True
Humanity and Precedence; 1 John 1:1-3
1
John 1:1 NASB “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what
we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands,
concerning the Word of Life—and the life was manifested, and we have seen
and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and
was manifested to us— what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you
also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is
with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.”
There
are three basic exegetical problems in this section that we have to deal with.
The first is, to what do those neuter clauses refer? They can’t refer to logos because that is a masculine noun.
In fact there is no neuter noun in the section to which it can refer. And that
is not unusual in Greek. Often when there is a collective concept a neuter noun
is picked up in order to refer to the collective concept. Some have suggested
that the collective concept refers to the witness of the apostles. In other
words, “witness” in the Greek is a neuter. It is possible that that is
ellipsisised out and that is the understood reference, but it can also simply
be that because he is talking about the message, about everything that is involved
with the message, that he just simply includes all of these things in one
reference by a neuter noun which refers to the message, the testimony,
everything that they saw and experienced about the Lord Jesus Christ. The
latter is the view that we take. It is referring to the overall apostolic
witness about the incarnation, everything that Jesus did, said and taught.
The
second thing we have to solve before we can accurately translate it is what
“beginning” refers to in the first clause: “what was from the beginning.” The
phrase in the Greek is the preposition apo
plus the noun arche. arche is the word for beginning, the
same word that is used in John 1:1, which begins “In the beginning.” But there
a different preposition is used—en.
apo means from; en means in or at the time of. Is 1 John
1:1 referring to the same beginning as John 1:1? We don’t think so. If we look
at how the way arche is used in
John’s writings, that is, in the Gospel, the epistles and Revelation, it is
used eighteen times. In John 1:1 it refers to the absolute beginning of the
space-time universe—“In the beginning was the Word.” The word “was” is,
as in 1 John 1:1, an imperfect active indicative of the verb eimi, to be. It refers to continued
existence in John 1:1—“In the beginning the logos already was existing.” That refers to the fact that
when God first created the space-time universe the logos was already in continuous existence. It is a reference
to the eternality of Jesus Christ. So John 1:1 refers to an absolute beginning
of the space-time universe. In John 2:11 the phrase is used again, and there it
refers to the beginning of Jesus’ miracles. In John 16:4 it refers to the
beginning of His teaching ministry to the disciples NASB “But these
things I have spoken to you, so that when their hour comes, you may remember
that I told you of them. These things I did not say to you at the beginning,
because I was with you.” So there it refers to the beginning of His public
ministry with the disciples. So “beginning” is a technical term that not always
refers to the same beginning. 1 John 2:7 reads NASB “Beloved, I am
not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had
from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.” That
is not talking about the absolute beginning of the universe or even the
beginning of Christ’s incarnation; it is referring to the beginning of His
teaching them about the spiritual life. 1 John 2:14 NASB “have
written to you, fathers, because you know Him who has been from the beginning…”
we see there that beginning can refer to eternity past. 1 John 2:24 NASB
“As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning.” That is
referring to the beginning of Jesus’ teaching the disciples. So the word
“beginning” is not a technical term for the absolute beginning, it can refer to
different beginnings. In 1 John 1:1 it is clear that it is talking about a
message. That message, therefore, had to have been communicated at a certain
starting point and that was during His teaching ministry to the apostles. So
they are talking there about their witness in the beginning of the public
ministry of Jesus Christ when the disciples were associated with them,
specifically John because that first person plural includes and is a reference
to him primarily, so that takes us to the episode in John chapter two when John
the apostle was a disciple of John the Baptist. Jesus told John and Andrew to
follow Him and they left John the Baptist for the Lord Jesus Christ.
This
brings us to why that last phrase in the first verse is not a capital W but
should be translated “message,” not Word. One of the problems we have when we
look at this is that John wants us to think in terms of what he has already
said in the Gospel. The Gospel began with the introduction of Jesus Christ as
the logos. As soon as we see the
word logos in 1 John 1:1 if we are familiar with the Gospel the first thing
that should come to mind is that we are thinking about the Gospel. In the
Gospel of John the emphasis is on the person of Jesus Christ, the man. John
doesn’t want us to lose sight of the fact that in this case the man is the
message and the message is the man. You can’t separate the message from the man
in the New Testament.
What
we have seen in the introduction here is that the empirical evidence that they
are emphasising—what we heard, what we saw, what our hands
handled—is the main message of this whole introduction. The thrust of it
is related to the incarnation. Jesus Christ had to be both true humanity and
undiminished deity to accomplish His work on the cross. He could not be simply
a good man. On the other hand, He couldn’t be God and not true humanity. If He
were not true humanity then He could not have died as a substitute for the sins
of humanity. Like had to die for like. But if he was not undiminished deity His
death would not have had unlimited value and he would not have had the +R,
the perfect righteousness of God. There are two aspects to salvation. The first
is the payment for sin, but the sin of every single person has been paid for.
Every unbeliever’s sin has been paid for but they are not saved. The two
aspects: you not only have to have your sins paid for but you have to have
perfect righteousness. God’s perfect righteousness cannot have fellowship with
anyone less than perfect righteousness. On the cross all of our sins were
imputed to Christ, and at the instant of faith alone in Christ alone the
perfect righteousness of Christ is imputed to us and credited to our account.
Therefore when God looks at us He is not looking at the fact that we are –R
and that we are sinners; that is covered by the fact that we have received the
perfect righteousness of Christ. So two things have to happen at salvation: we
have to have our sins paid for but we have to be able to receive perfect
righteousness. The perfect righteousness did not come from Christ’s humanity,
it came from His deity.
The
second reason Jesus Christ had to become incarnate is that in the hypostatic
union He provided the pattern and the precedent for our new spiritual life in
the church age. That spiritual life is based on the indwelling and the filling
ministry of God the Holy Spirit.
John
uses the word logos here because he
knows that it is going to bring to our minds Jesus Christ, but he is not using
it in the technical sense. One of the ways we know this is that logos is used seven times in John’s
epistles; none of the other six are a technical use of logos. In John’s Gospel the word is used about 30-40
different times but it is only in the first two verses and the fourteenth verse
of the first chapter that it has a technical meaning. So it is unusual for John
to use it in a technical sense to begin with. Secondly, we would notice if
logos is used technically for the Lord Jesus Christ then we would be able to
substitute Jesus Christ for the word logos
and it would make sense, e.g. John 1:1.
1
John 1:1, “From the beginning we have heard,” akekoamen,
perfect active indicative of the first person plural of akouo meaning to hear or to listen to. This is interesting
because the first two verbs in the sentence are perfect active indicative and
the second two verbs are aorist active indicative. Normally a perfect tense
emphasises the results of a past action, but there is a very rare use of the
perfect tense which is called the aorist or dramatic perfect. The use of the
aorist or dramatic perfect is a rhetorical device to describe an event in a
highly vivid way, so that the aoristic or dramatic perfect is used as a simple
past tense without concern for present consequences. “What we have heard” is
off in the past, it is not an emphasis on present results; but he puts it in
the perfect because he is dramatising, he is coming out of the shoot, as it
were, with a pun. The second verb is heorakamen,
which is the perfect active indicative of horao,
which means to see with comprehension, understand, perceive. This is what we
heard and perceived, it is what we understand about Jesus Christ; we saw this
with our eyes and we beheld it. The prefect tense, again, is an aoristic or
dramatic perfect. The active voice indicates that the subject performs the
action. In both of these verbs John, along with the other disciples, heard and
saw and perceived with their eyes what was going on and what Jesus was
demonstrating before them. The indicative mood expresses the mood of
reality.
Then
we come to the next two verbs, the aorist middle indicative, first person
plural of theaomai which means to
not only on just see but to perceive everything. So it is talking about
understanding and perception in horao,
and witnessing, what they beheld, in the second. The aorist in the last two
verbs is a consummative aorist; it places the stress on the cessation and the
completion of the activity. This isn’t still going on. They saw it at one time,
during those three years of Jesus’ public ministry. They saw it all and these
are their conclusions. All of these verbs have the same emphasis, that John
along with the other disciples saw, heard, beheld, and their hands handled the
Word of life. The last verb is the aorist active indicative, first person
plural of pselaphao which means to
feel, touch or handle. All of this means that they had full empirical content
with the Lord Jesus Christ and His physical incarnation, and so it wasn’t an
illusion. It was actual and they were eyewitnesses to it.