Judaism was (and remains) a pre-philosophical religion. That is, the Jews never asked why God created the world, or how He brought it into being ex nihilo, or how He could know that He’d always been, or … The soon-to-be-Christians needed a more serviceable god, and so they assigned Him all and only the serviceable properties they needed from Him. Being a mere add-on story, the Synoptic Gospels were likewise pre-philosophical. The early still-Jewish Christians needed a messiah, they thought he needed to be incarnate, and so they imagined not an incarnate God but a flesh and blood man ‘anointed‘ by God, not all that dissimilar to Mohamed seven centuries later.

But in the decades between the Synoptics and the Book of John, something had changed. The Christ story couldn’t sell itself in the Hellenised world without absorbing the vocabulary and rules of inference of Greek philosophy, a process we now call ‘apologetics’. And Greek philosophy did ask the questions the Jews did not. More particularly, since God couldn’t acquire knowledge, knowledge had to be, as Plato argued, something in the world a priori. Since anointment was a political act, it could only have been an unfortunate metaphor. Likewise the kingdom of Heaven. Likewise Christ being the Son of God. So for Christ to be God, he (or now He) had to be co-eternal with God. Hence, according to John, “In the beginning” – which is to say outside of time – “was the Word. And” then only in time was “the Word made flesh.”

And so why did God make the world? Because by ‘logos’ is meant order. So in the beginning – which is to say outside of time – there was already a blueprint of what would become Creation. So that order, or blueprint, is already a constituent of the divine Mind.

As an atheist I think all of this is bunk. But it’s not nonsense. In fact in my view it – or something very much like it – is the only reading that allows Johannine Christianity to make sense.

But then what do I know? I’m an atheistic Jew. And Judaism was (and remains) a pre-philosophical religion.

Categories: Philosophy of Religion

Tags: Book of John, Christ, Christianity, creation ex nihilo, Greek Philosophy, Judaism, Plato, Synoptic Gospels