Incarnation Vocabulary

and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us – 1 John 1:2 NASB

Was manifested – The first letter of John doesn’t start like a typical letter of the first century.  There is no standard introduction, no preamble or greeting.  John jumps right into the subject – What did he and the other apostles witness?  What makes John’s declaration so important is that we stand in the same position as the recipients of his letter.  We weren’t there either.  We weren’t on the hillside when Yeshua gave His teaching.  We didn’t see the blind man healed.  We weren’t at the pool of Siloam and we weren’t at the cross.  We didn’t see the empty tomb.  If we are going to know, we will have to rely on the witness of others.  That’s just what John hopes to provide.

We readily understand why this matters to us but why should it be so important to those who lived when John was still alive?  If John is writing to them, they clearly knew each other.  They must have known that John knew Yeshua, so why is all this suddenly so pressing?  The answer might not be what you think.  John isn’t trying to convince these readers about the truth of the incarnation.  He is trying to assure them that what they have already believed to be true is still true.  As we discover from his letter, there was a group of people originally part of the fellowship who now proclaimed a “higher” form of understanding.  These people left the fellowship, claiming that their new knowledge allowed them to behave in ways that were no longer consistent with the established practice of the fellowship.  John hears of this division and writes to the qehillah (assembly) in order to encourage them to stick with what they heard “from the beginning.”

What was this divergent teaching that caused so much concern?  The departing group claimed that they were beyond the ordinary definitions of good and evil.  “They maintained that they had no sin, not in the sense that they had attained moral perfection but in the sense that what might be sin for people at a less mature stage of inner development was no longer sin for the completely ‘spiritual’ man.”[1] In other words, as they moved away from the reality of the real, physically manifested Yeshua, they moved toward a Greek Hellenism that proclaimed it was no longer necessary to live according to the “old ways” of the apostolic fellowship.

Now that we see why John writes, we can understand his use of the Greek verb phaneroo.  The verb means “to make apparent, known, manifest,” but what is even more important is the connection to typical Hebraic understanding of what God makes manifest.  The idea of making manifest is fundamental to the words of the prophets (“and the word of God became in Hosea”) and to Torah.  In fact, Torah is the paradigm case of God making Himself manifest until we come to Yeshua who fills out the rest of the picture.  Yeshua is a continuation of the manifestation of God, this time in flesh and blood rather than in words alone.  That’s why John can exhort his readers to stick with what they heard “from the beginning.”  Yeshua isn’t new revelation.  He is the completion of the revelation.

If we apply John’s point to our contemporary religious environment, we discover a shocking truth.  If John were writing to today’s Christian church, the church would be the ones who claimed they had a superior understanding.  The church would be the ones claiming it was no longer necessary to follow the revelation of the past.  The church would be the ones claiming they were beyond good and evil as defined by Torah.  If we read John’s letter as a part of the Messianic community in the first century, we have to conclude that our contemporary version of Christian faith is the worldview that John opposes, not the one he supports.  We have been reading his letter upside-down.  He isn’t writing to us as Christians.  He is writing to those who are hanging on to the complete manifestation, not the ones who split the manifestation between Malachi and Matthew.

Topical Index:  manifest, phaneroo, 1 John 1:2, revelation