Mention has been made above of Harnack’s view as to the relation of the
Prologue to the main body of the Gospel. He holds that the Prologue is
really separable from this, that it is of the nature of a postscript, or
after-thought, rather than a preface. He regards it as not so much the
statement of a programme to be worked out in the Gospel as a sort of
‘covering letter,’ intended to commend the work to cultivated Gentile or
Hellenistic readers.
This view has in its favour the obvious fact that the word λόγος,
wherever it occurs in the body of the Gospel, is used in its ordinary
and familiar sense, and not in the special sense given to it in the
Prologue. In face of this fact it seems at first sight difficult to
treat the Prologue as containing the leading idea that runs through and
determines the character of the rest of the Gospel. And yet it is well
known that many writers have so treated it—and conspicuously the two
French scholars, M. Jean Réville and the Abbé Loisy.
There are two ways of escaping the inference just referred to. One is
that of which I have just been speaking, the method adopted by Dr.
Julius Grill in his recent work on the origin of the Fourth Gospel, to
take as the leading idea, not the Logos but the combination of Life and
Light which the Evangelist gives as equivalent to the Logos[62]. The
other is to follow in the track of M. Loisy, and to treat the doctrine
of the Logos as a summary name for the whole ‘theology of the
Incarnation[63].’