From Reflections on the life and character of Christ. By Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle
John i, 1. “In the beginning was the word.” The apostle here writes, not of the beginning of the world, but of the gospel, agreeably to the sense of the term in other parts of his writings, ch. xv, 27, xvi, 4; 1 John i, 1, ii, 7,; 2 John 5, 6; also Luke i, 2. This will not apply with respect to the “superior Lord,” the eternal Jehovah. There would be no propriety in saying that HE was in the beginning who was before any thing began; who is himself without beginning of days or end of years. “The word was with God.” So was Moses in the mount, and for a similar purpose: to receive instructions and supernatural communications, to be furnished for the discharge of the high office to which he was called. “And the word was a God.” So was Moses made unto Pharoah in the power given him to perform miracles; and this inferior sense of the term is authorized not only by various passages of scripture, but by our Lord himself in his debate with the Jews. To contend for the construction usually adopted, that the word was possessed of strict and proper deity, is to make the apostle a polytheist; for, having the moment before said he was with God, it was impossible he could, if really divine, be otherwise than another God. Any writer would be treated with just contempt who should talk of a man being with himself; and can we suppose that the pen of an inspired evangelist would express what from any other would be absolute nonsense? With respect to the word being the creator of all things, we are referred, in the title of the hymn, to Eph. iii, 9, 10, and Col. i., 16. But the former of these passages will not support our author’s position, that all things were made by Christ's own power; for it is there said, that “God created all things by Jesus Christ.” The words “by Jesus Christ” are, however, wanting in the most authentic manuscripts, and are decidedly rejected by Griesbach, in his Greek Testament, as an interpolation. In the latter of these texts, the all things said to be created by Christ, were not the heavens and the earth themselves, but things in them; such as thrones, dominions, &c. “And he is before all these things, and by him they subsist.” Why? Because “it pleased the Father that in him all fulness should dwell” so that here likewise the idea of original power in Christ fails. As little can it be doubted, that the all things made (or more properly, according to the sense of the original word, done) by Christ, were such only as related to the establishment of his religion in the world. As to the divine adoration of the word, nothing is said of it here, nor indeed in any other part of the New Testament.
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