the doctrine of the logos, and its influence on the gospel

the fourth gospel is like one of those great egyptian temples which we may see to this day at dendera or edfu or karnak—and we remember that the temple on mount zion itself was of the same general type—the sanctuary proper is approached through a pylon, a massive structure overtopping it in height and outflanking it on both sides. the pylon of the fourth gospel is of course the prologue; and this raises at the outset two important questions: i. what are the affinities of its leading thought; or, in other words, what is its place in the history of thought and the history of religion? and ii. in what relation does the prologue stand to the rest of the gospel? i need not say that both these points have been, and are being still, actively debated.

i. affinities of the logos doctrine.

the preponderance of opinion at the present time doubtless leans to the view that there is some connexion between the logos of philo and the doctrine of the logos in the fourth gospel. but the question is as to the nature and closeness of that connexion. on this many shades of opinion are possible.

186

1. partial parallels in o. t. and judaism.

if the logos of st. john is not connected with that of philo, the alternative must be that its origin is palestinian. the directions in which we should look would be to the old testament, the apocrypha, and the memra of the targums. and it is true that there are many places in these writings in which ‘the word of god’ is used with pregnant meaning.

ps. xxxiii. 6: ‘by the word of the lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.’ cf. 2 esdras vi. 43: ‘as soon as thy word went forth the work was done.’

ps. cvii. 20: ‘he sendeth his word, and healeth them, and delivereth them from their destructions.’

ps. cxlvii. 15: ‘he sendeth out his commandment upon earth; his word runneth very swiftly.’

ps. cxlvii. 18: ‘he sendeth out his word, and melteth them; he causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow.’

isa. xl. 8: ‘the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our god shall stand for ever.’

isa. lv. 10, 11: ‘for as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which i please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto i sent it.’

wisd. ix. 1: ‘o god of the fathers, and lord who keepest thy mercy, who madest all things by thy word.’

187wisd. xvi. 12: ‘for of a truth it was neither herb nor mollifying plaister that cured them, but thy word, o lord, which healeth all things.’

wisd. xviii. 15, 16: ‘thine all-powerful word leaped from heaven out of the royal throne, a stern warrior, into the midst of the doomed land, bearing as a sharp sword thine unfeigned commandment; and standing it filled all things with death; and while it touched the heaven it trode upon the earth.’

this last passage goes furthest in the way of personification. but in the other passages there is a tendency—we can hardly call it more—to objectify the ‘word of god’ and to treat it as though it had a substantive existence. this is, however, still some way short of the logos both of st. john and of philo.

rather more may be said of the memra of the targums. these writings are indeed, in their extant form, of uncertain date. and yet i suspect, though i cannot prove, that our present texts faithfully preserve the interpretative tradition of the synagogues. the same tendencies were at work as far back as the beginning of the christian era, and the probabilities are that they expressed themselves in the same way. the jews were a conservative people; and the ‘tradition of the elders’ went on continuously without any real break.

we are always hampered by our want of knowledge. the works of philo bulk large upon our shelves, and their contents naturally impress the imagination. of the state of thought in syria and palestine we have far scantier information. i believe it to be possible that a doctrine like that of the philonian logos was 188more widely diffused than we suppose. after all philo grounded his use of the term largely upon the stoics; and the stoics were spread all over the roman empire; they were strong in asia minor. at the same time we should not be justified in drawing too much upon conjecture, where we have positive data in our hands. so far as palestine goes, we have traces of a tendency but not of a system. in both philo and st. john we have what might really be called a system. this creates a presumption that the connexion between them is not accidental.

the example of st. paul may show us what an active stimulus to thought had been given by christianity. in his case we see what far-reaching consequences were drawn from concentrated reflexion upon single detached verses of the jewish scriptures. we must not wholly put aside the possibility that the author of the fourth gospel let his thoughts work in the same manner. we shall see presently that on some important topics he has certainly done so. still, if the doctrines of philo came in his way, the easier hypothesis would be that he was influenced by them. the work of construction would in that case be lighter for him; he would find the half of it done ready to his hand.

2. the evangelist not a philosopher.

it is a distinct question in what form we are to conceive of philo’s teaching as coming before him. the author of the fourth gospel was a thinker, but not a professed philosopher. so far as we can judge 189from the writings of his that have come down to us, we should not be inclined to credit him with much philosophical erudition. the idea that we form to ourselves of the evangelist is not that of a great reader always poring over books. i find it hard to think of him as sitting down to a deliberate study of the jewish scholar’s voluminous treatises. the mental habits of the two men are too different. the evangelist has a shorter and more direct way of getting at the truth. he was more like the old ionian philosophers, who looked up to the sky and out upon the earth, and set down the thoughts that rose in them in short loosely connected aphorisms. the author of the fourth gospel did not look so much without as within: he sank into his own consciousness, and at last brought out to light what he found there. he dwelt upon the past until it became luminous to him; and then he took up the pen.

we will consider presently what sort of hypothesis we may form as to the process by which the evangelist came to assimilate philonian ideas, if he did assimilate them. but it may be well, first, to try to realize rather more exactly the extent of the agreement and difference between the two writers.

3. points of agreement with philo.

and, first, as to the agreement. i have said that philo’s philosophy, in spite of its decorative exuberance and prolixity, is yet at bottom a system. and in the main outline of that system the evangelist coincides with him.

190by the side of the eternal, philo has what he himself called ‘a second god’ (πρ?? τ?ν δε?τερον θε?ν, ?? ?στιν ?κε?νου λ?γο? grill, entstehung d. vierten evang. p. 109); and this second god he called ‘the divine word.’ the word was himself god (καλε? δ? θε?ν τ?ν πρεσβ?τατον α?το? νυν? λ?γον, ibid.). the word was the agent or instrument (?ργανον) in creation (ibid., p. 110).

the action of the word is not infrequently compared to that of light; and although it is nowhere said that the word is life[55], there are contexts in which the ideas of light and life appear in connexion[56]. in like manner there is a certain amount of parallelism for the idea of the word coming to his own and being rejected; it is the word that makes the mind receptive of good; there are some who may be fitly called ‘sons of god,’ and those for whom this title is too high may at least model themselves after the pattern of the word. the parallels for the later part of the prologue are slighter, until we come to the last verse (ver. 18). philo fully shares the conception of the transcendence of god, and speaks of the logos as his ‘prophet’ and ‘interpreter[57].’

there are many coincidences of idea in the attributes ascribed to the logos, as existing in heaven, as revealing the name of god, as possessing supernatural knowledge and power, as continually at work, as eternal, as free from sin, as instructing and convincing, as 191dwelling in the souls of men, as high priest towards god, as the source of unity, of joy and peace, as imparting eternal life, as bridegroom, father, guide, steersman, shepherd, physician, as imparting manna, the food of the soul[58].

i am by no means clear that the case for the connexion of the logos of st. john with the logos of philo is really much strengthened by these parallels. if we ask ourselves whether they necessarily imply literary dependence, i think we should have to answer in the negative. we have to remember that philo and st. john alike have the old testament behind them. whatever is suggested by this may as well come from it directly, and not through a further literary medium. and, when once we have the idea of the logos, there are a number of epithets and metaphors that would go with it almost of themselves.

4. absence of philonian catch-words.

on the other hand, when we examine the parallels adduced in detail, we cannot help noticing that many catch-words of the philonian doctrine are entirely absent from the fourth gospel: πρεσβ?τατο? in many connexions (grill, p. 106); πρεσβ?τατο? υ??? (p. 107); πρωτ?γονο? (pp. 106, 107); μ?σο? τ?ν ?κρων, ?μφοτ?ροι? ?μηρε?ων (p. 106); λ?γο? ??διο?, ? ?γγυτ?τω (sc. θεο?), ε?κ?ν ?π?ρχων θεο? (a term which occurs in st. paul and in the epistle to the hebrews, but not in st. john); λ?γο? ?ρχ?τυπο?, σκι? θεο? (p. 108); μεθ?ριο? στ??, μεθ?ρι?? τι? 192θεο? (κα? ?νθρ?που) φυ?ι? (pp. 109 f.); τ?? μακαρ?α? φ?σεω? ?κμαγε?ον ? ?π?σπασμα ? ?πα?γασμα (p. 115); λ?γο? ??ρατο? κα? σπερματικ?? κα? τεχνικ?? κα? θε?ο? (p. 112).

among these expressions are several that at an early date entered into christian literature, but they are not found in the fourth gospel.

it is probably to such examples as these that dr. drummond refers when he speaks of ‘the total absence of philo’s special vocabulary not only in relation to god, but in regard to the logos’ (character, &c., p. 24).

5. more fundamental differences.

it is of yet more importance that the conception of the logos in philo and in the fourth gospel presents great and fundamental differences.

i do not feel compelled to number among these that particular difference which is at once the most obvious and the most comprehensive. it is of course true that the evangelist identifies the logos with the person of jesus christ, whereas it is doubtful how far the philonian logos is to be regarded as in any sense personal. we always need to remember that the whole category of personality was wanting at the time when philo wrote. the question whether such a conception as that of the logos is personal, naturally forces itself upon us; we have a name for it, and we are accustomed to think of things as either personal or impersonal. philo, on the contrary, had neither the name nor the idea corresponding to the name. hence we are not surprised to find his 193language fluctuating, to find him sometimes write as though the logos were personal, and sometimes as though it were not. where there is no clearly drawn boundary line between two ideas, it is easy to pass from one to the other without being aware of it.

with st. john the conditions are different. in any case it was he who took the decisive step of identifying the divine word with the person of christ. having once done this, his language necessarily became fixed; the ambiguities which attached to philo’s teaching were for him so far at an end. the personal element in the johannean conception belongs not to the idea of the logos but to the historical christ; the originality of the evangelist consists in uniting the christ of history with the idea of the logos, but whether that idea were personal or impersonal as it came to him was of secondary importance.

the divergence is really more significant when we observe that the logos idea itself has a different content. the central point in philo’s conception is the philosophic idea of the divine reason; the centre of st. john’s is the religious idea of the divine word, divine utterance, creative, energizing, revealing. if we for a moment cease to think of the hypostatic and mediating aspect of the word and dwell rather on the attributes and functions associated with it, we find ourselves naturally deserting philo and going back to the old testament. when we glance over the string of passages quoted above, we see in them a truer counterpart to the real meaning of the prologue. ps. xxxiii. 6, with 2 esdras vi. 43; ps. cxlvii. 15, 18; 194wisd. ix. 1, bring out the creative activity of the word; [num. xi. 23; hos. vi. 5]; isa. xl. 8; lv. 10, 11; wisd. xviii. 15, 16, bring out the broad providential, governing and energizing activity; ps. cvii. 20; wisd. xvi. 12, emphasize the redemptive activity in the narrower sense. all these ideas really underlie the prologue, though they do not all receive equally explicit expression. the dominant thought of the prologue is the thought of creation, revelation and redemption wrought by ‘the living god’—that old comprehensive genuinely hebraic name—but wrought by him through his son, who is also his word.

the phrase that has just been used brings us round to another aspect of the prologue, which also takes us away from philo and back to the old testament, or to sources still more immediately christian. if there is any truth in the contention that the doctrine of the prologue governs the rest of the gospel, it must be not directly as a doctrine of the logos, but rather (as has been pointed out especially by grill and h. j. holtzmann) indirectly through those two great constituent conceptions of life and light which together make up, and are embraced under, the doctrine of the logos. the antecedents of these two conceptions are to be sought far more in the old testament, and on the direct line of christian development, than in any language of philo’s. as has just been said, ‘the living god’ is not only a strictly hebraic and old testament idea, but one of the most fundamental of all the ideas of which the hebrew mind and the old testament have been the vehicles. 195the prologue to the fourth gospel is essentially based upon this idea, and works it out in a form that is also determined by the old testament. the significant combination of life and light, which is so characteristic of the prologue and which so runs through the gospel, can hardly have any other ultimate source than ps. xxxvi. 9: ‘with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light,’ the first half of which has an important parallel in jer. ii. 13, ‘my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.’ there is of course the difference that what in the old testament is ascribed directly to jehovah, in the gospel is ascribed to the logos. that is part of the evangelist’s method, which we may assume to be at work all through. but not only does the combination of life and light belong essentially to the old testament and not to philo, but each of these ideas taken separately has without doubt an old testament and not a philonic basis. it is true enough that philo makes use of metaphors derived from ‘life’ and ‘light,’ and applies them to the logos, as he is indeed profuse in metaphors of this character; they are part of his literary embroidery. it is also quite possible that the metaphors were in the first instance suggested to him by the same old testament passages. but the use in the fourth gospel is far deeper and more pregnant with meaning. it is also rightly urged that the use in the gospel, more particularly of the conception of life, is really 196incompatible with philo’s system. the teaching of philo is at bottom dualistic; for him matter is evil, and his object is to remove god from contact with it. in st. john there is no dualism. the writer conceives of matter as penetrated with the divine. alike god and the word of god work downwards and outwards, through spirit to the material envelope and vesture of spirit. there is no inconsistency between the spiritual and the material quickening, both of which are taught distinctly in the gospel. ‘as the father raiseth the death and quickeneth them, even so the son also quickeneth whom he will’ (john v. 21); ‘as the father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the son also to have life in himself’ (ver. 26). both father and son are a principle of life which takes possession at once of soul and body, which imparts alike ethical and spiritual vitality to the disciple of christ on earth, and that eternal life which is not something distinct from this but really the continuation of it in the world to come. no one can fail to see the powerful comprehensiveness of this idea, which incorporates and assimilates with ease such jewish notions as that of the resurrection of the body, where philo’s dualism makes a break and condemns his system either to superficiality or inconsequence.

another point that would be of importance if the facts were really as is often alleged, is the use of the term paraclete. philo, like st. john, has this term; and if it were true that with him too it is a designation of, or directly in connection with, the logos, that 197would greatly strengthen the case for the view that st. john was really borrowing from him. but the doubts on this head, first raised by heinze, and more recently enforced by dr. drummond and dr. grill, appear to be perfectly valid[59]. it is not the logos that is called paraclete, but the cosmos[60].

we observe that the cosmos, which is compared to the high priest’s vestments, is also described as ‘son (of god).’ this is very contrary to the usage of the evangelist, for whom the cosmos (in the sense in which he uses the word) is far more the enemy of god than his son.

all these points together make up a wide divergence between philo’s doctrine and that of the fourth gospel. they go far to justify harnack’s epigrammatic saying that ‘even the logos has little more in common with that of philo than the name, and its mention at the beginning of the book is a mystery, not the solution of one’ (history of dogma, i. 97). we may discount the epigram a little, as one has to discount all epigrams; but when we have done this, there remains in it a large and substantial truth.

iv. possible avenues of connexion.

it does not follow that i would deny all connexion between the philonian logos and st. john’s. my doubt is whether this connexion can have been literary. i find it difficult to picture to myself the evangelist sitting down to master the diffuse tomes 198of philo. where is the interest that would impel him to do this? philo is a student and a philosopher. he is a philosopher who operates with a sacred text, and therefore has unlimited opportunity for applying and expounding his philosophy. but the evangelist is interested in none of his theorems for their own sake. there is only one thing that he seeks. he wants a formula to express the cosmical significance of the person of christ. when he has got that, he is satisfied. for the purpose of filling up his formula and working out its meaning, he goes not to philo but to the old testament. there, and in his own experience, he finds all the data that he needs.

i believe that there is a connexion between greek, or hellenistic, speculation and the fourth gospel. but i can conceive of this best through the medium of personal intercourse and controversy. how did st. paul get his first knowledge of christianity? doubtless through his own vehement attacks upon christians, which he found so calmly and steadfastly resisted; or, it may be, through the disputations in the synagogues and in the law courts, of which he was the witness. we may well believe that st. john extended his knowledge in the same way. partly he would learn from foe, and partly from friend. in a place like ephesus he would from time to time hold controversy with philosophers of the stamp of justin. but, apart from this, in the christian community itself he would find germs of teaching such as had been planted by the alexandrian jew apollos. we are left to conjecture; 199and we have so few positive data to go upon, that our conjectures are of necessity vague. the evangelist need not have waited for his arrival in ephesus to come in contact with the idea of the logos, not perhaps in its full philonian form but in a form that might lead up to the philonian. philo (as we have seen) drew largely from the stoics; and there were stoics in the cities of decapolis[61]. at a centre like antioch they would be found in greater numbers; and at such a centre it would be quite possible to fall in with a wandering disciple or disciples of philo. i have long thought that it would facilitate our reconstruction of the history of early christian thought, if we could assume an anticipatory stage of johannean teaching, localized somewhere in syria, before the apostle reached his final home at ephesus. this would account more easily than any other hypothesis for the traces of this kind of teaching in the didaché, and in ignatius, as well as in some of the earliest gnostic systems.

we cannot verify anything. we have no materials for the purpose. we can only deal a little with probabilities. but behind all probabilities it is enough for us to know that there must have been many avenues 200by which the conception of the logos may well have reached the apostle besides that of the direct and systematic study of the writings of philo.

ii. relation of the prologue to the rest of the gospel.

1. view of harnack.

mention has been made above of harnack’s view as to the relation of the prologue to the main body of the gospel. he holds that the prologue is really separable from this, that it is of the nature of a postscript, or after-thought, rather than a preface. he regards it as not so much the statement of a programme to be worked out in the gospel as a sort of ‘covering letter,’ intended to commend the work to cultivated gentile or hellenistic readers.

this view has in its favour the obvious fact that the word λ?γο?, wherever it occurs in the body of the gospel, is used in its ordinary and familiar sense, and not in the special sense given to it in the prologue. in face of this fact it seems at first sight difficult to treat the prologue as containing the leading idea that runs through and determines the character of the rest of the gospel. and yet it is well known that many writers have so treated it—and conspicuously the two french scholars, m. jean réville and the abbé loisy.

there are two ways of escaping the inference just referred to. one is that of which i have just been speaking, the method adopted by dr. julius grill in his recent work on the origin of the fourth gospel, to take as the leading idea, not the logos but the 201combination of life and light which the evangelist gives as equivalent to the logos[62]. the other is to follow in the track of m. loisy, and to treat the doctrine of the logos as a summary name for the whole ‘theology of the incarnation[63].’

2. view of grill.

it is easy (as i have said) to bring under the head of life and light all the miracles in the gospel, from the miracle at cana down to the raising of lazarus and even the miraculous draught of fishes in chap. xxi. both the first ‘sign’ and the last are instances of the assertion of creative power, and the healing of the blind man in chap. ix, where this aspect is more subordinate, illustrates the activity of christ as the light of the world, a text on which the concluding paragraph of the chapter enlarges.

besides the miracles there are many other allusions to these ideas of life and light: notably to the ‘living water’ in the discourse with the samaritan woman (john iv. 10-14); to the ‘bread of life’ in the discourse in the synagogue of capernaum (vi. 31-58); in the comment apparently suggested by the libation at the feast of tabernacles (vii. 37 f.); in the sayings on light in viii. 12, xi. 9 f., as well as in chap. ix.

there can be no doubt at all that these ideas of 202light and life are quite fundamental to the evangelist, and that they fill a large place in his mind. but to say this is not quite the same thing as to say that the gospel is constructed upon them. the evangelist has told us in set terms on what the ground-plan of his gospel is constructed; ‘these (things) are written, that ye may believe that jesus is the christ, the son of god; and that believing ye may have life in his name’ (xx. 31). there is no need to seek for any other definition of the object and plan of the gospel than this.

3. view of loisy.

the same verse may help us to form an estimate of the theory of m. loisy. so far as ‘the theology of the incarnation’ is meant to express the same thing, the phrase is certainly justified. and if m. loisy intends it to be at the same time a paraphrase for the doctrine of the logos, we can have no objection. at least the only objection we need have would be that he is using a vaguer and more general term, when he might use one that is both definite and characteristic. as a rule, one is more likely to get at the heart of a writer’s meaning by laying stress on the peculiar and individual elements in his teaching, and not on that which he shares with others.

but the question how far either m. loisy or dr. grill has succeeded in defining the root-idea of the gospel is after all only secondary. the real issue is not as to the accuracy of the definition, but as 203to the nature of the relation which is pre-supposed between the root-idea, the principle which covers the plan and object of the gospel, and the narrative of which the main body of the gospel consists. if i may speak for a moment of the leading idea, not of st. john but of m. loisy, i am afraid that the tendency, if not the purpose, of his whole book is to convict the author of the gospel of writing fiction where he professes to write fact. ‘the theology of the incarnation’ is a euphemism which is meant to describe the gospel as from end to end allegory and symbol, the product of an idea and not of reality.

m. loisy, we all know, occupies a peculiar position. his criticism is radical and destructive, but he believes himself to bring back as faith what his criticism has destroyed. few recent writers have left less of the fourth gospel standing as solid history; but at the same time he is a dutiful son of his church, and what the church accepts he also accepts as true. there can hardly be any doubt that the church, as far back as we can trace its convictions, regarded the fourth gospel as strictly historical. if it had not done so, it is very questionable whether the church itself would have taken the shape it did. there are many in these days who, if they followed m. loisy as a critic, would find it very hard to follow him as a theologian. they are not a little perplexed to understand how he himself can reconcile the two trains of his thinking. that, however, is his own affair, with which outsiders are not concerned. but they are greatly concerned to know whether or not 204his criticism is sound. there is no doubt at all that the fourth gospel expresses the evangelist’s ‘theology of the incarnation.’ it expresses it, but is it the product of it? has it no more substantial foundation than an idea? is it history, or is it fiction? that is the great and vital question to which we must address ourselves more directly in the next lecture.