5 January 2024 John 1:43-51
C.S. Lewis once said, reflecting on some of the writing in the New Testament, “St. Paul, despite some passages of striking beauty, seems to me to write badly.”
It has long been observed that the New Testament is not where you might go to find elegant writing. The writing style of the Greek text is called koine, meaning “common.” It was street Greek, sometimes lovely, sometimes bracingly clear in the way that old sayings cut to the chase and say what most needs to be said. But other times it is sloppy and, well, common.
Translators have tried to tidy up John 1:43, making it say, “Jesus decided to go to Galilee, and he found Philip.” In fact, however, the sentence in Greek has a problem with pronoun-antecedent agreement. There are two verbs in the sentence, and it isn’t clear what the subject is of either one. Grammatically it could be Jesus, but just as easily Peter, or Andrew, and the meaning of the sentence would be slightly different each way. So, what was John trying to say? It isn’t clear.
Verse 1:44 mentions that Philip was from the same town as Peter and Andrew, but this observation explains nothing. It doesn’t clarify where they were going, or what they were going to do when they got there, or why they were headed to Galilee in the first place. So why does John include this? It isn’t clear.
This passage begins like the three others before it, “on the next day” – so, four consecutive days. The paragraph that comes immediately after this one, however, begins, “on the third day” (2:1). Why does it go backwards? Does it mean the third day after the paragraph before? The text doesn’t say. So, what does “the third day” refer to? It isn’t clear.
One of the biggest problems in the text arises in 1:45, “Philip found Nathanael and told him….” Who is Nathanael? He doesn’t appear in any of the other gospels, and it is not clear how he is related to Philip. Some have pointed out that while Nathanael is not mentioned in the other gospels, Bartholomew is not mentioned in John, and so for the sake of symmetry they have concluded that Nathanael and Bartholomew must be the same person. But that is a pretty arbitrary judgment, and it didn’t convince theological heavyweights like Augustine, who concluded that Nathanael was not one of the Twelve. So who was he? The writing makes it very hard to say.
There would be red pencil all over this passage if it were turned in as a high school essay.
So why did nobody ever tidy it up? There were centuries of opportunity – copyists could have fixed the pronoun-antecedent problem (translators have done that). They could have straightened out the chronology so we knew what “the third day” referred to, and thrown in a parenthetical explanation about who Nathanael was. Why didn’t they?
I think it’s because they knew they weren’t writing a myth.
Tidying up awkward expressions is what myth writers did (and still do). They make the writing more elegant, make heroes more handsome and villains more vile. They put speeches in the mouths of warriors that make it sound like the warriors spent as much time in the library as at the gym. They write fiction.
But nobody did that here. The sloppy writing of John 1:43-51 looks the same as it always did because the generations of copyists didn’t think they were writing a myth, but history. The gospels are not legend, but testimony, and as with all testimony, we want to know what the witnesses saw, and heard, and wrote. John 1:43-51 is what the witness saw, not a myth. It is history.
How did people find out that Jesus was the Messiah? They did it the way that Philip and Nathanael did. One saw, and told another, “Come and see” (1:46). The writing might not always be special, but the message is: Jesus sees what is in your heart right now; He is the truth you long for. He is the one who clarifies. He is history.
“Come and see.”
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