《Whedon’s Commentary on the Bible - John》(Daniel Whedon)
Commentator
Daniel Whedon was born in 1808 in Onondaga, N.Y. Dr. Whedon was well qualified as a commentator. He was professor of Ancient Languages in Wesleyan University, studied law and had some years of pastoral experience. He was editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review for more than twenty years. Besides many articles for religious papers he was also the author of the well-known and important work, Freedom of the Will. Dr. Whedon was noted for his incisive, vigorous style, both as preacher and writer. He died at Atlantic Highlands, N.J., June 8, 1885.
Whedon was a pivotal figure in the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism in the nineteenth-centry America. As a result of his efforts, some historians have concluded that he was responsible for a new doctrine of man that was more dependent upon philosophical principles than scripture.
01 Chapter 1
Verse 1
1. In the beginning—Originally: before all things else.
Was the Word—Not was created, or brought into existence, but was. Fix any assignable point as the beginning, and the Word was, and still was. That is, the Word is absolutely eternal.
The Word—As mind manifests itself in the spoken word, so God, the eternal mind, manifests himself in the eternal LOGOS or Word. And as this Word is in John 1:14 said to have been made flesh, and in John 1:14; John 1:18 is called the only begotten of the Father, the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, so this Word by which God manifests his own hidden and unknowable nature is identified with Jesus the Messiah. The propriety and beauty of both the terms Word and Son, to designate that in God by which his absolute essence is revealed in the universe, are such that we might suppose them originated by the mind of the Evangelist himself, under the guidance of inspiration. But we know, historically, that the term Word is used in a somewhat similar sense in the Old Testament, in the old Jewish Targums, in the Jewish apocryphal writings, by the Greek philosopher, Plato, and Greekish Jew, Philo, of Alexandria. Consult Watson’s Institutes, Part II, chap. 12. and Clarke’s excellent notes on John 1. In the Old Testament the first chapter of Genesis describes the creation as taking place at the divine word spoken. We have, Genesis 15:1, “The WORD of the Lord came to Abraham.” 1 Samuel 3:21, “The Lord revealed himself by the word of the Lord.” 2 Samuel 7:21, “For thy word’s sake.” In the Targums we find the term Word, (Memra,) used for God revealing himself. Thus they say, “The Word [Memra] of Jehovah creates man.” “Jehovah thy God, his Word [Memra] goeth before thee.” “The Lord said unto his Word.” Philo applies such passages as we have above quoted from the Old Testament expressly to the Logos. He describes the Logos as being the image of God, the second God, the eldest son of the eternal Father, etc. The term Logos being thus prepared and used by uninspired writers and in different systems, John adapts and limits it to the true Christian use. This Logos, as now defined, is the second person in the Holy Trinity, incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. The term “Word” is used in the New Testament by John alone in this sense.
Was with God—Literal Greek, was TO God. The eternal word was inherent to, in, with, God. This mysterious inherence is, as Asthanasius said, “hid by the wings of the cherubim.”
The Word was God—The Arians, who hold that the Word is inferior in essence to the supreme God, though superior to all other finite beings, read this clause the Word was a god. But there is no reason for interpreting this word God differently from the same word in the former part of this verse, or from the same word, God, in John 1:6; John 1:12-13, etc. The Arian hypothesis has a strong tendency to polytheism.
Verse 3
3. All things were made by him—Rather, all things became, or came into existence, by him. The sublime opposite of nothingness.
Without… anything—All that from nothing rose, rose not without him. There may be things in their own nature strictly eternal and uncreated, such as space and number; such as the antithesis of right and wrong. Such things the Logos made not; but made all things which were made in accordance with these eternal natures.
Verses 3-5
3-5. Our Evangelist traces in beautiful climax the ascending stages of the creative work of the Logos; namely, as producing existence, life, consciousness, natural, moral, and spiritual.
Verse 4
4. In him was life—Life original and essential. For had he not possessed original life, neither life, nor motion, nor sense could have ever existed in the universe. And from his original life all other life is derived. And this life is more than mere existence. A thing may exist and yet have no life. Life is the opposite of death; existence is the opposite of annihilation or non-existence. Existence is at the bottom and is the basis, and life overlies it.
And the life was the light of men—This life imparted by the Logos to man became the light; that is, the consciousness. It appears as the physical or sensitive consciousness by which men feel; the intellectual consciousness by which they perceive and reason. But this light, thus far, is possessed, more or less distinctly, by mere animals. But it is rather the light possessed by men alone, over and above mere animal nature, that our Evangelist speaks of. There is the moral and spiritual consciousness by which men have eternal and divine conceptions: such as conceptions of God, of absolute right, of holiness, and of immortality. And this highest consciousness of the human spirit is the basis of the operation of the divine Spirit in and upon man, by which he is able to be in himself a responsible and a holy being. Thus have we the climax of existence, of life, and of consciousness, intellectual and spiritual.
Verse 5
5. Light shineth in darkness—Not only was there from the Logos a moral consciousness created in man’s original nature; but when, nevertheless, the moral and spiritual consciousness of men through sin again became dark and inert, the Logos, Christ, shed the beams of truth and love into it, unappreciated and unaccepted. This shining and rejecting existed in all ages; but specially during the incarnation, of which John is about to write.
Verse 6
6. There was a man—Yes, a man; and that is a noble title; but what is it in comparison with the Logos?
Sent from God—And so sent he has a grand going forth; but what is it compared to the eternal goings forth of the Logos?
Verses 6-8
6-8. Thus far the Evangelist has traced the Word from his eternity into his creation of things, his creation and original enlightening of man’s nature, and his shedding new but rejected light into man’s darkness. He is soon (9-18) to trace the entrance of the Logos into our living world; but he first takes care (6-8) that we shall not be led astray in our thoughts by mistaking for the Logos one who was not the Logos. The disciples of John the Baptist, even to a late date, maintained that he was the superior of Jesus. Our Evangelist John, with his brother James, had both been disciples of the Baptist; and he is, therefore, the very man to correct the error. He does so now by this preliminary statement; in which he brings John into a comparison of overwhelming inferiority with the supreme eternal Light.
Verse 8
8. Witness of that Light—The Logos, as incarnate, is now by the Evangelist identified as the living Light. We have, then, Jesus and John as the Light and its witness. The entire body of prophets and the whole Old Testament were indeed witnesses to this Light; but John, the last of the prophets, was the only living personal witness to the living and personal Light. The term Light here becomes personal, and is rightly commenced with a capital.
Verse 9
9. The best commentators render this verse,
That was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlighteneth every man. The true Light—In opposition to John, whom some supposed to be the true light; and in opposition to every false light.
Coming into the world—For the Evangelist now traces, as before said, the Logos as coming by the incarnation into the living human world.
Every man—Every child of Adam. Every human being is endowed by the Logos with a preparatory light, so that he need not be in that darkness which comprehends not the light. (See note on John 1:5.)
Verses 9-14
9-14. Having secured us from confounding him with another being, the Evangelist now traces the Logos as entering, operating, and dwelling in our living world.
Verse 10
10. He was in the world—This clause confirms the interpretation just given of the previous verse, which refers the coming into the world to the Logos.
Made by him—The Creator came into the world which he had created, but was unrecognized by the world; partly because he was disguised in the incarnation, and partly because the world, that is, the natural heart of man, refused to use the light mentioned in the ninth verse, and so became the darkness which comprehended not the light.
Verse 11
11. To his own—This word own is in the plural neuter, and signifies own things, possessions, or properties. The second own is in the plural masculine, and signifies his own living beings; that is, men. As the landlord comes to his own estates, but his own tenants receive him not, so the Logos came to his own world of things, and his own world of creatures, men, did not receive him. This does not refer to his rejecters as Jews or as his countrymen, but to men, as his own responsible subjects.
Verse 12
12. But—There were happy exceptions.
Power—Not so much ability as right, prerogative.
Sons—Rather, children. His name—Which stands for all that his name comprehends. Our faith must embrace Christ in his fulness. And with how transcendent a fulness does the Evangelist’s description endow him! To receive him is faith in act. It is not, as Olshausen says, a mere susceptibility, but an activity; an appropriation of Christ by a free putting forth of the will.
Verse 13
13. Which were born—Though the term regeneration but seldom appears in Scripture, yet the terms which variously express it are abundant.
Not of blood—As the blood of the parent flows into the veins of the offspring.
Nor of the will of the flesh—Nor from the carnal impulse of sensual nature.
Nor of the will of man—Though the will of man be a previous condition upon which God regenerates, the will of man does not regenerate either another man or himself. Self-regeneration is an impossibility in fact and an absurdity in thought. Man consents, and God regenerates. Man repents, and God forgives. Man turns, and God converts. Man believes, and God justifies. But antecedent to either or all of these operations the divine Logos ENLIGHTENS every man, (John 1:9,) both by his own truth and power and by his Holy Spirit sent into the heart.
Verse 14
14. Word was made flesh—So that which in the first verse was God, now is made flesh, God incarnate. He is made flesh not by ceasing to be Logos or God, but by investing himself with humanity. He does not become body, for that might imply that the Logos was the proper soul of the body and the substitute for a human soul. The incarnate is one Christ, perfect man and perfect God.
Dwelt among us—There are in the Old Testament appearances of the angel-Jehovah, which have every proof of being transient manifestations of God himself to man. But their phenomenal bodies were not truly flesh, and so the Divine dwelt not among men permanently, but only appeared transiently.
His glory—Moses on the contrary could not stand the effulgence of Jehovah. See Exodus 33:18-23. John beheld in vision the glory of Christ, (Revelation 1:12-17,) and fell as dead. The apostles beheld his glory at the transfiguration, and were struck with stupor. But this effulgence to the senses is but the symbol of that divinity which shone in the spirit, the words, and the works of the Incarnate.
Only begotten of the Father—He who has thus far been styled the Word is now viewed as the Son. The terms we think beyond all question express essentially the same thing. Remove all physical elements from both, and conceive the pure spiritual import, and they express an ineffable derivation of the second person of the Trinity, in his divine nature, from the first person. We most easily conceive it as identical with the distinction between God as the eternal, unknowable background, and God as self-manifesting. Both are living God. But the latter is the living Word, the living Son, uttered, generated from the former. The difference between the Word and Son is, that, while the former most distinctly expresses revelation, the latter expresses personality. But as the former implies no physical lips or voice in the utterance, so the latter expresses no sex or real physical begetting.
Full—This adjective agrees with the term
Word. Of grace and truth—Grace to bring salvation to man; truth to guide him in the way to that salvation.
Verse 15
15. John bare witness of him—Our Evangelist adduces the Baptist’s testimony not to prove (as he will in John 1:19-34) that Jesus, and not himself, was the Messiah; but to prove what he is just now saying, that the Messiah was truly of this exalted nature. And cried—The great truth was maintained with a cry; a lofty voice that made the wilderness ring.
Cometh after me… preferred before me—Put in the form of a paradox; my successor is my predecessor. He is my successor in time, my predecessor in a previous eternity. This was indeed crying up the divine Comer to his true divine height.
For he was before me—Literally, he was my First. Not merely my former, but my absolute FIRST: first in the train of all my predecessors; therefore at the eternal beginning. The quotation of the Baptist’s words embraces but this verse, and then follows the Evangelist in continuance.
Verse 16
16. Of his fulness—Namely, of grace and truth, as mentioned in John 1:14.
All we received—This all embraces all men; being spoken in our character as
men. Grace for grace—Grace additionally bestowed for grace improved. As light previously implanted by the Logos in man is necessary for his reception of light, so grace fundamentally bestowed upon man is the basis of all his possible reception of further grace. But that first grace—”a gracious ability”—must be exerted by the free will of the agent; and then the Only Begotten adds grace additionally bestowed for grace originally improved.
Verse 17
17. The law was given by Moses—The law is the expression of absolute justice, which in itself knows not grace nor mercy. This was given from God to men by Moses; but if there were nobody better than Moses, we should have had nothing but law alone. There would have been no grace to bring salvation from its penalty; no consequent truth to reveal that grace. These came, even into the Old Testament dispensation, by Jesus Christ. All the mixture of grace with law in the Old Testament is from Christ.
Verse 18
18. No man hath seen God… Son hath declared him—The Evangelist winds up this exordium as he began it, with the declaration that the Son, like the Word, is the manifest God, revealing the God invisible and unknowable. In the 17th verse the Son gives, reveals, grace and truth; in the 18th he is the declarer or revealer of the infinite Unseen.
The only begotten—This begetting is as truly figurative as the utterance of the Word is figurative. Derivation and infinite wisdom are expressed in the latter; derivation and infinite power are expressed in the former.
Only begotten Son—Mr. Tregelles seems to have established the fact that the true reading is only begotten God. The passage thereby becomes a striking proof-text of the divinity of the Son.
In the bosom of the Father—As the Word was in the divine intellect before its incarnation, so the Son was in the love, the bosom, the heart of God, before his earthly birth. The Wordship and the Sonship are equally divine, before the creation and the First Advent, and eternal.
The prologue of the Gospel has now terminated, and the narrative proper commences at this point; to which point the forty days’ Temptation in the Wilderness is the last preceding event. Nor is there, as sceptical critics have pretended, the slightest difficulty in finding ample place for the Temptation at this point.