind of dynamic activity; how much more must it be so with God?

(3) There came into Hebrew religious life something which greatly accentuated the development of this idea of the word of God. For 100 years and more before the coming of Jesus, Hebrew was a forgotten language. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but the Jews no longer knew the language. The scholars knew it, but not the ordinary people. They spoke a development of Hebrew called Aramaic, which relates to Hebrew rather as modern English relates to Anglo-Saxon. Since that was so, the Scriptures of the Old Testament had to be translated into this language that the people could understand, and these translations were called the Targums. In the synagogue, the Scriptures were read in the original Hebrew, but then they were translated into Aramaic, and Targums were used as translations.

The Targums were produced in a time when people were fascinated by the transcendence of God and could think of nothing but the distance and the difference of God. Because of that, those who made the Targums were very much afraid of attributing human thoughts and feelings and actions to God. To put it in technical language, they made every effort to avoid anthropomorphism in speaking of him.

Now the Old Testament regularly speaks of God in a human way; and wherever they met a thing like that, the Targums substituted the word of God for the name of God. Let us see how this custom worked. In Exodus 19:17, we read that ‘Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God.’ The Targums thought that was too human a way to speak of God, so they said that Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet the word of God. In Exodus 31:13, we read that God said to the people that the Sabbath ‘is a sign between me and you throughout your generations’. That was far too human a way to speak for the Targums, and so they said that the Sabbath is a sign ‘between my word and you’. Deuteronomy 9:3 says that God is a consuming fire, but the Targums translated it that the word of God is a consuming fire. Isaiah 48:13 has a great picture of creation: ‘My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens.’ That was much too human a picture of God for the Targums, and they made God say: ‘By my word I have founded the earth; and by my strength I have hung up the heavens.’ Even so wonderful a passage as Deuteronomy 33:27 which in the Authorized and Revised Standard Versions speaks of God’s ‘everlasting arms’ was changed, and became: ‘The eternal God is thy refuge, and by his word the world was created.’

In the Jonathan Targum, the phrase the word of God occurs no fewer than about 320 times. It is quite true that it is simply a roundabout way of referring to the name of God; but the fact remains that the word of God became one of the commonest forms of Jewish expression. It was a phrase which any devout Jew would recognize because he heard it so often in the synagogue when Scripture was read. Every Jew was used to speaking of the Memra, the word of God.

(4) At this stage, we must look more fully at something we already began to look at in the introduction. The Greek term for word is Logos; but Logos does not only mean word; it also means reason. For John, and for all the great thinkers who made use of this idea, these two meanings were always closely intertwined. Whenever they used Logos, the twin ideas of the word of God and the reason of God were in their minds.

The Jews had a type of literature called The Wisdom Literature which was the concentrated wisdom of sages. It is not usually speculative and philosophical, but practical wisdom for the living and management of life. In the Old Testament, the great example of Wisdom Literature is the Book of Proverbs. In this book, there are certain passages which give a mysterious life-giving and eternal power to Wisdom (Sophia). In these passages Wisdom has been, as it were, personified, and is thought of as the eternal agent and co-worker of God. There are three main passages.

The first is Proverbs 3:13–26. Out of that passage we may specially note:

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy. The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew. (Proverbs 3:18–20)

We remember that Logos means word and also means reason. We have already seen how the Jews thought of the powerful and creative word of God. Here we see the other side beginning to emerge. Wisdom is God’s agent in enlightenment and in creation; and wisdom and reason are very much the same thing. We have seen how important Logos was in the sense of word; now we see it beginning to be important in the sense of wisdom or reason.

The second important passage is Proverbs 4:5–13. In it we may notice:

Keep hold of instruction; do not let go; guard her, for she is your life.

The word and wisdom are both seen as the light of life for all people. The two ideas are amalgamating with each other rapidly now.

The most important passage of all is Proverbs 8:1–9:2. In it we may specially note:

The Lord created me [Wisdom is speaking] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always. (Proverbs 8:22–30)

When we read that passage, there is echo after echo of what John says of the word in the first chapter of his gospel. Wisdom had that eternal existence, that light-giving function, that creative power which John attributed to the word, the Logos, with which he identified Jesus Christ.

The development of this idea of wisdom did not stop here. Between the Old and the New Testament, this kind of writing called Wisdom Literature continued to be produced. It had so much concentrated wisdom in it and drew so much from the experience of the wise that it was a priceless guide for life. In particular, two very great books were written, which are included in the Apocrypha and which it will do anyone’s soul good to read.

(a) The first is called ‘The Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach’, or, as it is better known, Ecclesiasticus. It too makes much of this great conception of the creative and eternal wisdom of God.

The sand of the sea, the drops of rain,

and the days of eternity – who can count them?

The height of heaven, the breadth of the earth, t

he abyss, and wisdom – who can search them out?

Wisdom was created before all other things,

and prudent understanding from eternity.

(Ecclesiasticus 1:2–4)

I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,

and covered the earth like a mist.

I dwelt in the highest heavens,

and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.

Alone I compassed the vault of heaven,

and traversed the depths of the abyss.

(Ecclesiasticus 24:3–5)

Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me,

and for all the ages I shall not cease to be.

(Ecclesiasticus 24:9)

Here again we find wisdom as the eternal, creative power which was at God’s side in the days of creation and the beginning of time.

(b) Ecclesiasticus was written in Palestine about the year 100 BC; and at almost the same time an equally great book was written in Alexandria in Egypt, called The Wisdom of Solomon. In it there is the greatest of all pictures of wisdom. Wisdom is the treasure which may be used to become the friend of God (7:14). Wisdom is personified as the creator of all things (7:22). She is the breath of the power of God and a pure stream flowing from the Almighty (7:25). She can do all things, and she makes all things new (7:27).

But the writer does more than talk about wisdom; he equates wisdom and the word. To him, the two ideas are the same. He can talk of the wisdom of God and the word of God in the same sentence and with the same meaning. When he prays to God, his address is:

O God of my ancestors, and Lord of mercy, who have made all things by your word, and by your wisdom have formed humankind.

(Wisdom 9:2)

He can speak of the word almost as John was to speak:

For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command, and stood and filled all things with death, and touched the heaven while standing on the earth.

(Wisdom 18:14–16)

To the writer of the Book of Wisdom, wisdom was God’s eternal, creative, illuminating power; wisdom and the word were one and the same. It was wisdom and the word who were God’s instruments and agents in creation and who continually bring the will of God to the minds and hearts of men and women.

So when John was searching for a way in which he could commend Christianity, he found in his own faith and in the record of his own people the idea of the word, the ordinary word which is in itself not merely a sound but a dynamic thing, the word of God by which God created the world, the word of the Targums which expressed the very idea of the action of God, the wisdom of the Wisdom Literature which was the eternal creative and illuminating power of God. So John said: ‘If you wish to see that word of God, if you wish to see the creative power of God, if you wish to see that word which brought the world into existence and which gives light and life to everyone, look at Jesus Christ. In him the word of God came among you.’

The Greek Background

We began by seeing that John’s problem was not that of presenting Christianity to the Jewish world, but of presenting it to the Greek world. How then did this idea of the word fit into Greek thought? It was already there waiting to be used. In Greek thought, the idea of the word began way back about 560 BC, and, strangely enough, in Ephesus where the Fourth Gospel was written.

In 560 BC, there was an Ephesian philosopher called Heraclitus whose basic idea was that everything is in a state of flux. Everything was changing from day to day and from moment to moment. His famous illustration was that it was impossible to step twice into the same river. You step into a river; you step out; you step in again; but you do not step into the same river, for the water has flowed on and it is a different river. To Heraclitus, everything was like that, everything was in a constantly changing state of flux. But if that is the case, why is life not complete chaos? How can there be any sense in a world where there is constant flux and change?

The answer of Heraclitus was: all this change and flux was not haphazard; it was controlled and ordered, following a continuous pattern all the time; and that which controlled the pattern was the Logos, the word, the reason of God. To Heraclitus, the Logos was the principle of order under which the universe continued to exist. Heraclitus went further. He held that not only was there a pattern in the physical world; there was also a pattern in the world of events. He held that nothing moved with aimless feet; in all life and in all the events of life there was a purpose, a plan and a design. And what was it that controlled events? Once again, the answer was Logos.

Heraclitus took the matter even nearer home. What was it that in us individually told us the difference between right and wrong? What made us able to think and to reason? What enabled us to choose aright and to recognize the truth when we saw it? Once again, Heraclitus gave the same answer. What gave to men and women reason and knowledge of the truth and the ability to judge between right and wrong was the Logos of God dwelling within them. Heraclitus held that in the world of nature and events ‘all things happen according to the Logos’, and that in the individual ‘the Logos is the judge of truth’. The Logos was nothing less than the mind of God controlling the world and everyone in it.

Once the Greeks had discovered this idea, they never let it go. It fascinated them, especially the Stoics. The Stoics were always left in wondering amazement at the order of the world. Order always implies a mind. The Stoics asked: ‘What keeps the stars in their courses? What makes the tides ebb and flow? What makes day and night come in unalterable order? What brings the seasons round at their appointed times?’ And they answered: ‘All things are controlled by the Logos of God.’ The Logos is the power which puts sense into the world, the power which makes the world an order instead of a chaos, the power which set the world going and keeps it going in its perfect order. ‘The Logos’, said the Stoics, ‘pervades all things.’

There is still another name in the Greek world at which we must look. In Alexandria, there was a Jew called Philo who had made it the business of his life to study the wisdom of two worlds, the Jewish and the Greek. No one ever knew the Jewish Scriptures as he knew them; and no Jew ever knew the greatness of Greek thought as he knew it. He too knew and used and loved this idea of the Logos, the word, the reason of God. He held that the Logos was the oldest thing in the world and the instrument through which God had made the world. He said that the Logos was the thought of God stamped upon the universe; he talked about the Logos by which God made the world and all things; he said that God, the pilot of the universe, held the Logos as a tiller and with it steered all things. He said that the human mind was stamped also with the Logos, that the Logos was what gave people reason, the power to think and the power to know. He said that the Logos was the intermediary between the world and God and that the Logos was the priest who set the soul before God.

Greek thought knew all about the Logos; it saw in the Logos the creating and guiding and directing power of God, the power which made the universe and kept it going. So John came to the Greeks and said: ‘For centuries you have been thinking and writing and dreaming about the Logos, the power which made the world, the power which keeps the order of the world, the power by which we all think and reason and know, the power by which we come into contact with God. Jesus is that Logos come down to earth.’ ‘The word’, said John, ‘became flesh.’ We could put it another way – ‘The mind of God became a person.’

Both Jew and Greek

Slowly the Jews and Greeks had thought their way to the conception of the Logos, the mind of God which made the world and makes sense of it. So John went out to Jews and Greeks to tell them that in Jesus Christ this creating, illuminating, controlling, sustaining mind of God had come to earth. He came to tell them that men and women need no longer guess and grope; all that they had to do was to look at Jesus and see the mind of God.