The Divine Lamp

Most of the Biblical notes on this site are my own, however, what follows comes from a public domain work.   To view the previous entry on John 1:1 go here.  To view my personal notes on John 1:19-51 go here, here, and here.

1:2 The same (or that one) was in the beginning with God.

Latin: hoc erat in principio apud Deum.

The emphatic opening of verse 2 (Greek, houtos) reiterates and gives added emphasis to the opening verse with its three great truths; i.e., the Word’s eternity, His distinct personality, and His essential unity with the Father. “Various attempts have been made by the Unitarians to escape the invincible argument for a Second Divine Person which these opening verses of our Gospel contain. Thus, they put a full stop after the the last “erat” of verse 1; and, taking the words in the order in which they occur in the Greek and Latin, make the sense of the third clause: “and God was.” Then they join “verbum,” the last word of verse 1, with verse 2: “This Word was in the beginning with God.” But even if we granted to the Unitarians this punctuation of the verses, the sense of the third clause would still be that the Word was God, and not that God existed. For “Deus” (in Greek, theos without the article), in the beginning of the third clause ought still to be regarded as the predicate, with “verbum” of the preceding clauses as the subject. This follows not merely from the absence of the Greek article already alluded to, but also from the absurdity of the Unitarian view, which supposes that St John thought it necessary, after telling us that the Word was with God, to tell us that God existed!

Others have tried to explain away the text thus: At the beginning of the Christian dispensation the Word existed, and the Word was most intimately united to God by love (but was not God). But, (1), they still have to explain how the word is declared creator in verses 3 and 10; (2), the statement in verse 14: “and the Word was made flesh,” implies transition of the word to a state different from that in which He existed “in the beginning;” but the time of the transition is just the commencement of the Christian dispensation, which cannot, therefore, the time referred to in verse 1 as “the beginning.” (Most of the above has been taken, with some modification by me, from THE HOLY GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN by John McIntyre. The book is in the public domain)