4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
To the author of the Gospel, the Word of God was both distinct from God and yet at the same time was in some way truly God. This Word of God (Logos/Memra) played an exclusive rule in the creation of the world, as we read in the verses above. Moreover, according to John, the life force that makes any of God’s creation breathe, move, and exist was intricately connected with and depended upon that very Word of God. In this section, the author of the Gospel compares this Word with light shining in the darkness, stating resolutely that the power of darkness was not successful in overcoming it.
The remainder of this Gospel, including the imagery of light and darkness, was initially, and for many years, attributed by theologians to Greek Platonic influence on the author and therefore upon the composition of this Gospel. However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 and their later availability for scholarship-at-large few decades later, a wholly different picture has eventually emerged. The themes of light and darkness among other similar themes abound in Dead Sea Scrolls Collection (1QS 3.13-4.26).
Scholarly debate about the nature of the community that preserved, and in many cases authored the scrolls, found by accident by a Bedouin boy, is still far from being settled. Was the Qumran Community, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, a marginal Jewish monastic group with almost no connection to the Jewish world-at-large, or was it a spiritual and learning center of sorts for a much larger Essene movement active throughout Roman Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora? If Josephus Flavius[1] is to be believed (much of recent study has confirmed such an optimism), in his first century report, this community almost equaled the number of members of pharisaic Judaism and therefore its influence in the Jewish world. In any case, while it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of the direct influence of the Qumran Community upon this Gospel; this archeological discovery has particularly placed this Gospel finally and firmly in the native conceptual thought world of pre-Christian Judaisms.[2]
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© By Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg, Ph.D.
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[1] Josephus, The Antiquity of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1
[2] An important point needs to be made clear. Since in their writings the pre-Christian Jewish Qumran sect referred to itself as a New Covenant fellowship; and since they seem to have coined the technical term “The Holy Spirit” freely used in the Gospels, does this automatically mean that the community influenced the composition of the Gospel? Not necessarily. What it does mean, however, is that the Qumran community, and some manuscripts that were either associated or authored there, was part of the theological and biblical “air” that everyone else breathed. The Gospel of John and its author was no exception to this.
