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Revisiting the Racial Problem in the Johannine Prologue

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A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire

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Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the necessity for a racial reading of John’s prologue. It introduces aspects of the prologue where it portrays otherness, difference, and the disruption of racial identity and race relations. This chapter also situates the study in light of Johannine scholarship on the prologue, including a brief review of the literature, a definition of race and ethnicity, racial ideologies of the Greco-Roman world, and the trajectory of the monograph. Issues on the background and context of John’s gospel are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Raymond Brown, Introduction to the Gospel of John, ed. Francis Moloney (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 180–181; Brown, The Gospel According to John 1–12, AB 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), lxxviii.

  2. 2.

    Brown, “Other Sheep Not of This Fold: The Johannine Perspective on Christian Diversity in the Late First Century Author,” JBL 97.1 (1978): 15.

  3. 3.

    Denise Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10.4 (2002): 435.

  4. 4.

    Prov 8:22; Sir 1:4; 24:9; Wis 9:9.

  5. 5.

    Scholars are divided on whether the prologue is an early Christian hymn or rhythmic prose. Rudolf Bultmann describes the prologue as a “cultic-liturgical poetry” in The Gospel of John (Philadelphia: Westminster: 1976), 14; John Painter views it as an edited Jewish hymn in The Quest for the Messiah: The History, Literature and Theology of the Johannine Community (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 137–142; Barnabas Lindars hold that the prologue was adapted from an existing hymn (The Gospel of John [London, Oliphants, 1972], 81); also George Beasley-Murray, John (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 4; Matthew Gordley most recently makes a persuasive case that the prologue is a hymn in “The Johannine Prologue and Jewish Didactic Hymn Traditions: A New Case for Reading the Prologue as a Hymn,” JBL 128.4 (2009): 782–786. Other scholars such as Craig Keener are not certain (John [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003], 1:337). See also Marianne Meye Thompson, John (KY: Westminster, 2015), 26; Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1995), 64; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John (London: SPCK, 1970), 126.

  6. 6.

    Fernando Segovia, “John 1:1–18 As Entrée into Johannine Reality Representation Ramifications,” in Word, Theology, and Community in John (St. Louis: Chalice, 2002), 33–64 [esp. 34]; Segovia, “The Journey(s) of the Word of God: A Reading of the Plot of the Fourth Gospel,” in The Fourth Gospel from a Literary Perspective, ed. R. Alan Culpepper and Fernando Segovia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 23–54.

  7. 7.

    Elizabeth Harris, Prologue and Gospel: The Theology of the Fourth Evangelist (England: Sheffield, 1994), 16.

  8. 8.

    Harris, Prologue, 23.

  9. 9.

    Harris, Prologue, 60.

  10. 10.

    Harris, Prologue, 60.

  11. 11.

    Harris, Prologue, 65, 81.

  12. 12.

    Harris, Prologue, 74.

  13. 13.

    Harris, Prologue, 77.

  14. 14.

    Harris, Prologue, 81–82, 89.

  15. 15.

    See Denise Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2, 29–33; Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco–Roman World (New York: Oxford, 2004), 309; Ep. Diog. 1.1; Mart. Poly. 10.1; 12:1–2.

  16. 16.

    Harris, Prologue, 195.

  17. 17.

    Harris, Prologue, 16, 90, 124, 129, 176.

  18. 18.

    Harris, Prologue, 159.

  19. 19.

    Craig Evans, Word and Glory: On the Exegetical and Theological Background of John’s Prologue (New York: T&T Clark, 1993), 1–46.

  20. 20.

    Evans, Word and Glory, 99.

  21. 21.

    Evans, Word and Glory, 146–150.

  22. 22.

    Evans, Word and Glory, 185.

  23. 23.

    See also Evans’ comparison between Sirach 24:32b with John 1:5; Wisdom 9:10 with John 1:10–11; Proverbs 8:25 with John 1:13; and the comparison of “friends of God” with “children of God” in Wisdom 7:14, 27 with John 1:12 in Word and Glory, 89–90.

  24. 24.

    Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” JBL 81.1 (1962): 1–13 [esp. 1–2]. He discusses the tendency of scholars who make “exaggerations” about the parallels, sources, and derivations.

  25. 25.

    Ekaputra Tupamahu, “The Stubborn Invisibility of Whiteness in Biblical Scholarship,” Political Theology Network, November 12, 2020, https://politicaltheology.com/the–stubborn–invisibility–of–whiteness–in–biblical–scholarship/.

  26. 26.

    Alison Jasper, The Shining Garment of the Text: Gendered Reading of John’s Prologue (Sheffield, UK: 1998), 9.

  27. 27.

    Jasper, Shining Garment, 19–20.

  28. 28.

    Jasper, Shining Garment, 24.

  29. 29.

    Jasper, Shining Garment, 178.

  30. 30.

    Jasper, Shining Garment, 189.

  31. 31.

    Jasper, Shining Garment, 231.

  32. 32.

    See Clarice Martin, “Womanist Interpretation of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi Smith (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 19–41.

  33. 33.

    Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 89.

  34. 34.

    Boyarin, Border Lines, 95.

  35. 35.

    Boyarin, Border Lines, 103.

  36. 36.

    Boyarin, Border Lines, 104.

  37. 37.

    Boyarin, Border Lines, 131.

  38. 38.

    Boyarin, Border Lines, 92.

  39. 39.

    Stan Harstine, A History of the Two-Hundred-Year Scholarly Debate about the Purpose of the Prologue to the Gospel of John: How Does Our Understanding of the Prologue Affect Our Interpretation of the Subsequent Text? (Lewiston: Mellen, 2015), 41, 84.

  40. 40.

    Günter Kruck, “Zur theologischen Bedeutung des Prologs im Johannesevangelium,” in Der Johannesprolog, ed. Günter Kruck (Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 13–25.

  41. 41.

    Kruck, “Zur theologischen Bedeutung,” 24.

  42. 42.

    Painter, Quest, 137–138.

  43. 43.

    Painter, Quest, 150–158.

  44. 44.

    Painter, Quest, 160–158.

  45. 45.

    William Loader, Jesus in John’s Gospel: Structure and Issues in Johannine Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 45.

  46. 46.

    Loader, Jesus, 72.

  47. 47.

    Loader, Jesus, 123, 317.

  48. 48.

    C. H. Dodd considers the prologue “a proem to the whole gospel” based on philosophical conceptions in The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (New York: Cambridge University, 1970), 292–296; Marianne Meye Thompson has an entire chapter devoted to the John 1:14 but nowhere discusses the ethnic implications of Jesus’s humanity, the kinship significance of “flesh,” nor the ethnic division or hostility in the prologue in The Humanity of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 33–52; Udo Schnelle argues that Johannine Christology is a reaction to docetic Christology in Antidocetic Christology in the Gospel of John, trans. Linda Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 213–237; John O’Grady notices how the prologue parallels various themes in the Gospel but does not describe them as ethnic or kinship conflict in “The Prologue and Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John,” in What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present, and Future of Johannine Studies, ed. Tom Thatcher (Waco: Baylor, 2007), 215–228 [esp. 218]; John Ashton highlights the theme of creation and how Jesus’s rejection and hostility are adumbrated in the prologue, but he interprets this hostility in terms of moral dualism—a rejection of revelation and wisdom by the Jews. See Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford, 2007), 365–383, 389–395; Ashton, The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 152–155; Paul Rainbow highlights the prologue’s main theme of Jesus’s divine origin and revelatory role in Johannine Theology: The Gospel, The Epistles, and the Apocalypse (Michigan: InterVarsity, 2014), 36, 73, 98, 148–150.

  49. 49.

    Loader, “The Significance of John 1:14–18 for Understanding John’s Approach to Law and Ethics,” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 19 (2016): 194–201 [esp. 198].

  50. 50.

    Loader, Jesus, 315–325, 330.

  51. 51.

    Love Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialects of Race (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 53–56; Buell, Why This New Race, 1–13, 151–152; Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self–Definition,” HTR 94.4 (2001): 453; J. Daniel Hays, From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 141–156.

  52. 52.

    Hippocrates, Air, Water, Places, 24.60.

  53. 53.

    Hippocrates, Air, Water, Places, 24.40–59.

  54. 54.

    Plato, “She established your State, choosing the spot wherein you were born since she perceived therein a climate duly blended, and how that it would bring forth men of supreme wisdom” (Tim. 24c). Plato also observes that some regions “are naturally superior to others for the breeding of men of a good or bad type. Other areas are more suitable for living because the wind, sun, water, and soil not only affect the body but are equally able to effect similar results in their souls as well” (Leg. 747d–e).

    Likewise, Aristotle echoes similar remarks of Greek superiority: “the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity” (Pol. 7.1327b). Aristotle also asserts that “those men who dwell in the north have stiff hair and are courageous while those who dwell further south are cowardly and have soft hair” (Physiogn. 806b15).

  55. 55.

    Vitruvius, On Architecture, 6.1.10–11; 6.1.3–5.

  56. 56.

    Eric Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 356; Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19; Frank Snowden also does not find “race” in the ancient world having any consequence in judging a person’s worth in Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco–Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 216–218. Snowden has been recently challenged by David Goldenberg who insists that environmental theories led to anti-black sentiment in the ancient world. See “Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav–Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (New York: Cambridge, 2009), 88–108.

  57. 57.

    Adrian Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (New York: Cambridge, 1970), 1; Denise McCoskey, Race Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York: Oxford, 2012), 9; Benjamin Isaac, Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–37; Eliav-Feldon et al., Origins of Racism in the West (New York: Cambridge, 2009), 9; Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6.

  58. 58.

    Andrew Benko, Race in John’s Gospel: Toward an Ethnos-Conscious Approach (Lanham, MD: Fortress Press, 2019), 5; Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III, A Pneumatology of Race in the Gospel of John: An Ethnocritical Study (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2019), 19–22.

  59. 59.

    Social-scientific scholars highlight the need for an approach beyond historicism. See Bruce Malina, Christian Origins and Cultural Anthropology: Practical Models for Biblical Interpretation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 1–9; John Elliot, What is Social Scientific Criticism? (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 7; Steve Barton, “Historical Criticism and Social Scientific Perspective,” in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, ed. Joel Green (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 69–74.

  60. 60.

    Lynne St. Clair Darden, Scripturalizing Revelation: An African American Postcolonial Reading of Empire (Atlanta: SBL, 2015), 16.

  61. 61.

    Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 6–17; Ali Rattansi, “Race,” in Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 241–245.

  62. 62.

    Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 10.

  63. 63.

    Barth, Ethnic, 10–11; Sandro Gindro adds that the term “ethnicity” developed as a form of identification to describe cultural, psychological, and social characteristics that differed from class or race. See “Ethnicity,” in Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 94.

  64. 64.

    Barth, Ethnic, 13–14.

  65. 65.

    Barth, Ethnic, 15.

  66. 66.

    UNESCO, “Fallacies of Racism Exposed: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists,” Courier 3.6–7 (United States), July-Aug. 1950, 1; Muddathir Abdel Rahim, Georges Balandier, et al., “UNESCO Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice,” Current Anthropology 9.4 (1968): 270–272.

  67. 67.

    Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2–9.

  68. 68.

    David James and Matthew Oware, “Ethnicity and Race” in Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003), 99–102. See also Janet Helms and Regine Talleyrand, “Race is Not Ethnicity,” American Psychologist 52.11 (1997): 1246–1247; Robert Swierenga, “Ethnicity in Historical Perspective,” Social Science 52.1 (1977): 31–44.

  69. 69.

    James and Oware, “Ethnicity and Race,” 101.

  70. 70.

    Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory (New York: New York University, 2012), 8.

  71. 71.

    Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Margins and (Cutting-)Edges: On the (IL)Legitimacy and Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and (Post)Colonialism,” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections, ed. Fernando Segovia and Stephen Moore (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 114–165 [esp. 121–127].

  72. 72.

    Ann Phoenix, “Dealing with Difference: The Recursive and the New,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21.5 (1998): 859–880 [esp. 876].

  73. 73.

    Matt 4:15; John 11:48; 1 Cor 1:23.

  74. 74.

    Matt 13:47; Mark 7:26; 9:29; 1 Cor 12:10.

  75. 75.

    Georg Bertram, “ἔθνος, ἐθνικός,” TDNT 2:364–371; Friedrich Büchsel, “γένος” TDNT 1:684–685; Herodotus, 1.143; 1.56; Diodorus, 2.46.4; Josephs, Ant. 15.384.

  76. 76.

    Isaac, Invention of Racism, 35.

  77. 77.

    Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (New York: Cambridge, 2000), 25.

  78. 78.

    Buell, Why This New Race, 1.

  79. 79.

    Benko, Race, 22–21.

  80. 80.

    Sechrest, Former, 54–60.

  81. 81.

    Sechrest, Former, 44–81.

  82. 82.

    Sechrest, Former, 81–90.

  83. 83.

    Sechrest, Former, 67.

  84. 84.

    Sechrest, Former, 84, 92.

  85. 85.

    Sechrest, Former, 92–93.

  86. 86.

    Sechrest, Former, 94.

  87. 87.

    Sechrest, Former, 100.

  88. 88.

    Sechrest, Former, 102.

  89. 89.

    The historic relationship between the Gospel of John and Asia Minor is affirmed by Polycrates. He defends the Quartodeciman practice of celebrating Jesus’s crucifixion on the Passover by insisting that they inherited this tradition from the Apostle John and Philip, Polycarp, Melito, and other leaders (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24). In addition, we also find the association of the Gospel with Ephesus in Irenaeus, Haer. 3.11.1; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.18.1; 3.20.11; 3.23.4–19; 3.39; 5.24; for a further review of the possible experiences of Jews in Asia Minor and how the Gospel would have been received in Ephesus see Sjef van Tilborg, Reading John in Ephesus (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 3, 33, 41–56, 63–74; John Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (Berkley: University of California, 1996), 259–281.

  90. 90.

    This is similar to Keener’s argument about the reliability of the Gospels in Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019), 499.

  91. 91.

    For a review of Heracleon’s commentary, see Einar Thomassen, “Heracleon,” in The Legacy of John: Second-Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 173–210; see also Paul-Hubert Poirier, who suggests that the Trimorphic Protennoia polemically reinterpreted the Johannine prologue, in “The Trimorphic Protennoi (NHC XII,1) and the Johannine Prologue: A Reconsideration,” in The Legacy of John: Second-Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 93–103 [esp. 101].

  92. 92.

    J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville: Westminster, 2003), 61.

  93. 93.

    Brown, Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York: Paulist, 1979), 55–59.

  94. 94.

    Ray Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 218; David Lamb, Text, Context, and the Johannine Community: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Johannine Writings (New York: T&T Clark, 2015), 203–204; Lindars, John, 35–42; Richard Bauckham, The Gospel for All Christians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 1–11; Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 13–14, 113–123; Keener suggests that some godfearers would have been in the Johannine community but would not have been the primary group, in John, 1:153, 158–159.

  95. 95.

    Bauckham, Testimony, 13.

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  1. Vanguard University, Costa Mesa, CA, USA

    Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III

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Galvan Estrada III, R. (2023). Revisiting the Racial Problem in the Johannine Prologue. In: A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20305-3_1

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