Salvation-History in the Prologue of John. The Significance of John 1:3/4.

Sauberes Ex. - In De Civitate Dei, St. Augustine reports, with approval, that a Platonist philosopher was once heard to say that the first five verses of John's Gospel were worthy to be written in gold and displayed in the most prominent place in every church.1 To be sure, the entire Prologue of John (vss. 1:1-18) may be the most majestic passage in the New Testament from a purely literary standpoint, and the most exalted from a theological and philosophical standpoint. Not surprisingly, then, it is also one of the most carefully scrutinized, analyzed, and argued passages in the entire Bible, and many will be naturally skeptical that any radically new theses about the Prologue could be made good. The fact is, however, that in more than one respect the usual approaches to the Johannine Prologue have been, probably, entirely misguided. No doubt the best example of this is the notorious effort of scholars to locate the origin of the Logos-concept which dominates the Prologue. Their attempts to trace this concept to some pre-Johannine milieu such as the dabar and hochma traditions of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, or wisdom speculations of later Jewish literature, or Greek philosophical strains, or Gnosticism, and the like, are utterly misplaced and in the end serve only to dilute and confuse the original meaning and power of John's Logos. (Vorwort). ISBN 9004086927