At Christmastime Christians celebrate the incarnation—the word means “enfleshment” or “embodiment in flesh.” Today what the average church member understands by “incarnation” is reflected in Matthew 1:23 (date: 80-100): Jesus, a Jewish child born to Mary, is Emmanu-el, which means God is with us—although Matthew never explains how God is with us in Jesus. A similar idea appears in Luke 1:35 (date 70-90). Mark (date: around 70), however, does not use incarnation language about Jesus, and does not know the birth traditions of Matthew and Luke. The idea that God is incarnate in the birth of Jesus, however, takes several centuries to crystallize in Christianity.

     Matthew’s idea was not a new concept. Antecedents existed in the Graeco-Roman world. For example, the twelve traditional Greek Gods appear in the form or guise of human beings; or the legendary heroes of Greek tradition, such as Herakles, and real human beings like Alexander were sons of Zeus by human mothers. Even the Jewish writer Philo portrayed certain human beings as the embodiment of divine Wisdom.

     In Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus is portrayed as claiming “to speak with divine inspiration and authorization as in some sense the representative of God.” But there is nothing in the synoptic gospels to suggest “that Jesus saw himself in some sense as God, as the incarnation of deity” (Dunn, “Incarnation,” 401). In Paul’s writings the classic statement of Jesus as a divine figure “incarnated” in bodily form is found in an early Christian hymn quoted by Paul in Philippians 2:5-11. The hymn uses incarnation language, but is also dualistic—that is, the divine figure does not become human, but merely assumes the form or guise of a human being. The theology of the hymn scarcely meets the later standards of Christian orthodoxy:

Christ Jesus, who though in the form of God did not count equality with God [not God, but equal to God] a thing to be held onto, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant [not really human, but only a divine figure in servile form], being born in the likeness of human beings [a divine figure in a human likeness]. And being found in human form [human in form only] he humbled himself...(Phil 2:5-8).

     Paul thought of Jesus as “God’s Son,” but how Jesus came by that relationship to God is different from the synoptic birth narratives. Paul thought of Jesus as a human being (Galatians 4:4) whom God appointed to son-ship when he was raised from the dead (Romans 1:3-4)—i.e. not at his birth. I find no incarnation language like the synoptic birth narratives in Paul’s writings.

     At the end of the first century the prologue of John (1:1-18) in language reminiscent of Lady Wisdom’s role in the creation (Proverbs 8:22-31) describes the divine Word as pre-existent with God, adding a divine character to the Word—“and the Word was God” (John 1:1-3). The Word (which was also the true Light, John 1:9), “became flesh” and temporarily resided among us (John 1:14). Other passages in John support the idea that John 1:14 is incarnation language (6:46, 14:9, John 10:33, 20:28).

     “Became Flesh” is very odd and obscure incarnation language at best. Clearly John thought of Jesus as a human being, for he describes him as “the son of Joseph” (1:45, 6:42), and John knows how human beings are born (John 16:21). So why use such an odd expression (“becoming flesh”) for describing the advent of the Word into the world? The language is hardly a personal description for the birth of a child. John uses sarx “flesh,” meaning a living being (in this case, of the human variety, John 17:2), rather than using anthropos, meaning human being. Such language suggests that the Word, while a living physical being like us, nevertheless is not one of us—a dualistic motif.

     The statement likely is formulated to oppose Docetism, an early ideology opposed by Christian orthodoxy. The Docetists argued that the body of Jesus was a phantasm (an unreal apparition). Hence, they argued that Jesus suffered and died in appearance only. From the perspective of that early Christian debate, John 1:14 is insisting that the Word was not intangible sound or immaterial luminance, but rather something actual, substantial, and physical—fleshly even. Opposition to Docetism is a feature of the Johannine letters (1 John 1:1-2, 4:2-3; 2 John 7), which were written about the same time as the Gospel of John, and in which exist echoes of the same sensual language as John 1:14.

     The issue addressed by this strange language in John 1:14 concerns the substantiality of the Word. The situation is similar to Lady Wisdom becoming substantially incarnate in Torah (Baruch 3:37-4:1), although there, as in John, there is not a one to one relationship between Lady Wisdom and the Book of the Torah. The prologue of John sets the reader up to understand that Word and Light are “enfleshed” in Jesus Christ. The term Light is specifically applied to Jesus in the narrative (John 8:12, 9:5, 12:35-36, 12:46), but oddly the principal term used in the prologue “Word” is not. John’s language created huge problems for later theologians, since it never explained how the divine incarnate Word and the human being Jesus are related.

     Is Jesus God incarnate? The earliest followers of Jesus did not think so, and it was not until the 4th century, particularly in the Nicene Creed, that such an idea became the official belief of Christian orthodoxy—where Jesus is thought of as “true God of true God.”

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

Source: James D. G. Dunn, “Incarnation” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (David Noel Freedman, et al. eds.; 6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992), 3.397-404.

Posted by Charles Hedrick at 8:56am
 

Jim,
Thanks for your reply. I think such cases might be worth further consideration if the children involved were able to accurately recall things like their former incarnation's Social Security Number, the names of their former incarnation's teachers and sweethearts, and the full address of their former incarnation's first and last residences. Are there many cases like this?
Lee
Posted by Lee Penya on 12/25/2012 at 9:59pm