Chapter 12 — In the Beginning Was the Word
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)
These are perhaps the most theologically dense words in the entire New Testament. In three short clauses, John makes a claim that has shaped Christian theology for two thousand years: the one who would become Jesus Christ existed before the creation of the universe, was in personal relationship with God, and was himself God.
Critics are well aware of the significance of this verse, which is why John's Gospel is among the most fiercely debated books in the New Testament. Those who reject the deity of Christ typically either dismiss John as historically unreliable, or they work very hard to find alternative readings of John 1:1. What they cannot do is ignore it.
The Skeptic's Objection
Some scholars, like Maurice Casey, are refreshingly direct: they acknowledge that John presents Jesus as "God, pre-existent and incarnate," and they reject the Gospel as historical fiction for precisely that reason. In their view, the high Christology of John is proof that it can't be trusted — it must be a late, legendary portrait with no connection to the historical Jesus.
This is a significant methodological problem, though. You can't simply disqualify evidence because it doesn't fit your conclusion. John's Gospel presents itself as the testimony of an eyewitness (John 21:24). It contains historically specific details that scholars have increasingly confirmed through archaeology. And its portrait of Jesus is entirely consistent with (not in tension with) the Christology of Paul's letters, which were written decades earlier.
Progressive Christians like John Shelby Spong try a different approach: they accept John as valuable but argue it was never meant to be taken literally. In Spong's reading, John is spiritual poetry, not history. But this interpretation runs headlong into the text itself, which is saturated with specific claims of historical fact — names, places, dates, eyewitness testimony.
The Three Clauses of John 1:1
"In the beginning was the Word" — This echoes Genesis 1:1 intentionally. When creation began, the Word (Greek: logos) already existed. He wasn't created at the beginning; he was already there when the beginning happened. John is placing Christ outside of time — not as a created being who existed before us, but as one who precedes creation itself.
"The Word was with God" — The Word is not simply identical to God in an undifferentiated way. He was with God, in personal relationship with the Father. This is why orthodox Christianity confesses three persons in one God: the Father and the Son (and the Spirit) are genuinely distinct from one another, yet all are fully God. They are in eternal, loving relationship.
"The Word was God" — The Word is not a second God or a lesser divine being. He is God. This clause has been the subject of intense grammatical and theological debate. Jehovah's Witnesses translate it "the Word was a god" — inserting an indefinite article to make Jesus a lesser divine being. But Greek grammar does not support this translation; scholars of Greek almost unanimously reject it. The most natural reading of John 1:1 is that the Word is fully God — divine in the same sense the Father is divine, though personally distinct from him.
The Word Becomes Flesh
The great turn of the Prologue comes in verse 14: "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."
This is the incarnation in its most compressed, most beautiful form. The eternal Word — the divine one who was with God before creation and through whom all things were made — became flesh. Not "appeared to be flesh" or "inhabited a human body temporarily." Became flesh. Fully, really, irreversibly human.
John says the disciples saw his glory. Not just his teaching, not just his miracles — his glory. The glory of the Son of the Father, the same glory he had before the world was made (John 17:5). In the man Jesus of Nazareth, the uncreated light of God shone through human flesh.
John closes his Prologue with this: "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 eternal Son, who has always been at the Father's side, has now come to tell us who God is — from the inside.
What John Adds to Paul
Paul's letters show us the preexistent Christ who was sent into the world. John's Gospel shows us the cosmic Christ through whom the world was made. Together they give us a portrait of Jesus that cannot be reduced to a great human teacher or even the highest of creatures.
John begins where Genesis begins — "in the beginning" — and shows us that what was there at the beginning was the eternal Word, through whom all things came to be. When he finally identifies this Word with Jesus (1:14-17), the identification is not a surprise: it's the culmination of everything the Prologue has been building toward.
The God who made the stars is the same one who walked the dusty roads of Galilee and died outside Jerusalem. And he did it for love of the creatures he made.
That is the Word made flesh. That is Jesus.
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