The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel / Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904

by W. Sanday

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 language 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; Wisd. 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. The 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 incompatible 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 would 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.