It is of yet more importance that the conception of the Logos in Philo
and in the Fourth Gospel presents great and fundamental differences.
I do not feel compelled to number among these that particular difference
which is at once the most obvious and the most comprehensive. It is of
course true that the Evangelist identifies the Logos with the person of
Jesus Christ, whereas it is doubtful how far the Philonian Logos is to
be regarded as in any sense personal. We always need to remember that
the whole category of personality was wanting at the time when Philo
wrote. The question whether such a conception as that of the Logos is
personal, naturally forces itself upon us; we have a name for it, and we
are accustomed to think of things as either personal or impersonal.
Philo, on the contrary, had neither the name nor the idea corresponding
to the name. Hence we are not surprised to find his language
fluctuating, to find him sometimes write as though the Logos were
personal, and sometimes as though it were not. Where there is no clearly
drawn boundary line between two ideas, it is easy to pass from one to
the other without being aware of it.
With St. John the conditions are different. In any case it was he who
took the decisive step of identifying the Divine Word with the person of
Christ. Having once done this, his language necessarily became fixed;
the ambiguities which attached to Philo’s teaching were for him so far
at an end. The personal element in the Johannean conception belongs not
to the idea of the Logos but to the historical Christ; the originality
of the Evangelist consists in uniting the Christ of history with the
idea of the Logos, but whether that idea were personal or impersonal as
it came to him was of secondary importance.
The divergence is really more significant when we observe that the Logos
idea itself has a different content. The central point in Philo’s
conception is the philosophic idea of the Divine reason; the centre of
St. John’s is the religious idea of the Divine word, Divine utterance,
creative, energizing, revealing. If we for a moment cease to think of
the hypostatic and mediating aspect of the Word and dwell rather on the
attributes and functions associated with it, we find ourselves naturally
deserting Philo and going back to the Old Testament. When we glance over
the string of passages quoted above, we see in them a truer counterpart
to the real meaning of the Prologue. Ps. xxxiii. 6, with 2 Esdras vi.
43; Ps. cxlvii. 15, 18; Wisd. ix. 1, bring out the creative activity of
the Word; [Num. xi. 23; Hos. vi. 5]; Isa. xl. 8; lv. 10, 11; Wisd.
xviii. 15, 16, bring out the broad providential, governing and
energizing activity; Ps. cvii. 20; Wisd. xvi. 12, emphasize the
redemptive activity in the narrower sense. All these ideas really
underlie the Prologue, though they do not all receive equally explicit
expression. The dominant thought of the Prologue is the thought of
creation, revelation and redemption wrought by ‘the living God’—that old
comprehensive genuinely Hebraic name—but wrought by Him through His Son,
who is also His Word.
The phrase that has just been used brings us round to another aspect of
the Prologue, which also takes us away from Philo and back to the Old
Testament, or to sources still more immediately Christian. If there is
any truth in the contention that the doctrine of the Prologue governs
the rest of the Gospel, it must be not directly as a doctrine of the
Logos, but rather (as has been pointed out especially by Grill and H. J.
Holtzmann) indirectly through those two great constituent conceptions of
Life and Light which together make up, and are embraced under, the
doctrine of the Logos. The antecedents of these two conceptions are to
be sought far more in the Old Testament, and on the direct line of
Christian development, than in any language of Philo’s. As has just been
said, ‘the living God’ is not only a strictly Hebraic and Old Testament
idea, but one of the most fundamental of all the ideas of which the
Hebrew mind and the Old Testament have been the vehicles. The Prologue
to the Fourth Gospel is essentially based upon this idea, and works it
out in a form that is also determined by the Old Testament. The
significant combination of Life and Light, which is so characteristic of
the Prologue and which so runs through the Gospel, can hardly have any
other ultimate source than Ps. xxxvi. 9: ‘With thee is the fountain of
life; in thy light shall we see light,’ the first half of which has an
important parallel in Jer. ii. 13, ‘my people have committed two evils;
they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out
cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.’ There is of course
the difference that what in the Old Testament is ascribed directly to
Jehovah, in the Gospel is ascribed to the Logos. That is part of the
Evangelist’s method, which we may assume to be at work all through. But
not only does the combination of Life and Light belong essentially to
the Old Testament and not to Philo, but each of these ideas taken
separately has without doubt an Old Testament and not a Philonic basis.
It is true enough that Philo makes use of metaphors derived from ‘Life’
and ‘Light,’ and applies them to the Logos, as he is indeed profuse in
metaphors of this character; they are part of his literary embroidery.
It is also quite possible that the metaphors were in the first instance
suggested to him by the same Old Testament passages. But the use in the
Fourth Gospel is far deeper and more pregnant with meaning. It is also
rightly urged that the use in the Gospel, more particularly of the
conception of Life, is really incompatible with Philo’s system. The
teaching of Philo is at bottom dualistic; for him matter is evil, and
his object is to remove God from contact with it. In St. John there is
no dualism. The writer conceives of matter as penetrated with the
divine. Alike God and the Word of God work downwards and outwards,
through spirit to the material envelope and vesture of spirit. There is
no inconsistency between the spiritual and the material quickening, both
of which are taught distinctly in the Gospel. ‘As the Father raiseth the
death and quickeneth them, even so the Son also quickeneth whom he will’
(John v. 21); ‘As the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to
the Son also to have life in himself’ (ver. 26). Both Father and Son are
a principle of life which takes possession at once of soul and body,
which imparts alike ethical and spiritual vitality to the disciple of
Christ on earth, and that eternal life which is not something distinct
from this but really the continuation of it in the world to come. No one
can fail to see the powerful comprehensiveness of this idea, which
incorporates and assimilates with ease such Jewish notions as that of
the resurrection of the body, where Philo’s dualism makes a break and
condemns his system either to superficiality or inconsequence.
Another point that would be of importance if the facts were really as is
often alleged, is the use of the term Paraclete. Philo, like St. John,
has this term; and if it were true that with him too it is a designation
of, or directly in connection with, the Logos, that would greatly
strengthen the case for the view that St. John was really borrowing from
him. But the doubts on this head, first raised by Heinze, and more
recently enforced by Dr. Drummond and Dr. Grill, appear to be perfectly
valid[59]. It is not the Logos that is called Paraclete, but the
Cosmos[60].
We observe that the Cosmos, which is compared to the high priest’s
vestments, is also described as ‘son (of God).’ This is very contrary to
the usage of the Evangelist, for whom the Cosmos (in the sense in which
he uses the word) is far more the enemy of God than His son.
All these points together make up a wide divergence between Philo’s
doctrine and that of the Fourth Gospel. They go far to justify Harnack’s
epigrammatic saying that ‘even the Logos has little more in common with
that of Philo than the name, and its mention at the beginning of the
book is a mystery, not the solution of one’ (_History of Dogma_, i. 97).
We may discount the epigram a little, as one has to discount all
epigrams; but when we have done this, there remains in it a large and
substantial truth.
iv. Possible avenues of connexion.
It does not follow that I would deny all connexion between the Philonian
Logos and St. John’s. My doubt is whether this connexion can have been
literary. I find it difficult to picture to myself the Evangelist
sitting down to master the diffuse tomes of Philo. Where is the interest
that would impel him to do this? Philo is a student and a philosopher.
He is a philosopher who operates with a sacred text, and therefore has
unlimited opportunity for applying and expounding his philosophy. But
the Evangelist is interested in none of his theorems for their own sake.
There is only one thing that he seeks. He wants a formula to express the
cosmical significance of the Person of Christ. When he has got that, he
is satisfied. For the purpose of filling up his formula and working out
its meaning, he goes not to Philo but to the Old Testament. There, and
in his own experience, he finds all the data that he needs.
I believe that there is a connexion between Greek, or Hellenistic,
speculation and the Fourth Gospel. But I can conceive of this best
through the medium of personal intercourse and controversy. How did St.
Paul get his first knowledge of Christianity? Doubtless through his own
vehement attacks upon Christians, which he found so calmly and
steadfastly resisted; or, it may be, through the disputations in the
synagogues and in the law courts, of which he was the witness. We may
well believe that St. John extended his knowledge in the same way.
Partly he would learn from foe, and partly from friend. In a place like
Ephesus he would from time to time hold controversy with philosophers of
the stamp of Justin. But, apart from this, in the Christian community
itself he would find germs of teaching such as had been planted by the
Alexandrian Jew Apollos. We are left to conjecture; and we have so few
positive data to go upon, that our conjectures are of necessity vague.
The Evangelist need not have waited for his arrival in Ephesus to come
in contact with the idea of the Logos, not perhaps in its full Philonian
form but in a form that might lead up to the Philonian. Philo (as we
have seen) drew largely from the Stoics; and there were Stoics in the
cities of Decapolis[61]. At a centre like Antioch they would be found in
greater numbers; and at such a centre it would be quite possible to fall
in with a wandering disciple or disciples of Philo. I have long thought
that it would facilitate our reconstruction of the history of early
Christian thought, if we could assume an anticipatory stage of Johannean
teaching, localized somewhere in Syria, before the Apostle reached his
final home at Ephesus. This would account more easily than any other
hypothesis for the traces of this kind of teaching in the _Didaché_, and
in Ignatius, as well as in some of the earliest Gnostic systems.
We cannot verify anything. We have no materials for the purpose. We can
only deal a little with probabilities. But behind all probabilities it
is enough for us to know that there must have been many avenues by which
the conception of the Logos may well have reached the Apostle besides
that of the direct and systematic study of the writings of Philo.