Son, clothed from eternity with the divine glory, Jesus cannot certainly be thought of in the position in contrast to God in which man stands in contrast with God. It is, on the other hand, quite intelligible how the Son, become man, having entered into all the conditions of the human life, must show Himself as such also in contrast with God, speaks of the only God (v. 44), the true God (xvii. 3), designates Him as His God (xx. 17), honours Him (viii. 49), and prays to Him (iv. 22, xii. 27, xvii. 1 ff.; comp. vi. 11, xi. 41, 42). Only as such can he designate the Father as the greater (xiv. 28).10 It is but the other side of this true human position towards God, if the world touches Him all round in the same way as it does all other men.11 Because with conscious consent to the divine will (vi. 38) He left the heavenly existence with the Father along with His glory, He must also be introduced into the divine consciousness as into the sensibility of the world of the sons of men.

$145. The Incarnation of the Logos.

John has shown in his Gospel that Jesus is the Messiah, or the Son of God, while he narrates how he had seen in the earthly life of Jesus the divine glory of the Only-begotten (a).

look for His final heavenly glory, in conformity with His nature, yet He hopes for it only as the reward for the discharge of His earthly calling (xiii. 32, xvii. 4, 5; comp. § 103, d; 120, d).

10 While it would be an incongruity, bordering on blasphemy, to seek to establish this for any other man, it yields a good sense, if the Son, who originally (in His heavenly existence with the Father) was equal to God in glory, claims that all who really love Him are to rejoice at His return to the Father, as He Himself rejoiced at it (comp. xvii. 13), because His going to the Father, throned in glory, made Him a partaker of that glory. Jesus accepts divine worship only (xx. 28) when, after His resurrection, He is on His way to His heavenly glory (ver. 17), in which He is to receive the full divine honour after finishing His Messianic work (v. 23; comp. § 143, b).

11 Hence is He subjected to the natural changes of human impulses. He is gladdened in fellowship with His disciples (xv. 11; comp. xvii. 33); the pain of a dear friend (xi. 3, 5, 36; comp. xiii. 23) draws tears from Him (xi. 35). The irritation to which He yields at the grave of His friend (xi. 33, 38), His higher peace of soul, in which He overcomes all anxiety and restlessness (xiv. 27), as also the deep shudder which seized His soul at the sight of death, and which must be conquered by prayer and resignation to the divine will (xii. 27; comp. xiii. 21, xviii. 11), show that in His earthly life He felt Himself quite as a man.

VOL. II.

Y

In order to designate the original nature of this Son of God, he calls Him, by an Old Testament expression, the Word, which had been from the very beginning the medium of creation and of revelation (b). As the Son of God was manifested by His appearance in flesh, so this Logos became flesh, and thereby the object of concrete perception (c). The idea of the communication of the Spirit in baptism is not irreconcilable, in the evangelist's conception, with these suppositions, if it is not even expressly brought about by them (d).

(a) If the evangelist, by means of his Gospel, would lead his readers to a belief in the Messiahship of Jesus (xx. 31: őtɩ ̓Ιησοῦς ἐστὶν ὁ Χριστός), this cannot have the same meaning for him, who writes for Gentile-Christian readers, as in the first evangelists (§ 136, d). If he more exactly designates the exalted One as the Son of God, then this name in his mouth is not, as in that of the Jews (i. 34, 50, xi. 27), simply a Messianic title of honour, but, on the ground of Jesus' selfmanifestation developed in the Gospel, it designates the eternal Son of God sent by God from heaven to accomplish the Messianic work (i. 4, 10, 14). In the light of this, John has acknowledged that the Old Testament prophets, when they prophesied of the Messiah, spoke of this eternal Son of God, and saw (xii. 41) that original glory proper to Him (xvii. 5, 24).1 John also yet preserves the original significance of

1 It is therefore quite the same whether the Christian confession is thus formulated, that Jesus is the Son of God (I. iv. 15, v. 5),— -or that He is the Christ (I. v. 1), without John's giving any other signification to this name (against Biedermann, p. 256), and that, as Gess, p. 530, asserts, after the example of the false teachers. If the apostle hence characterizes the antichristian false doctrines of his time, that they deny that Jesus is the Christ (I. ii. 22; comp. iv. 3), then he understands by this that those doctrines deny that Jesus is a person with the original divine nature, which, with him, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews (§ 118, b), the name of son designates; and because any other than the Son promised in the Old Testament, and made manifest in Jesus, can be only a lying fiction, so those false teachers, when they speak of a Xpitós or viós, yet have not throughout the Son (I. ii. 23). The ordinary name 'Inσous Xpiorós (i. 17, xvii. 3; I. ii. 1, iv. 2, v. 6; II. 7) has won for the apostle a special meaning, inasmuch as, in opposition to those false teachers, it expresses the identity of Jesus with the promised Messiah (in his own sense), on which account he is in the habit of so designating the (eternal) Son of God by a more solemn term ( viòs auroũ 'Inσous Xpiorós: I. i. 3, iii. 23, v. 20; comp. I. i. 7; II. 3). But the name & Xporós alone occurs only II. 9 (comp. § 134, a, footnote 1); and it is there, too, expressly emphasized, that in the doctrine of this

the name of son (§ 17), since, i. 4, x. 14, the relation of Christ's sonship is urged in order to magnify the greatness of the sacrifice which God has made in His mission into the world (comp. § 77, c). He is likewise called, on that account, ver. 9, the Only-begotten, for whom the sitting down at the right hand of God is no longer emphasized as specially characteristic, but His resting in the bosom of the Father (i. 18), because this latter is the sign of the closest relation of love (comp. xiii. 23). To be sure, it corresponds to this relation of love (comp. § 144, a), that the Father pours out all His glory on the Only-begotten (i. 14: Sóğav ós μovoyevoûs πapà πατρός). And because the apostle has beheld this glory, he can point out the revelation of it in the earthly historical life of Jesus. In the great miracles of divine power, as also in Xprós one has the Son, and in Him the Father. Jesus, on the other hand, is usually called viòs roữ еtoũ (I. iii. 8, iv. 10, v. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20), or the Son simply (I. ii. 22, 23, 24, iv. 14, v. 12; II. 9).

2 There is by no means involved, as Baur, p. 357, supposes, even in the very designation as μovoysvs, the idea of generation, whether we think by it, with Scholten, p. 82, of a generation in the metaphysical sense, or, with Beyschlag, p. 154, of supernatural generation. Rather, I. iv. 9 f., as John iii. 16, 18 (comp. § 143, a), the context shows that the μovoysvs designates the Son only as the only, and therefore as the highest, object of the divine love, whom to give up was love's greatest sacrifice. On the other hand, the idea of yıvvãobas in tou Oo, elsewhere common to the apostle, is never transferred to Christ. As, i. 18, participation in the divine kingly glory is no more mentioned, as elsewhere throughout, as a characteristic for the exalted Son, who alone is spoken of here (against Beyschlag, p. 151; Schenkel, p. 375; Gess, p. 562), so the name xúpios, which designates the Messianic lordship of the exalted Christ, does not at all occur in the Epistles (II. 3, xupíov is false). Only in the Gospel is Jesus sometimes, as in Luke (§ 138, a, footnote 1), in the narrative parts called & xúpios (iv. 1, vi. 23, xi. 2, xx. 18, 20, xxi. 7, 12). The address xúps, and the selfdesignation derived from that (xiii. 13-16, xv. 20), has, besides xx. 28, nothing to do with its specific position of honour (comp. § 18, d).

3 To connect xapá with μovoysvous, by which it will be said: the Only-begotten of the Father (comp. Schultz as above, p. 211), is unquestionably contrary to the language. But, in general, the words are not about the concrete person of the Only-begotten, although Gess, p. 559, yet simply explains them as though the words were τοῦ μονογ. The expression designates a glory so great as none

but an only-begotten Son of the Father can have it, inasmuch as the Father makes the only Son the exclusive possessor of all He has (comp. Scholten, p. 81). And this glory, no doubt, by no means consists of the grace and truth (comp. Neander, p. 884, and Beyschlag, p. 170), or of His special fellowship with the Father (Gess, p. 561), but in the fulness of all the glorious divine attributes,— in particular, of the omnipotence and the omniscience. We have accordingly in John not the sharply-outlined Pauline idea of diža (§ 76, d), but the early apostolic one (comp. § 118, c, footnote 7).

the ever fresh tokens of His divine omniscience, has Jesus revealed His glory (ii. 11; comp. xi. 4, xvii. 10); so that the Gospel can conclude with the confession of His Godhead (xx. 28), and therewith complete its proof that Jesus was the promised Messiah, i.e. (in his sense) the eternal divine Son of God. It is true John would not by that say that Jesus possessed, even in His earthly life, the Sósa peculiar to Him from the beginning (xvii. 5), as Köstlin, p. 150, and even Scholten, p. 105, maintain; for he even speaks of an exaltation to glory which awaited Him only after His death (vii. 39, xii. 16: Soğaσ Oñvai). But the Father, who is said to do these almighty works and to speak these omniscient words, has therewith given to Him a reflection of that glory (xvii. 22), in order to bear witness thereby to the world of that glory, which originally belonged to Him as the only-begotten Son, and which He had laid aside in His earthly existence. Only because it depends on the evangelist so to prove the one by the other, the facts of His life, which even the oldest tradition in substance knew, appear here in a light which at times seems to deny the actual humanity of the Son of God.

δοξασθῆναι).

(b) The Son of God, who at the conclusion of the Gospel is addressed as eós (xx. 28), must naturally have been from the

The first of these tokens was like a miracle of creative power, by which wine came to be where water had been (ii. 9). The two healings of the sick, iv. 53, v. 8, were done by a simple almighty word, which had effect partly in the distance, partly in His immediate presence. In the distribution of the bread and the walking on the lake (chap. vi.), Jesus showed a divine lordship over the elements. By the healing of the blind man by Jesus only an unheard-of thing is narrated (ix. 32), by which a new creation of the sight, denied to the blind man, was brought about; and finally, the work of God (v. 21) in the resurrection of the dead (xi. 43). Plainly this definite number of seven great miraculous works of God are selected in order to point out in each a token of His divine omnipotence from another side, as, § 143, b, there are tokens of His original divine nature. The same is true of the proof of His omniscience. Jesus, as the heart-searcher (comp. I. iii. 20), knew what is in man (ii. 25), and verifies this ever afresh (i. 43, 48, iv. 35, v. 42, vi. 15, 61, vii. 19, viii. 40). He knew beforehand the most secret development in men (vi. 64, 70, xiii. 11); He divined the thoughts of the disciples (xvi. 19), and they therefore acknowledge His omniscience (ver. 30; comp. xxi. 17). He knew all secrets (i. 49, 51, iv. 19, 29, xi. 4, 14, 15), and He knew all the future (xviii. 4; comp. ii. 19, iii. 14, vii. 83, xii. 35, xiii. 1, 38). The whole history of His suffering is thereupon set forth to show how all His words were fulfilled (xviii. 1-3; comp. xiii. 26, xviii. 4–7; comp. x. 18, xviii. 8, 9; comp. xvi. 32, xvii. 12, xviii. 10–27; comp. xiii. 38, xviii. 28-xix. 16; comp. xii. 32, 33, xviii. 32, xx. 8, 9; comp. ii. 19).

very beginning in the divine nature (eòs v, i. 1). He is indeed come into the world for this purpose, that He, who was Himself the true God, may make known Him that is true (I. v. 20). But then He must also have been from eternity as God Himself (I. i. 2, 13, 14: ¿ àπ' ȧрxñs). No clearer evidence can be given for the fact, that the name of son did not by itself designate the original nature of Christ (note a), than that John searches for a special designation for the nature of the Son of God in His eternal existence with the Father, and His living mutual fellowship with Him (i. 1: Tρòs Tòv Ocóv; comp. I. i. 2). But such a designation can he find only in the Old Testament, which, according to his conception, had already prophesied of the eternal Son. Here he found with God from the beginning His word mentioned in many ways as living, operative. Nay, since it is even the nature

5 The tautology, which arises from referring the uros to God, is not removed by arbitrarily supplying: that is to say, only the Father of Jesus Christ (comp. Huther in loc.), although God has never before been so designated. Rather has He, according to the current interpretation, been twice so called, Him that is true; and that by Him that is true, the true God is meant, what is now to be once more confirmed has been à priori presupposed without more ado. But the contrast in ver. 21 of dwλe can prove nothing, since what is dealt with in this verse is ever how we can come to the knowledge of the true God. But Gess, p. 537, reasons from iv r åλné, to which, according to the correct interpretation, i vi is and must be in apposition, because the meaning that the Son is the medium of our existence in God runs counter to the whole Johannean use of speech (comp. § 149, c, footnote 8).

It is to no purpose denied by Reuss (ii. pp. 438, 439 [E. T. ii. 391, 392]), that ar apxus is to be taken in the absolute sense. The beginning can be but that point of time at which our thinking in general begins. As there is no such point,-because to any such point of time another such can be thought of as antecedent, there is involved in it the idea of eternity a parte ante. In another way is this expressed in the Gospel by a play on Gen. i. 1: in this way, that at the beginning of the divine creation, from which the Scriptures begin, He did not in any way come into existence, but He was (i. 1: iv px). But this was already given to the evangelist, by the testimony of Jesus about Himself (§ 144, a).

in the מימרא דיי Even the term

T:

'It must be regarded as acknowledged, that in all Old Testament expressions about that word there is yet no hypostatizing of it implied, but only a poetical objectivizing of it (comp. Gess, p. 625 f.). Targums designates but the revelation which God gives of Himself by means of His Word in the world, and which has on that account divine authority (Deut. xviii. 19; 1 Kings viii. 50) and divine energy (Gen. xxxix. 2, 21; 2 Sam. vi. 7), without its being thought of as having an independent life (comp. Gess, p. 658). But the way in which the Word of God is here conceived of shows plainly, that if John sought in the Old Testament for an attestation of the prehistorical