Still Bugged by Semantic Range and Translations

You blind guides! You strain out a tiny bug, but swallow a truck-sized beast!
Matthew 23:24

The story so far …

I wrote a post (prompted by a BBC article on puns) noting that Jesus' saying about straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel in Matt 23:24 works better in Aramaic than Greek. The inference being that the saying originated in Aramaic, and it was not invented by the Greek Authors of the Gospels after the event.

The key words here are

English    Aramaic    Greek
Gnat         Galma         Konopa (κώνωπα)
Camel      Gamla         Kamelon (κάμηλον)

(PS I have yet to find the Aramaic spelling for galma/gamla)

As many people have observed before me, the Aramaic couplet galma/gamla makes a better sounding pun than the Greek couplet konops/kamelos.

Not so, according to a challenger who visited my blog. The Aramaic word for “gnat” isn’t “galma’, it’s “baqa” (בקא ).

Yes, but, I responded, “galma” is a legitimate Aramaic word meaning vermin, louse or bugs in grain, (according to the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon) and some lexicons extend its semantic range to “gnat”.

However, what if the Aramaic galma of Jesus’ time did not mean gnat?

The answer to this is could be found in a sober consideration of semantic range. The late Leon Morris, New Testament Scholar and Principal of Ridley College in Melbourne, noted that we tend to perceive words as having a precise point of meaning, such that they can only mean one thing and not another. In reality, they cover a semantic range and its rare to find a word in one language that has exactly the same semantic range in another. Translations, then, might never convey the whole meaning in a text with all its word-plays and associations. However, they can (or they ought to be) be fairly accurate approximations, which may be the best way to understand our translations of the Bible.

In researching this, I also emailed Johan Ferreira of Crossway College in Brisbane. He wrote back to say that he was not aware of such an Aramaic word (galma). He then wrote something that has been bugging me ever since (if you’d excuse the pun) by stating that the Greek text (the original) of Matthew was the inspired version on which we base our English translations.

Whether you believe or not in some Divine impulse behind the writing of the Bible, this observation  is illuminating.

Though I don’t have all the intelligence to confirm it, it is possible that the Aramaic galma does not refer directly to gnat; or, if it does, it’s a bit of a stretch. However, it does appear reasonable that the Aramaic galma intersects the semantic range of the Greek konopa, which is properly translated as gnat. As Johan Ferreira pointed out, our English translations are based on the Greek, not the reconstructed Aramaic, hence the English gnat. Further, the Greek couplet konopa/kamelon does its best to preserve the pun, but it gets lost in the translation from Greek to English. Hence, my rendering at the head of this post.

So, I’ll grant my challenger the benefit of the doubt on galma, but the consideration of semantic range seems to bring us back to the same point regardless – Jesus’ pun still sounds better in Aramaic than Greek, and our English translations have still not obscured his message.

Finally, you may be wondering why I have been laboring over this issue. The principal reason is to counter the skeptics who believe that the Bible’s “translations of translations” have conspired to obscure its message. They haven’t. The reason they haven’t is that we have access to the Aramaic and Greek (and Hebrew). This is important because if we find errors, or slips, or inaccuracies, we have the wherewithal to correct them.

From my understanding, I can see that our English translations are not perfect (the bug-a-bear semantic range precludes the possibility of there being a "correct" translation) but they are a long, long way from being utterly corrupted and untrustworthy. Indeed, a considered approach to the language of scripture and the process of translation brings us closer, not further away, from its source.

The Man Who Lived

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

Philippians 2:9

The worst way to get yourself to live forever, according to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, is to try and live forever. Which is ironic, given that trying to live forever has been the abiding preoccupation of humanity in most of recorded history.

Today is Resurrection Sunday; the culmination of Easter Week and a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It’s a celebration of one who has succeeded where no-one else has; in conquering death, the last enemy. However, how he did it, and what it means are things that are probably completely foreign to us.

It is remarkable that Jesus was not actually preoccupied with living forever, or preserving his own life, or making a name for himself. The way he chose was not immortality, but mortality, and he sealed it by getting himself killed. Not a good strategy, you’d think.

Christ humbled himself, and God raised him up. Its counter to our instincts. If it were up to us, we would reverse the roles by raising ourselves up so that we can look down on God. We are the ones who want to make a mark, who want to be remembered, and who want to make a name for ourselves. We want to go to heaven when we die. But, where we would fill ourselves with these things, Christ emptied himself.

So should we, says Paul.

Paul was onto something here. To him, and to the rest of the Christian community, Christ didn’t simply lay down a template from which you could construct your own immortality. Christ demonstrated what life is in the present tense. His way is not simply a program for living forever in some future eventuality – a kind of religious cosmic life assurance policy in which you deposit now and withdraw later. It is illumination for living in the present.

Because Christ humbled himself, says Paul, so should we now, in our present circumstances. Christ is the example that inspires us to consider others to be more valued than ourselves - a sure recipe for any successful human community. If we live this way now, heaven will come to us. Indeed, it will be with us already.

It’s so against our nature, and so against all logic. It’s irrational. It cannot be done without faith. Without faith, we would struggle for our own survival. We would be like the drowning man who flails at his rescuer, or the patient who grabs the surgeon’s knife at the critical cut. We would be like the man who listed his virtues as he tried to bargain his way out of death. That’s me – the one who cannot bring himself to trust his redeemer. Theologically, that's Adam, the one who brought death into the world.

If that’s you, don’t panic. Know that just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so He will also raise you.

For he who becomes like the Heavenly One has heaven within himself
(Theophylact of Bulgaria, circa 1050 to 1108, commenting on Matthew 19:29, in his Explanation of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Matthew)

The God Who Died

… Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

John 19:30

Reading the account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution today in John’s Gospel (John 18 and 19) at our Good Friday service, one phrase kept nagging at sub-conscious - could have. There are so many could haves in this story, each presenting its own escape-hatch to an increasingly desperate situation, I have to wonder why it ended as painfully as it did.

Jesus could have crossed over the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives (John 18:1) and kept walking. He could have continued his campaign from the desert, returning to challenge the authorities in Jerusalem after capitalizing on his popularity to negotiate his position on the back of a sizeable army.

Jesus could have dodged Judas and his posse, and slipped away into the night, instead of belligerently presenting himself to them (John 18:5).

Jesus could have bossed them with his claim to divinity (the phrase “I am he” in John 18:5 and 8 echoes the name of God in Exodus 3:14)

Jesus could have backed up Peter’s initiative in beating off the posse with swords (John 18:10). There would have been a scuffle, some injuries and even some deaths, but he and the civic leaders could have come to an accommodation later on, as political leaders are wont to do.

The disciple who was known to the high priest (John 18:15) could have lobbied behind the scenes for Jesus' release, or even a more lenient sentence. (This disciple is probably the primary author of the Gospel and, if it was John, he would have been barely out of his 'teens at the time, though that’s not an excuse for inaction.)

Peter could have stood up in Jesus’ defense (John 18:15-17 and 25-27), but in a now-famous act of cowardice, disowned him.

Annas and Caiaphas could have been less defensive about the perceived threat from the Galilean preacher before them (John 18:19-24). However, Jesus was spearheading a counter-temple movement in their own constituency, and they knew the stakes. They could have been more concerned with the substance of the controversy at hand than the consequences on their own religion and their positions in it.

Pilate could have been equivocated less (John 18:31, 19:6). He was in an impossible position, caught in the vice between Rome’s imperative to maintain civil order, and the Jews who had been enraged at the insult Jesus had paid to their Temple. He knew that the crowd wanted blood, not justice, but he capitulated at the prospect of (politically inexcusable) bloody riots on his watch.

Incidentally, John’s Gospel walks us through Pilate’s calculations in some detail. It’s as if John is looking for some mitigating circumstances in the Governor’s actions. Even so, despite the all the best incremental judgments, it still ends in disaster, which I find to be a shrewd comment on the effectiveness of our good intentions.

The Chief Priests could have expressed a higher allegiance than to Ceasar (John 19:15). Weren’t they the servants of the Most High? Could they have delayed proceedings until a more thorough investigation had been carried out into the truth of the matter? The rich irony here is that though they were professing allegiance to Ceasar, it wasn’t Ceasar (strictly speaking, Ceasar’s representative) who was agitating for Jesus’ death. They had to manipulate Ceasar into doing what they wanted. This appears to me to be a telling parallel on what they hoped to achieve through their activities in the Temple, except that the One being subject to their manipulations was much, much higher than Ceasar.

The soldiers could have insisted on clearer orders (John 19:16). John’s Gospel records no explicit instruction from Pilate to crucify Jesus and, as the mob had already pointed out, no-one else had the authority to give the order. It seems to have been an implied understanding, but no-one was willing to sign it off. The soldiers would have been within their rights to question it.

Jesus' own family could have launched a last-ditch attempt to rescue Jesus from the cross (John 19:25). It might have been a suicidal mission against the professional soldiers who ensured that the crucified one would end up very dead indeed. However, their efforts might have galvanized the many Jews and residents in Jerusalem who were sympathetic to Jesus’ cause (see Luke 23:27) to come to his aid.

Finally, Jesus, the Word of God who had brought the cosmos into being, could have called on the mighty armies of heaven to get him down, but he didn’t.

Everything that is good and noble in the human spirit simply crumbled in the events that led to Jesus' death. It was as if all that we hold good was swept away in a tsunami of failure and weakness. We were confronted with the worst of what we are.

It's tempting to distance ourselves from this by blaming others. Who was responsible for Jesus' death? Not us, surely?

Medieval antisemitism held that the Jews were responsible, thus justifying the various pogroms in European history. Many have recoiled in recent times from this position (rightly so), but ignoring the part of "the Jews" in this story would be to write their very human faces out of the script. My own understanding is that if we view "the Jews" as categorically representative of the whole of humanity (think of their function in the office of the High Priesthood, or the sense of their “pure” decadency from the first son of God, Adam), then they represent us. In other words, they did exactly what we would do in the same circumstances. Their culpability - their sinfulness - is ours.

However, the allocating of human culpability is not entirely satisfactory in the theological context of John’s Gospel. Surely the Creator and Sustainer of all things could have set things on a different path? Surely He is not as vulnerable to the foibles of human nature and circumstance as we might think? There is another profound truth about Good Friday – the One who was ultimately responsible was the One who was crucified. He ordained it because that’s how He wanted it to be.

Of all the characters in this story, He could have had it differently, but He became the God who died.

(For further reading on the historical circumstances of Good Friday, and the social, political and religious pressures on the people involved, see http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/augustweb-only/42.0b.html?order=&start=1)

Not Above Correction

You blind guides! You strain out a tiny bug, but swallow a truck-sized beast!
Matthew 23:24

Contrary to popular belief, Christianity does not give its followers the right to stick to their heart-felt preconceptions and prejudices, regardless of the observable evidence. The fundamental truth that there is a fundamental truth forces us to examine and align what we internally believe against an external, transcendent reality.

What this means, in practical terms, is that Christians cannot hold themselves above correction. We cannot simply fall back on our instincts and say “it’s not true because it doesn’t feel true”, even for our most intimate, core beliefs. That there is a light mandates us to push ourselves, sometimes kicking and screaming, into it. And, when we’re wrong, we’d better man up and say so. (What else is faith and repentance?)

So, with this in mind, I moderated a recent challenge to my last post about the Puns of Jesus, in particular the legitimacy of the Aramaic word, “galma” and its English translation, “gnat” (as quoted in Matthew 23:24). I must also confess to doing this partly out of a gratified vanity that someone had actually read my piece and had gone to the effort of posting a response. I digress, but it’s true.

My challenger had searched for “galma” but could not find it in the lexicons. Instead, a search for the Greek term “konops” (gnat), came up as בקא “bakae”. The wider inference (if I read his post rightly) is that much of Christianity and Christian apologetics is nothing more than the blind leading the blind (if I may borrow a phrase from the passage of Matthew’s Gospel under consideration).

Being entirely dependent on the one and only source in my blog, and finding my inferences being potentially founded on sand, I determined to find out more, and to publish whatever I discovered, even if it meant being damned, to boot. (Oh dear, Wellington’s boot prompts yet another pun - I can’t seem to avoid them on this topic).

There are, as a quick Google search will demonstrate, a multiplicity of blogs, sites, theological dictionaries, and other theologizings on the (supposed) Aramaic word-play on “gnat” and “camel” in Jesus’ now famous sound-bite. Obviously, I was a relative latecomer to this particular homage. However, truth is not a democracy, and something doesn’t become true just because a large number of people believe it. (Popular Atheism springs to mind, but I digress again.) Was this a myth that had been propagated throughout the Christian community to uphold an untruth about the sources and reliability of the Gospels? There is certainly enough motivation to sustain it, but is there a more solid foundation in an observable, external reality?

To be fair to my challenger, one on-line English-Aramaic Lexicon returns “baqa” for “gnat”. Further, it is difficult to find dictionary sources (as opposed to derivative blogs and books) for the Aramaic word “galma”. “Gamla” (camel), by contrast enjoys much attestation, and I can claim some familiarity with it, having spent a few days many years ago helping to dig up the city of the same name in the Golan Heights. The city, incidentally, gets its name from the camel-back shaped hill that it sits on, which is something I can confidently confirm, having seen it with my own eyes.

At this point, my inferences appear to be quite shaky, and if I am to be found wanting, I’d be better off falling on my own sword than someone else’s. However, my (admittedly cursory) exploration of the subject is not concluded yet.

One of the problems, I found, is that the Anglicisation of the Aramaic word for “gnat” is variously spelled “galma”, “kalma” or “qalma”. Searches for the two latter variants yield a multitude of translations, including “gnat”, “louse” or “vermin”. Entries for “louse” and “vermin” in the on-line English-Aramaic Lexicon yield “galma” (or “kalma” or “qalma”) as quoted in our English translations , and extend the semantic range to “bugs in grain”.

Another problem, which I must defer to scholars more knowledgeable than me, is that forms of Aramaic have survived until recent times. A lexicon of the dialect that survived until 1988, “TheNeo-Aramaic Dialect of Barwar” records “baqa” as “gnat” and “qalma” as “louse”. The linguistic puzzle here is that I don’t know if the modern semantic range of “qalma” (meaning “louse”) reflects the Aramaic of Jesus’ time, some 19 centuries prior, or if it had changed over time.

However the etymology works, the imagery of Jesus’ saying remains intact; you strain out tiny bugs, but swallow truck-sized beasts of burden. (Incidentally, both are "unclean" and therefore forbidden for consumption, even inadvertently.) The only concern, then, is whether the traditional rendering of “galma” as “gnat” should be something else, say “louse” or “vermin” or “tiny bug”. None of these sound as good in English, however, and the Aramaic pun fades in translation.

Translation, I believe, is a process of compromises, though I hesitate to go as far as Professor Robert Alter (a stellar scholar of Old Testament Hebrew) who holds that all translation is blasphemy. We might not capture all the associations and word-plays from the now-extinct languages of the Bible but, surely, the search for their meanings is not entirely hopeless.

The second objection of my correspondent is somewhat beyond the scope of my original blog; do Christians foster and promote untruths in order to support their beliefs? As I noted at the start, we have a mandate not to but, that’s no guarantee of success. As a Christian, I have the freedom to own my blindness because the light is there whether I see it or not. The question remains though; am I blind because my eyes are faulty, or is it because there is nothing to see? The answer to that question would take far more than this brief survey of gnats and camels allows.

The Puns of Jesus

A frequent objection to the Christian Gospel is the translation of the Bible, promulgated by some Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah’s witnesses and Dan Brown sympathizers. 

Essentially, the objection runs along the lines of “the Bible has been translated from translations of translations to such an extent that its original message is barely recognizable”. It’s an argument that is most often found amongst those who object to the claims of the orthodox Christian churches about the full deity of Jesus Christ. According to the objectors, the first Christians never understood Jesus to be fully and wholly God, and the evidence presented by the Bible has been corrupted. Orthodox churches have therefore misunderstood and misrepresented Jesus' message.

It’s an urban myth, and it is usually extrapolated well beyond mere translation to comprehensibility, but the issue is a serious one as all serious translators know.

Whilst not offering a comprehensive or conclusive response, I chanced upon one aspect of the teachings of Jesus that support the authenticity of the accounts that have survived long enough to get included in our modern New Testament – the Puns of Jesus.

Puns are plays on how words sound. We use them to make a phrase or statement more memorable, or even to package two meanings into the same statement, sometimes for amusement, sometimes to delight in the irony, and sometimes to provoke thought. Because they play off the sound of the words, they are notoriously difficult to translate. It’s not that the individual words are difficult to translate; puns use common words that are easily recognized. The difficulty is in adequately conveying the vocalization.

This is exactly what’s going on in Matthew 23:23-24 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

We all know what Jesus means; he’s condemning the religious leaders for getting obsessed with little things, while ignoring the big things. It’s about the comparison of little things and big things.

But, why would Jesus compare a gnat and a camel? Why this particular pairing of a little thing and a big thing. Why not, say, "seed" and "tree", "dove" and "eagle", "frog" and "whale"?  

If we were to write this in a modern(ish) English pun, we might say “You strain out a mote and swallow a mount”. The vocalization of “mote” and “mount” give us the pun we’re looking for, and they vividly convey the meaning of the phrase.

Of course, Jesus didn’t speak English. As a language it had not yet come into existence, so our version would be a clear indicator that we were projecting a foreign, later idiom onto the teachings of Jesus. In other words, we would be putting words into Jesus’ mouth, thus vindicating the critics’ accusations.

The interesting point here is that Jesus’ quip about the gnat and the camel does not work fluently as a pun in Greek, which is the language that the Gospel-writers wrote in. The Greek words for gnat and are konopa and kamelon, respectively (see http://interlinearbible.org/matthew/23-24.htm).

Though the Gospels were written in Greek, Jesus spoke in Aramaic. The Gospel-writers therefore had to translate his sayings from Aramaic to Greek. Fortunately for them, konopa and kamelon are fairly close, but they would have known that the phrase would have sounded much better in Aramaic. The words for gnat and camel in Aramaic are galma and gamla respectively, thus allowing the formation of a memorable pun; you strain out a galma and swallow a gamla!

Several more examples of Aramaic puns are described in my chance-discovery ebook, the Methods and Message of Jesus of Nazareth, by Robert H Stein, including kepha in Matt 16:18 and ruha in John 3:8 .

In other words, what we see in the Greek translation is a serious effort to capture the Aramaic puns of Jesus. This places the source material in the Aramaic, not the Greek, which is what you’d expect if the Greek were attempting to reliably capture the meaning and vocalization of Jesus’ original Aramaic sayings. Its not what you’d expect from a bunch of Greek scribes attempting to put their sayings into the mouth of Jesus.

The reliability of the New Testament in conveying the teachings of Jesus and the first Christians rests upon much more than this cursory exploration of Aramaic puns. However, it does add to the case for the defence against the objections of the prosecution.

Guns and Smallpox

The widespread reaction among my friends to news this morning of yet another mass shooting in Newton, Conneticut, USA is one of utter horror followed by “not again”.

One of my friends, Ralph, commented on FB

How many more mass shootings, how many more heartbreaks, will it take for US society & leaders to end wide access to such lethal guns?

To which I replied

You didn't need to qualify your description of "guns" with "lethal". Guns are designed to kill. That's what they do. They have no other purpose. Being "lethal" is what occupies the totality of being a gun. That's why responsible governments strictly control their availability and use. Or, they ought to.

But, you know that already.

No doubt, this killing will prompt much hand-wringing in the US over gun control. I wish all the best to those campaigning to increase it. However, they are up against a number of powerful adversaries, including the NRA. The right to carry arms is prescribed in the US constitution, though it was written in a time when village militias needed to defend themselves against attack by the Redcoats. Then, there’s the fragmentation between Federal and State government, so before you say “the government has to do something”, you have to say which government.

There's also a profoundly visceral side to this, which, I am sure, the NRA and it’s allies play to the full. It’s to do with the process of disarmament and a heightened sense of self-preservation. Put simply, it says that if the US implements a process of disarmament, then all the good guys will hand their weapons in first, leaving the bad guys with all the guns. How then do you defend yourself from the bad guys? By getting a gun, of course. By the way, it’s your constitutional right, there’s a chain store down the block, and you’re supporting American Industry. Like all good temptations, there are a thousand (apparently) good reasons not to refuse.

It strikes me that the situation is rather like an infection. Once it has taken hold, it’s incredibly difficult to dislodge. Just like eradicating individual smallpox viruses, you have to remove or adequately control every gun in every State. Allow just one back in, and it will bring ten more with it. Before you know it, you'll have an escalation and you'll be back to where you are now.

I am not irreconcilably opposed to guns. I know that people kill people, not guns. I also know that farmers need guns to kill animals. But we don't currently live in an era in which our villages can be attacked by King George III's stooges, and there's a quantum of difference between the damage a madman can do with a kitchen knife and a semi-automatic rifle. However, it never ceases to shock me that, in the US, my neighbor has the right to carry apparatus that is perfectly designed to kill me, or 20 kids at an elementary school, if he so chooses.

It will take a massive effort to pacify the gun-controlling population of the US. But, if we can eradicate smallpox, surely we can improve gun control.

John's Alternative Christmas Story

The Odd Gospel

Though there are four Gospels in our Bibles (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), only two (Matthew and Luke) cover the birth of Jesus. If you go to a Christmas church service this year and hear some Bible readings, they would almost certainly be from Matthew and Luke.

So, what of the other two Gospels? Mark starts his narrative in Jesus’ adult life, and John is so totally left-field, he seems to be starting from an entirely different planet. In fact, John doesn’t start with the birth of Jesus; he starts with the Creation of the universe (the least you could say about John is that he doesn’t lack ambition).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. John 1:1-3.

Deliberately invoking the language and imagery of Genesis 1, in which God says and it is done, John puts the Universe and its Creator in order. He emphasizes the role of the “Word” in this creation, and then identifies this mysterious, eternal “Word” as Jesus, saying “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us” (John 1:14). 

It all started with a baby (or did it?)

How does this relate to the Christmas story? The way John sees it, God first creates the universe and He then enters it “in the flesh” in the body of Jesus Christ. The circumstances of His arrival are chronicled in Matthew and Luke; the Creator arrives as a small, vulnerable baby, just like any human being, into a tribe that has had a special, but rather stormy relationship with God. That’s why John can write “He came to that which was his own…" (John 1:11).

Why did God enter into His creation “in the flesh”? John’s answer is so that we can see Him in the flesh. John puts it this way “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18).

The puzzling thing here is that John would have known several Old Testament accounts of people seeing God (Isaiah 6:1-6 etc.). However, in none of these accounts do we get the sense of seeing someone in the same way that you see someone you are living with. This, I think, is what John’s Gospel is trying to say. Previously, we could see the image of God in His Creation, or we could imagine what God is like in the same way that you'd imagine what a person was like from the shadow he would cast on the ground in front of you. But, it wasn’t until God lived for a while among us in the flesh that we truly got to know Him. No longer did we have to imagine God from special writings, or infer Him from his actions in history, we could get so intimate with Him, we could even smell His body odor. That’s quite a confronting thought for those who only see God as a kind of superlative, distant, royal celebrity, but that’s how John wants us to see it.

Look at me

As you might have gathered by now, I’m quite a fan of John’s Gospel, and I spend quite a lot of time thinking about it. Going over it again in recent times, however, I noticed yet another puzzling aspect of John’s prologue; the apparent intrusion of John the Baptist.

There’s a scene from The Simpsons in which Maggie, the youngest, arrives and Homer, Marge and Lisa are entranced by the new addition to their family. Frustrated by his family’s single-minded devotion to a rival sibling, Bart jumps up and down shouting “Look at me! Look at me!”. That’s what I thought of John the Baptist’s intrusion into the scene in John's Gospel. He seemed to be there to divert attention from the main event.

You could even write the Baptist out of the script, and it would still make sense. The following is an abridged version, and if I read it out in Church, I wonder how many people would spot the fact that something is missing.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

What is missing are the two references to John the Baptist in John 1:6-9 and John 1:15. My abridged version above makes sense in terms of the Creator and His entering into the world, but what it lacks is a specific witness who truly "gets" it. This, I believe, is John’s crucial role and that is why he is essential to the story. In other words, what is the point of being “seen” if there is no-one to “see”.

Setting the pattern

The Baptist’s role as a witness is well worth exploring. As the first witness in John’s Gospel, he is representative of all subsequent witnesses, including us.

• John was “sent” from God (John 1:6). The Greek word for “sent” is “apostelo”, from which we get our term “apostle”. So, John the Baptist is the first “Apostle” on record, but he gets his head cut off long before the band of twelve start to organize themselves into a recognizable Church. The term, then, doesn’t refer to a rank in an organization, but to a calling. Everyone who witnesses Christ is an “apostle” in the sense that their witness is “sent” from God. Three centuries later, the authors of the Creeds would use this idea to describe the whole church as “apostolic” to capture this sense of a shared calling among all believers
• John’s prerogative as a witness was to testify (John 1:7). His role wasn’t merely to passively “see” but to communicate what he had seen. As is the pattern for all Christian witness, John’s testimony involved both words and actions.
• The point of the testimony is to bring “all men” to faith (John 1:7). There’s no discrimination here between those who are in God’s “special” tribe, and those outside.
• John, himself, was not the light, but he was there to bear witness to the light (John 1:8).

If only we would allow these last words to sink in. When we bring “all men” to faith, we are not bringing them to faith in ourselves. Rather, we should seek to bring them to faith in the “true light that gives light to every man”, Jesus Christ. 

So much of what we think is Christian witness is actually concerned with convincing people that we are the good guys. I’m all in favor of Christians establishing a credible witness, and choosing the right, but ultimately, we’re not here to vindicate ourselves. If we follow the Baptist’s lead in pointing people to the true light, then we have freedom to acknowledge and engage our sins and shortcomings, as he did. In other words, we can do our best, but it will not be enough to save. Only God, in Christ, can do that, and a faithful witness, such as the Baptist’s will not allow us to forget it.

Not the true light

It is profoundly dangerous to allow ourselves to be seduced by the notion that we are the light. This mentality is manifest in the fundamentalist religious movements that preach domination by a strongly hierarchical and theocratic organization. They emphasize obedience to themselves, regardless of their actual competence or knowledge. It’s usually done by a bait-and-switch – the bait being some exclusive claim to God, and the switch being a shift in the believer’s allegiance to the (alleged) physical representation of God on earth, which, lo and behold, is none other than the incumbent leadership. The leaders imagine themselves to be the true light by some special revelation, and the truth becomes pliable in their hands. One tell-tale sign is a habit of continually revising history to vindicate the movement's current leaders.

John’s Gospel openly rebukes such a mentality in John 1:15; 

John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”

Because we are modernists, we like to think that the latest is the greatest. However, the convention in John’s time was exactly the reverse; if someone preceded you, they were greater than you - the oldest was the greatest. This is reasoning that the Baptist uses; Christ was there first, so he must be greater than me. If Christ is greater than all of us, including the First Apostle, then we are all answerable to Him as the ultimate authority, including the highest Bishops, Prophets, Popes, Rabbis, Mullahs and Gurus in our respective religions. Applied simply, it means that anything that does not recognize Christ as the ultimate authority to whom we are all answerable, is not a Christian witness. 

Of course, there are plenty of religious movements that claim allegiance to Christ, but their Christ is more fantasy than flesh. John’s Gospel is insistent about what kind of Christ is the real thing, and the real thing is visible in the fleshy baby in the manger, to human view displayed, as one of my favorite carols puts it.

What the two Johns tell us

So, John the Baptist plays a vital role in the prologue to John’s Gospel. He, like us, is there to witness God in the flesh and to testify about what he has seen. Its a role that's intrinsic to the created order of things. Matthew and Luke record witnesses of Christ’s advent in the stars, in angels, shepherds and Magi, but in John’s Gospel, the Baptist is the first to really “get” it, and he sets the pattern for how we should “get” it, too.