Recovering the Jewish-Messianic Gospel, Part Five

Continuing our study, we will now consider the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews, both written in the 90's.

In Proverbs 8 we read that Wisdom “was beside Him [God] , as a master workman.”

The idea of the “master workman” or craftsman has an interesting parallel in Greek philosophy among the Stoics.  They proposed around 300 BC that the supreme God was transcendent and unknowable by humans, but that a second god, called the Craftsman, was the creator of the material world and the revealer of the supreme God to humanity. Another term for this “second god” in Stoic philosophy was the Greek word Logos, meaning “idea”, “word” or “reason”. This second god, the Logos, mediated the truth of the supreme transcendent God to humanity.

Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived from 50 BC to 25 AD in Alexandria, Egypt combined the ideas of the Stoics with the Septuagint.  The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures.  It is what we Christians today call "the Old Testament."  Philo focused on verses in the Old Testament that seemed to suggest Wisdom was a person. He also highlighted verses that could suggest the “word of God” as a divine person.  In the Greek Septuagint, the term “word” was often rendered as Logos.  Philo looked at passages like Psalm 33:6 and wrote that this was the same idea of the Logos found in Greek stoic philosophy:

“By the word (greek: logos) of the Lord the heavens were made,
And by the breath of His mouth all their host.”

The Old Testament has many passages like this in which the term “word” seems to be a divine power in itself.  For example, Psalm 107:20,

“He [God] sent His word and healed them,
And delivered them from their destructions.”

...Also Isaiah 55:10-11,

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.”

Philo used the term Logos over 1400 times in his writings.  Here are some passages from Philo written 40 years before the gospel of John took shape:

“…to his Word (Logos), his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same Word (Logos) both pleads with the Immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the Ruler to the subject” (Heres 2-5) [Notice here the idea of the Logos as an Intercessor with God for humanity and Representative from God to humanity. We see this idea reproduced in the Letter to the Hebrews.  In Hebrews 1:3 Jesus represents God to humanity and in  7:25 he intercedes with God for humanity]

“Therefore of necessity was the Logos appointed as judge and mediator, who is called angel” (Qu. Ex. II.13)

“The incorporeal world is set off and separated from the visible one by the mediating Logos as by a veil” (Qu. Ex. II.94)

“…follow the guidance of that reason (logos) which is the interpreter and prophet of God” (Immut. 138)

“This hallowed flock (the heavenly bodies) he leads in accordance with right and law, setting over it his true Word (Logos) and firstborn Son, who shall take upon him its government like some viceroy of a great king” (Agr. 51)

“God’s firstborn, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were…” (Conf. 146).

 

These last five excerpts from Philo remind us of passages from the New Testament saying that Jesus is the Logos (John 1:1-3), the one mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5), and that he is the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15).

James D.G. Dunn observes, “What is sufficiently clear is that Philo’s thought, not least his concept of the Logos, is what can fairly be described as a unique synthesis of Platonic and Stoic world-views with Jewish monotheism” (Christology in the Making, 1989, p. 221).  For Philo, the Logos was not an actual divine being, but a way of talking about God's self-revelation. He saw himself as a monotheist.

These ideas from Greek philosophy, along with the Wisdom tradition in Judaism, form the thought-background for the first chapter of the gospel of John. This gospel was written around 90-95 AD.  By this time the early Christian communities had been interacting directly with Greek culture and ideas for over 60 years. I don’t believe that the gospel of John was written by one of the original disciples of Jesus. It was probably written by a follower of Jesus steeped in the Greek philosophical ideas of Philo, Plato and the Stoics.  The author of this gospel is presenting Jesus as the Unique Revealer of God to humanity - the Logos.  Let’s read John 1:1-5.

“In the beginning was the Word [Greek word Logos], 

and the Word was with God, 

and the Word was a god.  

He was in the beginning with God.   

All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. 

In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.  

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

[Note: this translation is a more accurate translation than most of our English translations since it observes the presence of the definite article in front of Theos (Greek word for God) when speaking of God in the fullest sense and the absence of the definite article when speaking of the Logos (god in a lesser sense).  This translation comes from David Bentley Hart's New Testament].

In John chapter one the Logos is portrayed as the "second god" who is both the agent of creation and the revealer of the supreme God.  This is the combination of  the Jewish wisdom tradition and Greek Stoicism, which we saw in Philo, that has now found its way into early Christianity.  In this final development of New Testament Christology, Jesus is not just a human king, born of a virgin - he is a pre-existent being who was God's agent of creation! 

We can see this historical progression from son of God (human Messiah, or King) to Logos.  Notice how the declaration that Jesus is son of God keeps moving earlier in the life of Jesus, and then finally the gospel of John identifies him as the Logos.

 

1. Paul -  Jesus was declared son of God at his resurrection (Romans 1:3-4, 50 CE).

2. Mark - Jesus declared son of God at his baptism (Mark 1:9-11, 65 CE).

3. Luke/Matthew - Jesus declared son of God at his birth (Luke 1:35, 85 CE).

4. John  - Jesus is not just a human king, he is the Logos, a pre-existant divine being who created the cosmos! (John 1:1-14, 95 CE).

The same thought background of Stoicism and Jewish wisdom theology is found in the letter to the Hebrews, which was probably written in the 90's by a follower of Jesus familiar with Philo. Here we see Jesus presented as the “radiance” of God the Father and the exact image of God, "upholding all things by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:1-3). Note the term "radiance" which is a direct echo of Wisdom of Solomon.

The same thought background is found in the letter to the Colossians (probably written in the 80’s) where we read in 1:15-17 that Jesus is...

^“…the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

Again this reminds us of Philo:

“God’s firstborn, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were…” (Conf. 146).

The idea of the firstborn here means the first creation of Yahweh.  So the author of Colossians is saying that Jesus is God’s Wisdom incarnate– he was the first creation of God and then God created everything else through Jesus (see again the wisdom tradition in Proverbs 8:22-30).

By the decades of the 80’s and 90’s, some of early Christian communities, (at least the communities which produced these documents), were saturated with the ideas of Greek Philosophy, and it is reflected in their developing understanding of Jesus. The original Jewish-Messianic gospel had been changed.

We too as 21^st century believers are also saturated in these concepts and we read them back into every part of the New Testament, even when they are not there. These same concepts of Greek philosophy led to the formation of the doctrine of the trinity in the 4th century. 

Trafficking in these Greek philosophical ideas helped the new religion that had now broken off from Judaism to find many Gentile followers. James Dunn comments on the first chapter of John’s gospel:

“Few if any passages have been so influential on subsequent theology. For it was the Logos (Word) concept, the explicit affirmation of the incarnation of the Logos, and the identification of Jesus as the incarnate Logos which dominated the Christology of the second and third centuries.  On the one hand, Logos Christology was central in early Christianity’s attempts to explain itself to its cultured contemporaries.  As we shall see, the simple opening phrases of the Johannine prologue expose us to a Christianity able and eager to speak in language familiar to the religious and philosophical discussions of the time, and the second century apologists continued the same dialogue using the same concepts.” (Dunn, Christology in the Making, 213),

In our next post we’ll look at the somewhat problematic passage in Philippians 2:5-11.