The Prologue of John's Gospel

Overview

Recall questions on the Word made flesh, life, light and darkness, belief and becoming children of God, flesh and spirit, law, grace and truth, the Jewish and Hellenistic background, Dodd and Hooker, and the Prologue's influence.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the Prologue claim about the Word?

   Model answer

   It opens by placing the Word at the beginning, alongside God and sharing in what God is, and by making the Word the agent through whom everything came to be. It then states that this Word took on human existence and lived among people, so that what was said of the Word is now said of a particular human life. The claim is therefore both about origins and about identity: the one who acts in the story is the one who was there before it.

2. 2

   What does the phrase the Word made flesh mean, and why is the wording deliberately blunt?

   Model answer

   It means that the divine Word did not merely appear in human form or inspire a human being but came to exist in the full physical condition of humanity. Flesh in this Gospel means the whole realm of created, mortal, limited human life. The bluntness matters because it forecloses readings in which the divine only seems to be human, and because it makes the visible life of Jesus, not an escape from it, the place where God is disclosed.

3. 3

   How do the images of life, light and darkness work in the Prologue?

   Model answer

   Life is what the Word possesses and gives, and it is identified with the light that comes to human beings. Darkness is set against it as an opposing realm that neither absorbs nor extinguishes it. These are not decorative images: they set up the Gospel's running contrast between two spheres, and later episodes of sight and blindness, night and day, cash out what the opening has announced.

4. 4

   What is the significance of belief and of becoming children of God in the Prologue?

   Model answer

   The passage distinguishes those who refuse the Word from those who receive him, and says that receiving him confers the standing of God's children. That standing is explicitly not a matter of descent, human decision or human agency but of divine begetting. In one stroke the Prologue makes belief the decisive category and detaches membership of God's people from ancestry, which sets the terms for the Gospel's later disputes.

5. 5

   How does the Prologue contrast flesh and spirit?

   Model answer

   Flesh denotes human existence in its natural, unaided condition, the sphere of birth, descent and limitation. Spirit denotes the divine sphere and the source of the new begetting the passage describes. The Gospel does not treat flesh as evil, since the Word enters it, but it does deny that flesh can generate what only spirit gives. The distinction returns whenever the Gospel discusses birth from above and true worship.

6. 6

   How are law, grace and truth related at the close of the Prologue?

   Model answer

   The law is credited to Moses and treated as a genuine gift, while grace and truth are said to come through Jesus Christ. Scholars disagree over whether this sets the two in contrast or in sequence, with the second fulfilling rather than cancelling the first. Either way the Prologue positions Jesus in relation to Israel's foundational gift rather than outside it, and grace and truth carry echoes of the covenant vocabulary of steadfast love and faithfulness.

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