Third Time’s a Charm

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.  John 1:14  NASB

Became flesh – Suppose for just a moment that John is thoroughly Jewish.  Suppose he is operating in the typical way Jews handled the Tanakh in the first century.  Suppose he’s writing a midrash based on Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8 with a bit of Enoch on the side.  Now try reading this quintessential “Christian” text as Jewish.  Oh, first you need a little more context:

He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him, and yet the world did not know Him.  He came to His own, and His own people did not accept Him.  But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.

Okay.  Before you go further, consider Boyarin’s analysis:

“The second attempt of Wisdom to enter the world comprised the giving of the Torah to Israel and the failure of that instrument as a means of bringing the Logos into the world, because Israel did not understand . . .”[1]

“Israel, which had the Torah, did not accept Wisdom; but some select Israelites such as Abraham, and even Gentiles, did.  They are called ‘children of God.’  The incarnation, therefore, is shown by the Evangelist to be indispensable to save the many, both of Israel and of the Nations.”[2]

“The myth of Wisdom elaborated in verses 9-13 relates the partial failure of the Word in the world.  Although the Word is the creator of all, as we have learned in verse 3, all was not capable of receiving him.  Indeed, his own people did not receive him when he came in the form of the Torah.  In response to this failure, however, this time Wisdom did not ascend once more into the heavens and abandon the earth and its people.  Instead, God performed the extraordinary act of incarnating the Logos in flesh and blood, coming into the world as an avatar and teacher of the Word, not the words.  Since the goal of the Logos was to make it possible for those who believed in his name to become, not flesh and blood, but children of God, he who was properly the only child of God, the monogenetos, became flesh among us.”[3]

Assume that Boyarin’s view is correct.  Since John sees Yeshua as the agent of the Holy One, the representation of Wisdom, the female gender of Proverbs 8 must be changed to the male gender for this instantiation of Wisdom.  Other than that gender change, everything else in this Prologue fits the midrash on Genesis 1.  Wisdom came into the world once before the giving of the Torah.  The world rejected Wisdom so Wisdom withdrew to the heavens.  Then Wisdom tried again at Sinai, but once more was rejected in Israel’s failure to become a holy nation, a royal priesthood.  Finally, miraculously, Wisdom came again, the third time, in the form of a human being, Yeshua, the chosen agent of YHVH.  This is John’s clarification.  It is not incarnational theology.  It’s midrash.  It’s completely Jewish.  And if this is true, then the Christian idea of a second person of a triune God is a non-Jewish reading of a Jewish text, a reading based on a different paradigm, a Greek one, which conveniently altered the Jewish nature of the Gospels.

If John’s Prologue is Jewish, then the idea of the Trinity, the essential theological differentiator between Judaism and Christianity, has taken a fatal blow.  And we’re back to Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God.

Topical Index: Trinity, incarnation, Wisdom, midrash, Logos, Boyarin, John 1:10-14

Today begins Sukkot.  Enjoy.

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 102.

[2] Ibid., p. 103.

[3] Ibid., p. 104.