Witness to the Word. Karl Barth
himself argue). (3) Citations of the verse in patristic and heretical writings from the second to the middle of the fourth century predominantly give it in this form, as Zahn (pp. 708ff.) shows. (4) One suspects that putting ho gegonen at the end of this verse was a measure taken in the struggle against Arian and Macedonian exegesis. Against ending the sentence at oude hen, however, is the linguistic difficulty of the expression ho gegonen … zōē ēn, which one then has to swallow in v. 4 whether or not one puts a comma after autō̧, and which very early witnesses try to avoid by substituting estin for the awkward ēn, just as ouden often replaces oude hen, which is certainly surprising at the end of a sentence. Zahn (p. 52) finds in this variant reading a reason to reject the ending with oude hen in spite of everything that seems to support it. W. Bauer, after firmly deciding against this ending in Hand-Commentar (p. 34),21 comes out for textual corruption in Handbuch (p. 11). The question stands indeed on a razor’s edge. If I decide with Zahn for ending v. 3 with ho gegonen, I do so (not without awareness of the great weight of external arguments against it) for the internal reason that the ending with oude hen, i.e., the meaning that it gives to v. 4, namely, that what came into being was or is life in the Logos—in other words, cosmogonic speculation in natural philosophy (which is not present in v. 3 except as a possible deduction in the margin)—then acquires a breadth and significance and orientation which it cannot possibly have according to the whole approach of the rest of the prologue and the Gospel. Just consider what would be the complexion of vv. 4b–5 if the light to which they refer were equated with the life that for its part is unequivocally equated with everything created! What was created was or is life, and this life is the light of men! What would such equations mean? If we cannot think that the author indulged in such speculations—as the church fathers seem to have done—if we try definitely to derive the meaning of life in v. 4a from the fact22 that in v. 4b the light of men is named, with a reference to history and not to nature, if we are right to regard v. 3, and later v. 10, as an indispensable link, but only a link, an episode, in the whole train of thought, then, without ruling out the possibility of textual corruption, we shall believe that, even apart from linguistic arguments, to begin v. 4 with ho gegonen is not original but an ancient misunderstanding.
If, although not without some remaining uncertainty, we conclude v. 3 with ho gegonen, then both positively and negatively (cf. 1 John 5:12) the verse actually ascribes to the Logos what Philo ascribes to it as an essential function, what is also ascribed to Logos Hermes, to Logos Thoth, to the sophia of Prov. 8:30, to Athena and Isis, to Vohu Manah and Mithra in the Zoroastrian religion, and finally to the Mandean Hibil-Ziwa. By it, making use of it, working through it as a representative, God made the world. As we read later in v. 10: ho kosmos di’ autou egeneto. As we read in 1 Cor. 8:6: di’ hou ta panta. As we read in Col. 1:16a: en autō̧ ektisthē ta panta, and in 16d: ta panta di’ autou … ektistai. As we read finally in Heb. 1:2: di’ hou kai epoiēsen tous aiōnas. The dia in all these passages denotes the role of the means or, rather, of the mediator whose existence and function, in the mind of the author and of that insightful age, explain the unheard-of fact that the dark, lower world is possible and actual alongside the pure and lofty God. Through him and only through him, through the Revealer, is this possible. Natural and revealed theology do not disagree but agree on this point. So great is God that it is only the Revealer who can originally bind him and the world together. So great is the riddle of the world that only the Revealer can secure its original relation to God. So great is the Revealer that in him we see not merely a later, ad hoc fellowship between God and the world, set up merely for the purpose of redemption, but a fellowship that is original. There would be no point in trying to contest the fact that in thus connecting the Revealer and the Creator, the Evangelist and the other New Testament writers entertain a thought that is not, it would seem, uncommon in their day. We do not reduce the value or significance of the New Testament witness if we acknowledge with some astonishment that many of its most important statements may be heard everywhere in a more or less clear form, that the time (which is said to be “fulfilled” [Gal. 4:4]) seemed to have a general awareness of what needed simply to be given its proper name and proclaimed as a reality by the Christian church. By way of distinction, however, we need to say, of course, that the New Testament authors are not primarily interested in this thought, as to a large extent non-Christian parallels seem to be, for the sake of giving an answer to the riddle of the world. Nor are they primarily interested in it in order to develop some prior doctrine of God. Their primary interest is that in this thought they found, in relation to God and the world, the word which they needed to bring into focus the reality of the Revealer as they believed they knew it in23 Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was their first concern, God and the world their second concern. I am not in a position to decide whether one can speak about a similar relation between God, the world, and the Revealer in any of the other speculations about the mediator. This is the relation, however, in the New Testament. The aim is to give Jesus Christ his place, and then to give God and the world their places. What Calvin rightly says about this verse applies to the other New Testament passages as well: haec practica est notitia.24
So much regarding the general meaning of the verse. Compared to the other New Testament passages mentioned it has three special nuances. First, it does not use ta panta but panta without the article. As a glance at passages like Rom. 8:28 and 1 Cor. 3:21 teaches us, and as the oude hen of the verse itself confirms, this means that the author is not looking at the world as a whole but at the world as the sum total of its individual parts. His point is that everything that has come into being, absolutely all things without exception, has come into being through the Logos. Again, he does not say that they were created, or that God created them, but egeneto, “they came into being.” The emergence of things is not seen from above but from below, in terms of themselves, as their own function. Yet this very quality of what they themselves do, their coming into being, is relativized. It is not their own. They have come into being not through themselves but through the Logos. Finally, the second and negative part of the saying underlines and sharpens it in a way that does not happen in the other New Testament sayings. Nothing, not one single thing, ne unum quidem, none of the many things that are (as the perfect gegonen is to be understood) came into being without the Logos, independently of him, or apart from him.
Supported by the establishment of these nuances, we obviously cannot be content with what we have said generally by way of understanding the thought. We must go on to ask in what further sense the Evangelist believed he had to say precisely this at this point. We might find many more or less true things stated in the verse. Thus Augustine25 took occasion to warn his listeners against the Manichean doctrine of an independent origin of evil, which seems tempting in view of the existences of flies and fleas. No, he cries, all things from angels to worms were created by the Word. We suffer evil, among other things from such insects, because we have offended God. According to Pfleiderer and Grill26 the Evangelist finds himself here in conflict with the Gnostic doctrine of aeons and archons. Of all such interpretations one might say that although the verse might have such meanings they are strangely remote from the context. Schlatter’s exposition is that with the Word that was with God we are given all that we need in relation to the world, for the Word is the power that made the world.27 The passage does contain this thought too, but it does not bring us any closer to its specific meaning. Nearer to the actual statement is the insight of Calvin that John, having taught the deity of the Word in vv. 1–2, now wants to show how the Word is at once at work in and with creation, how, emerging from its inconceivable being in God, it may be known in its works.28 Those are all looking in the same direction who think they see the point of the prologue in the anticlimax: The Word with God, the Word and the world, the Word among men, the Word itself flesh. That this anticlimax is present, and that here we are on the second highest rung of the ladder, we obviously cannot dispute. I should say that this anticlimax forms the framework of consideration, and that descending this ladder, with the valuable insights that it yields, undoubtedly forms the general purpose of the prologue. What seems to be arguable to me, however, is that the purpose of the prologue is exhausted by the descent of this ladder from rung to rung. We recall what we said about its practical purpose. The nuances that we have established in v. 3—the sharpening of the thought of ta panta di’ autou by the negative repetition, the climax with the individual panta and oude hen, egeneto instead of