T H E G O O D N E W S
O F Y E S H U A T H E M E S S I A H,
As Reported By
Yochanan (John)

Gospel of Yochanan/John Chapter 1:1-18

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,And the Word was God.
2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing made had being. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of
mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not suppressed it.
6 There was a man sent from God whose name was Yochanan. 7 He came to be a testimony,
to bear witness concerning the light; so that through him, everyone might put his trust
in God and be faithful to him. 8 He himself was not that light; no, he came to bear witness
concerning the light. 9 This was the true light, which gives light to everyone entering the world.
10 He was in the world—the world came to be through him— yet the world did not know him.
11 He came to his own homeland, yet his own people did not receive him. 12 But to as many
as did receive him, to those who put their trust in his person and power,he gave the right to
become children of God, 13 not because of bloodline, physical impulse or human intention,
but because of God. 14 The Word became a human being and lived with us, and we saw his
Sh?khinah, The Sh'khinah of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth. 15 Yochanan
witnessed concerning him when he cried out, “This is the man I was talking about when I said,
‘The one coming after me has come to rank ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”
16 We have all received from his fullness, yes, grace upon grace. 17 For the Torah was
given through Moshe; grace and truth came through Yeshua the Messiah. 18 No one
has ever seen God; but the only and unique Son, who is identical with God and
is at the Father’s side—he has made him known.

Verse 1–18 In his prologue to the Good News Yochanan sets forth both the divine and human origin and nature of the Messiah. Contrary to modern Jewish opinion, which holds that the Messiah is to be human only, numerous Jewish sources speak of the supernatural features of the Messiah; see below on specific verses in this prologue and also 17:5. The passage consists of groups of couplets separated by prose explanations. Pliny the Younger, one of the first pagans to mention Christians, wrote that they would meet on a fixed day before daylight “and recite by turns a form of words” (or: “sing an antiphonal chant”) “to Christ as a god” (Letter to Emperor Trajan, around 112 c.e.). Besides the prologue to Yochanan, additional New Testament passages lending themselves to “antiphonal chant” or other liturgical use are found in Lk 1–2 and at Ro 11:33–36, Pp 2:6–11, 1 Ti 3:16 and 2 Ti 2:11–13. The Hebrew parallelism of the Psalms and other books in the Tanakh was probably designed for antiphonal chanting. 1a In the beginning was the Word. The language echoes the first sentence of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Word which was with God and … was God is not named as such in Genesis but is immediately seen in action: And God said, ‘Let there be light’ ” (Genesis 1:3). “And God called the light Day” (Genesis 1:5). And so on, through Genesis and indeed throughout the whole Tanakh. God’s expressing himself, commanding, calling and creating is one of the two primary themes of the entire Bible (the other being his justice and mercy and their outworking in the salvation of humanity). This expressing, this speaking, this “word” is God; a God who does not speak, a Word-less God is no God. And a Word that is not God accomplishes nothing. In the Tanakh God himself puts it this way:

For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and returns not there, but waters the earth,
and makes it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater:
so shall my word be that goes out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void,
but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in that for which I sent it.
(Isaiah 55:11)
Thus the Tanakh lays the groundwork for Yochanan’s statement that the Word was with God and was God. In v. 14 we learn that this Word is Yeshua the Messiah himself; moreover, at Rv 19:13 Yeshua is explicitly called “the Word of God.”“Word” translates Greek logos. While “logos” had a role in pagan Gnosticism as one of the steps through which people work their way up to God and as such found its way into numerous Jewish and Christian heresies, here it does not bespeak a pagan intrusion into the New Testament, as some suppose. Rather, it corresponds to Aramaic “memra” (also “word”), a technical theological term used by the rabbis in the centuries before and after Yeshua when speaking of God’s expression of himself. In the Septuagint logos translates Hebrew davar, which can mean not only “word” but “thing” or “matter”; hence the Messianic Jew Richard Wurmbrand has suggested this midrashic understanding of the initial phrase of this verse: “In the beginning was the Real Thing.” Thus the Messiah existed before all creation (compare 17:5). In fact, he was involved in creation (Co 1:15–17, MJ 1:2–3). The Talmud too teaches the Messiah’s preexistence. According to a baraita (an unattributed teaching from the Mishnaic period rabbis, who are known as Tanna?im), “It was taught that seven things were created before the world was created; they are the Torah, repentance, the Garden of Eden, Gey-Hinnom, the Throne of Glory, the Temple, and the name of the Messiah …. The name of the Messiah, as it is written: ‘May his name [as understood here, the name of the Messiah] endure forever, may his name produce issue prior to the sun’ (Psalm 72:17).” (Pesachim 54a, N’darim 39a; also Midrash on Psalm 93:3) And see 19:17N.

Verse 1b–3 Is Yochanan speaking about two (the Word was with God) or one (the Word was God)? Yochanan’s answer expresses Hebraic rather than Greek thinking: it is a matter of both/and, not either/or. We learn in these verses that the Word was not a created being, as the fourth-century heretic Arius taught and as Jehovah’s Witnesses teach today.

Verse 4–9 Yeshua as the true light for the world is a major theme of Yochanan. See 8:12&N.

Verse 6 Yochanan the Immerser; see Mt 3:1N.

Verse 11 His own homeland … his own people, literally, “his own things [neuter] … his own people [masculine].” His own homeland and people could be either the world and all humanity, or the Land of Israel and the Jewish people; the latter seems more relevant, since he spent his entire life in or near Eretz-Israel. A still narrower interpretation, Natzeret and the people who knew him there, conforms to Lk 4:16–30 and Mk 6:1–6 but seems out of context here. In any case the majority of those he reached did not become his followers.

Verse 12 Put their trust in his person and power, literally, “put their trust in his name.” The concept of “name” in the Ancient Middle East included everything a person was. We retain the sense today when we say someone speaks “in a person’s name,” meaning with his authority and expressing his views. To “trust in the name of Yeshua the Messiah” certainly does not mean to attribute magic properties to the name itself. The right to become children of God. Isn’t everyone a child of God? In a sense, yes (Ac 17:28); indeed, all are created “in his image” (Genesis 1:26–27, Ya 3:9). In numerous places God reveals himself as a Father (and in at least one place, Isaiah 49:14–15, as a Mother) to Israel. But here being a “child of God” means having an intimate personal relationship with him, as did Avraham, Yitzchak, Ya?akov, Moshe and David. God spoke to them personally and they spoke to him. It is exactly the same way with everyone who comes to trust in the Messiah, meeting the conditions of the New Covenant: the believer is able to be in touch with God his Father; see below, chapters 15–17 and numerous places in Sha’ul’s letters.

   Verse 14 The Word became a human being, literally, “the Word became flesh.” It is not that a man named Yeshua, who grew up in Natzeret, one day decided he was God. Rather, the Word, who “was with God” and “was God,” gave up the “glory [he] had with [the Father] before the world existed” (17:5) and “emptied himself, in that he took the form of a slave by becoming like human beings are” (Pp 2:7). In other words, God sent “his own Son as a human being with a nature like our own sinful one” (Ro 8:3), so that “in every respect he was tempted just as we are, the only difference being that he did not sin” (MJ 4:15). It is God the Word, then, who decided to become man, not the other way round.
   But can the one God, whose ways are as high above our ways as the heavens above the earth (Isaiah 55:8–9), “become a human being” and still be God? Does not the assertion that the Creator becomes the creature contradict the very essence of what it means to be God? The New Testament writers were aware that the concept of God becoming human needed unique treatment. For example, Sha’ul writes that in Yeshua the Messiah, “bodily, lives the fullness of all that God is” (in Co 2:9); likewise, see v. 18&N. Such circumspect language points to the extraordinariness of the idea. Mattityahu writes that when the Son of Man will come “no one knows—not the angels in heaven, not the Son, only the Father” (Mt 24:37): God is omniscient, yet there is something the Son does not know. Instead of rejecting the incarnation because it contradicts his prejudices about God, an open-minded person tries to discover what the concept means in the New Testament. Its writers are pointing to and attempting to describe a mystery which God has revealed in considerable measure but not altogether, for “now I know partly; then I will know fully” (1C 13:12).
   The Tanakh reports many instances of God’s appearing as a man—to Avraham in Genesis 18, to Ya?akov (Genesis 32:25–33), Moshe (Exodus 3), Y’hoshua (Joshua 5:13–6:5), the people of Israel (Judges 2:1–5), Gid?on (Judges 6:11–24), and Manoach and his wife, the parents of Shimshon, (Judges 13:2–23). In all of these passages the terms “Adonai” and “the angel of Adonai” (or “Elohim” and “the angel of Elohim”) are used interchangeably, and in some of them the angel of Adonai (or Elohim) is spoken of as a man. The Tanakh itself thus teaches that the all-powerful God has the power, if he chooses, to appear among men as a man. The New Testament carries this already Jewish idea one step farther: not only can God “appear” in human form, but the Word of God can “become” a human being—and did so.
   Non-Messianic Judaism has generally taken a defensive theological position against Christianity and its concept of incarnation. Thus the Rambam’s thirteen-point creed has as its third article: “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be his name, is not a body, that he is free from all material properties, and that he has no form whatsoever.” Maimonides clearly did not mean to contradict the Tanakh’s own descriptions of God as having physical features such as a back, a face (v. 18) and an outstretched arm; rather, he meant to exclude incarnation. In the light of the New Testament a Messianic Jew can simply pronounce him wrong. However, for the sake of retaining a traditional Jewish formulation, he can preserve the words but reinterpret them against Maimonides’ purpose. For example, a New Testament believer can agree that God’s nature is not physical or material, but he would insist that the article does not exclude the incarnation of the Word as Yeshua if it is understood as an occasional, rather than essential, attribute of God, an event necessitated because sin occurred in human history. On the other hand, the Malbim (Meir Loeb Ben-Yechiel Michael), writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, though a staunch defender of Orthodoxy against Reform Judaism, had a concept of hitgalmut (“incarnation”) surprisingly close to the Christian idea of incarnation; it is found in his commentary on Genesis 18, where Adonai appears to Avraham. (The word “hitgalmut” is related to golem—recall the Yiddish play, “The Golem,” based on a folktale about a clay body which its maker caused to come alive.) Sh?khinah, God’s manifest presence. See paragraph (3) of MJ 1:2–3N.

Verse 15 See v. 30.

Verse 16 Grace, Greek charis, is equivalent to Hebrew chen (“grace, favor”) or chesed (“loyal love and kindness”).

Verse 17 On Torah see Mt 5:17N. On “Yeshua” and “Messiah” see Mt 1:1N. Another passage comparing Moshe and the Torah with Yeshua and the New Covenant is 2C 3:6–16. It is sometimes thought that the present verse demeans Moshe, but this is not the case. On the contrary, that a mere man for whom no claim to divinity has ever been made should even be compared with the Word of God incarnate shows how highly Yochanan regards Moshe. Nor does he demean the Torah, God’s eternal “teaching” about himself as given to Israel, by comparing it with grace and truth. Elsewhere Yeshua himself says that he did not come to abrogate the Torah but to fill it out (Mt 5:17–20&NN), and proceeded to follow this program by interpreting the Torah in ways that make its meaning and commands even clearer (Mt 5:21–48). Grace and truth are personal attributes of God which Yeshua not only revealed in a unique way during his brief earthly lifetime, but, in his eternal capacity as the Word of God, has been continually bestowing on humanity since the dawn of creation. Grace, truth and the Torah are all from God, supreme expressions of who he is; see Rv 19:11N.

Verse 18 No one has ever seen God. Yet many who saw the angel of Adonai thus saw God (v. 14). Moreover, Moshe saw “God’s back” (Exodus 33:19–23), Isaiah “saw Adonai sitting on a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1), and the seventy elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel … and ate and drank” (Exodus 24:9–11). Therefore this passage must be taken to mean that the ultimate glory and nature of God are hidden from sinful humanity. As Exodus 33:20 puts it, “And [God] said, ‘You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.’ ” The only and unique Son, who is identical with God. Greek monogenês theos is to Jewish people a shocking and problematical phrase. “Theos” means “God,” and “monogenês” can mean either “only-begotten” or “only, unique.” If “monogenês” is an adjective, the phrase may be rendered, “the only-begotten God” or “the only and unique God.” The former concept is alien to the Tanakh and the rest of the New Testament and inconsistent with the remainder of Yochanan’s Gospel as well; while the latter does not make sense in the context of the sentence.
The JNT takes “monogenês” as a substantive, with “theos” (“God”) standing in apposition and describing it. In this case the phrase means either “the Only-Begotten One, who is God” or “the Only and Unique One, who is God.” The word “Son” is supplied and is not in the Greek text used for the JNT, although some manuscripts do have “uios” (“son”) instead of “theos.” What, then, does it mean to call the only and unique son “God,” especially when the Son, who is God, has made him, the Father, who is also God, known? Is there more than one God? Again, refer to v. 1: this “Only and Unique One” is fully identified with God, yet not in such a way as to negate the basic truth of the Sh?ma that “Adonai is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, Ro 3:30). For this reason I have supplied the words, “who is identical with,” in order to reflect the delicacy of the incarnation concept (see v. 14&N) when the predicate “God” is applied to “the only and unique Son”: throughout his Gospel Yochanan teaches that the Father is God, and the Son is God; yet he distinguishes between the Son and the Father, so that one cannot say that the Son is the Father. I submit that the chief difficulty in our understanding this lies neither in the Greek text nor in my translation of it, but in the very nature of God himself.

Stern, D. H. (1992; Published in electronic form by Logos Research Systems, 1996). Jewish New Testament Commentary : A companion volume to the Jewish New Testament (electronic edition.). Logos Library Systems (Jn 1:1). Clarksville, MD: Jewish New Testament Publications.

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