The Riddle of the Baptist and the Genesis of the Prologue: John 1:1–18 in Its Oral/Aural Media Context

How might a greater sensitivity to ancient media culture impact understandings of the composition-history of the Fourth Gospel’s Prologue? Analysis of this passage has generally assumed that John 1:1-18 includes portions of an ancient “hymn” that would have been familiar to John’s first audiences from their liturgical experience. This conclusion is based both on the content of the unit and, more particularly, on its style and structure. But while source-critical approaches have produced interesting readings, they proceed from an essential misconception of the media dynamics of early Christian culture and, further, of the actual compositional dynamics of the passage itself. John 1:1-18 should not be understood as the reworking of a hymn, but rather as an original composition and as the Evangelist’s poetic expansion of a traditional saying associated with John the Baptist. To defend this thesis, I will first briefly review source-critical research on John 1:1-18, focusing on approaches that view the Prologue as a primitive hymn that has been absorbed into the current text. I will then place these approaches in dialogue with Werner Kelber’s research on the problem of the “original form” of an oral text, which would suggest that any attempt to isolate and reconstruct a primitive precursor to this passage is misguided. I will proceed to argue that the Prologue evidences a high level of compositional unity, and that this unity is a product of the fact that the Prologue was composed through the expansion of a traditional oral unit which may now be found on the lips of the Baptist at John 1:15. By all appearances, John 1:1-18 seems to have been orally composed as an organic element of the larger narrative that it introduces, and 1:15 should be regarded as the compositional genesis of the Prologue rather than as an interpolation.