John 1:9-13

The Work of the Light before the Incarnation. But in truth the light, which lighteth every man, was always coming into the world. Possibly John 1:9 means that when John was witnessing, the true light was on the point of coming and was actually in the world, which He had created, though men knew Him not. But this interpretation is less natural. He was always in the world that He had made, though it was ignorant of its Maker. His coming was to His own possession. But His own failed to recognise Him. In speaking of this failure the writer is thinking chiefly but perhaps not exclusively of Jews. But the failure had its exceptions. And those who in all nations received Him, gained the higher life of the spirit, which is entered upon by a birth from God, with which fleshly motives and physical descent have nothing to do. The use made by Gnostics of this verse to support their theories of the spiritual seed may have led to the substitution of the singular who was born, which made the words refer to Christ. The context clearly demands the plural who were born, so that the words describe the method of the spiritual rebirth of those who received the Logos. [In view of the importance of the passage, it ought, perhaps, to be said that there is strong evidence for the singular (Tertullian, Irenæ us, the Codex Veronensis of the Old Latin VS, probably Methodius, possibly Justin Martyr). The singular leads up well to John 1:14, and the connexion with what precedes is good, the sonship of Christians rests on His sonship. In particular the very emphatic threefold negative statement of John 1:13 seems to be directed against some who affirmed the contrary, and such a denial was far more likely to be of Christ's supernatural conception than of the Divine begetting of Christians in the spiritual sense. The singular is found, however, in no Gr. MS.; it may have originated in Latin through the ambiguity of the Latin relative pronoun (qui) ; and it may have been introduced to affirm the supernatural conception. Harnack has recently (July 1915) in a lengthy discussion, Zur Text-kritik und Christologie der Schriften des Johannes, concluded on several grounds that the plural cannot be accepted, and that the passage referred originally to the virgin conception. But he considers that this also is not in place in this context. He thinks that the verse was added in the margin as a comment on the words And the Word became flesh at a very early time and in the Johannine circle. It ran He was begotten, etc., the relative pronoun being absent as in Codex D, the Vercellensis (Latin), and perhaps in Tertullian. When the words had been taken into the text the relative was inserted by some. A. S. P.] For the work of the Logos among men before the Incarnation cf. John 12:40 (Isaiah) and perhaps John 8:56 (Abraham). The interpretation which finds in these verses an anticipated account of the work of the Incarnate Logos, which is out of place before the culminating declaration of John 1:14, is less natural.