Jesus Not Just At Creation, But Creating...

John 1: 1-5

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

            “Him.”  The pronoun continues.  This is ‘the Word’, already interpreted to mean Jesus.  Jesus was God.  Jesus was in the beginning with God-meaning before creation itself.  And now he is the Creator.  “All things came into being through him, and (to be clear), without him, not one thing came into being.”

            The scope of Jesus expands here.  If it were just the first two verses, it might be argued that Jesus was present for creation, on the sidelines, an observer.  Not ‘all’ of God was involved in creation.  But this sentence crushes that possibility.  All things came into being through Jesus.  We know from Genesis that God created all.  The Word, Jesus, was God, so Jesus is God who created all things.  The second half of the sentence looks reinforcement, ‘without Jesus, not one thing came into being.’  In other words, no exceptions.

            It is kind of a resume for Jesus.  There are a lot of other names and titles that will be attached to Jesus: Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, Son of Mary….the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One…but John is taking pains to identify Jesus with God, Jesus as God.  What these first three verses of the Gospel of John have done is to take Jesus and lay him into the original creation story of Genesis 1.  First, in the beginning, in this verse, a summary that Jesus is the creator through the days of creation that follow.

            These are three verses and there is a whole Gospel to follow.  John begins by establishing the pedigree of Jesus in the orders of the creator and the creation.  This leads us into Jesus’ role in the present.

Sidebar: Who is John?  Did he write this gospel?  So, of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in none of them does the author self-identify.  In the history of Biblical interpretation, they like to argue about this. 

Who is John?  There are a number of men named “John” in the Bible, including Jesus’ own cousin, John the Baptizer.  I understand this John to be the disciple of Jesus, the one who is listed as the author of four other books of the New Testament, the letters 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John as well as the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelations. 

For some context, if you remember the controversy over the novel “The Da Vince Code”.  The novelist referenced Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper and argued that Mary Magdalene was ‘hidden’ in it.  She was next to Jesus, leaning in on him-a place of intimacy.  History argues that this was John, who is described as ‘beloved of Jesus’-thus having this place of intimacy.  Traditionally, John was the youngest of the disciples, and-also according to tradition-the only one of the Twelve who was die naturally, in his old age, while the rest were martyred.

Who wrote the gospels?  It depends on what you assume about the timeline.  Many modern scholars argue that the gospels were not written until after the lives of the first generation of Jesus’ believers, thus it could not be those who are named.  This argument rests on dating the grammar of our earliest gospel manuscripts.  Other scholars will argue that these are written in the first generation because dating methods do not offer a particular date, but a range of time.  There are also arguments on how the gospels emerged.  Did the authors sit down and write them?  Or were the written forms based on oral accounts?  Is this a single work or a compilation of works? 

To make a long story short (and I am probably too late for that), there are arguments to be made for these authors and arguments to be made that the successors of these authors gathered these gospels ‘in the name of’ the authors, and arguments to be made that these names were attached by tradition to these writings.    

Does it matter?  Does it matter who wrote them?  They are in the Bible and have been since the New Testament became the Word of God.  Is the importance to be found in whose name is on the manuscript or its contents?  For me, I question scholarly motives on these things.  Does the scholar want to cast doubt on the Bible?  Does the scholar want to lock in the Bible narrative?

Here is what I think.  John wrote John.  In Seminary, I learned about grammatical studies that compared the gospel with the other writings attributed to John in the New Testament and they match.  In terms of the age of the gospels, John is argued by some to be the last of the gospels written but the earliest dated gospel fragment (not grammatical age but the age of the physical manuscript) we have is from John.  What bothers me about arguments to make John the last of the written gospels, the farthest from the ‘actual’ time and experience of Jesus, is that this somehow makes it less ‘trustworthy’ than the others.   

And that is no longer a scholarly debate on the origins of the New Testament, that’s an attempt to undercut the writings that are the foundation of my faith.