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Page 9- John 1:1- Caveat Lector (Reader Beware)
Other New Testament writers proclaim the same truth about how God finally spoke in a Son in New Testament times. Jesus is the fulfillment of the greatest of all God’s promises: Paul wrote to Titus (1:2) about “the knowledge of the truth...in the hope of eternal life which God who cannot lie promised long ages ago, but at the proper time manifested, namely his word in the proclamation [Gospel].” Salvation comes to us “according to His own purpose which was granted to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but now has been revealed, by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:9).
Luke and Paul are in perfect agreement about the origin of the Son of God. He is a supernaturally created human being originating in time in the womb of Mary. Thus Paul carefully writes in Galatians 4:4 of the Son, that he “came into existence (genomenos)” of a woman. Paul chooses not to use the normal word for “born” (gennao). He stresses the fact that the Son came into existence at his birth. In the 50s AD Paul was already fending off any notion that the Son did not have his beginning in the womb of his mother. After all, a person who is pre-human is non-human. One is what one is, according to one's origin. The whole point about the Messiah, Son of God, is that he is a member of the human race. As God created Adam, son of God, from the dust (Luke 3:38), Jesus was created in his mother's womb by miracle.
F.F. Bruce and Professor Don Cupitt
The noted Bible scholar F.F. Bruce questions the traditional translation of John 1:1 with these words: “On the preexistence question, one can at least accept the preexistence of the eternal Word or Wisdom of God, which (who?) became incarnate in Jesus.”19
Professor Cupitt of Cambridge writes:
John’s words ought to be retranslated: “The Word was with God the Father and the Word was the Father’s own Word,” to stress that the Word is not an independent divine being, but is the only God’s own self-expression. If all this is correct, then even John’s language about Jesus still falls within the scope of the King-ambassador model.20
The considered views of these leading Christian thinkers show that it is sufficient to think of “word” as God’s utterance, not His Son prior to the begetting of the Son in Mary. On this model, the Son is in fact what the word became.21 The Son does not preexist as Son. The Son is the visible human expression of God’s pre-ordained purpose. There was no Son of God until the Messiah was conceived in history. Before that God had His Design and Plan “with Him,” as the basis of His whole intention for creation and for mankind. On this understanding the Messiah is truly a human being, a status which cannot be claimed for him if he has been alive since before Genesis!
Is John’s Unity With or Opposed to the Rest of the New Testament?
If we read John and his introduction in this fashion, we find him proclaiming, unitedly with the other Gospel writers and the rest of the New Testament, the supremely important fact that Jesus is the Messiah, Son of God. On that great truth the church is to be founded (Matt. 16:15-18) and united, and for that single purpose — to demonstrate and urge belief in Jesus as the Messiah — John wrote his whole gospel (John 20:31). But notice carefully that the Messiah is the human lord of David (Ps. 110:1), the Son of God, and that there is only one God. Remember too the wise words of a leading contemporary scholar.
Indeed to be a “Son of God” one has to be a being who is not God!...It is a common but patent misreading of the opening of John’s Gospel to read it as if it said: “In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with God and the Son was God.” What has happened here is the substitution Son for Word (Greek logos), and thereby the Son is made a member of the Godhead which existed from the beginning.22
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[19] From correspondence with the author, June 13, 1981, emphasis added.
[20] The Debate About Christ, SCM Press, 92.
[21] Cp. Leonhard Goppelt, The Theology of the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1992, Vol. 2, 297: “The logos of the prologue became Jesus; Jesus was the logos become flesh not the logos as such.” This comment of Goppelt was cited by James Dunn with approval in Christology in the Making, SCM Press, 1989, fn. 120, 349.
[22] Colin Brown, D.D., Ex Auditu, 7, 1991, 88, 89