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Page 10- John 1:1- Caveat Lector (Reader Beware)
On that fatal shift the whole Trinitarian “problem” was constructed. The resolution of that problem will come only when we return to the unitary monotheism of John, of Jesus and of the whole Bible.
The celebrated Church historian, Adolf Harnack, put his finger on the root of the problem displayed in traditional views of the Godhead:
The Greeks, as a result of their cosmological interest, embraced this thought [of a literal preexistence of the Son] as a fundamental proposition. The complete Greek Christology then is expressed as follows. “Christ who saved us, being first spirit and the beginning of all creation, became flesh and thus called us.”23That is the fundamental, theological and philosophical creed on which the whole Trinitarian and Christological speculations of the Church of the succeeding centuries are built, and it is thus the root of the orthodox system of dogmatics; for the notion that Christ was the beginning of all creation necessarily led in some measure to the conception of Christ as the Logos. For the Logos had long been regarded by cultured men as the beginning and principle of the creation.24
Another distinguished historian of Christian dogma, Professor Loofs of Halle University, stated that "polytheism entered the church camouflaged" when John's logos was turned into the preexisting second member of the Trinity.
A Gnostic Twist of John’s Words
John 1:1 suffered at the hands of its Gnostic expositors early, even we think in the New Testament period. Whether or not 1 John 1:1-2 was written earlier or later than the Gospel of John, it provides just the commentary we need to clarify John 1:1. With utmost emphasis the Apostle tries to ensure that we think of the word as “it” not “he.” There are no less than five neuter pronouns in 1 John 1:1-3. “That which was from the beginning...concerning the word of life...and we announce to you the life of the age to come which was with [pros] the Father and was manifested to us.” It was the promise of the Life to Come, the promise of the Kingdom which was “with the Father.” That promise was manifested in the flesh at the conception of the Messiah. The Messiah embodied all the promises of God. God was and is in him reconciling the world to Himself. But to turn the promise into the actual person of Messiah, consciously in existence before his birth, is to destroy the promise and its fulfillment. God did not speak in a Son in the past ages but He did in these last days (Heb. 1:1-2).
The Jewish writer Philo, a contemporary of Paul, recognized Moses as an expression of God’s plan. He describes Moses as the “empsychosis” of God’s divine thought, i.e. as the personalization of the Divine Plan (Life of Moses, I, 28). Thus John says that while the law came through Moses, Jesus was the personalization of the character of God expressed as grace and truth (John 1:17). Jesus, if you like, is “Mr. Grace and Truth,” the expression of God in a miraculously begotten Son. But before that time there was no Son of God, except as a promise in the Divine Plan from the beginning.
In all probability John has been “turned on his head.” What he intended was to stave off all attempts to introduce a duality into the Godhead. For John the word was the one God Himself, not a second person. The later, post-biblical shift from “word” as divine promise from the beginning, the Gospel lodged in the mind and purpose of the one God, to an actual second divine “person,” the Son, alive before his birth, introduced a principle of confusion and chaos from which the church has never freed itself. This shift was the corrupting seed of later Trinitarianism. God became two and later, with the addition of the holy spirit, three. It remains for believers today to return to belief in Jesus as the human Messiah and in the One God of Israel, his Father, as the “one who alone is truly God” (John 17:3). God is one person not three.
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[23] II Clement 9:5.
[24] Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. 1, 328, emphasis added.