Debating John 1: Eusebius vs. Marcellus

Most Christians today have a hard time imaging how the prologue to the fourth gospel (John 1:1-18) could be anything but a rock-solid and obvious support for the deity of Christ and for “the Trinity.” They have no idea that in early Christianity this unique, dense, and difficult passage was much disputed, even among mainstream Christians, leaving aside the wild misinterpretations of the second-century gnostics. Here is an excerpt from the late great English patristic scholar Maurice Wiles, summarizing the debate between Marcellus (died around 375) and Eusebius the famous church historian (died around 340) about the meaning of this famous text.

‘In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.’ Each writer can claim that in each of the three clauses of that famous text, the precise wording and the intended nuance of meaning are evidence in favour of his interpretation. We will take Eusebius first. The phrase ‘In the beginning’ shows that the Logos has a beginning other than itself. It is not itself anarchos [“without beginning”]. And thereby it is differentiated from the Father. The use of the preposition ‘with’ rather than ‘in’ in the second clause inhibits the use of the human analogy and indicates the hypostatic [i.e. substantial] as opposed to accidental [i.e. property-like] character of the Logos. The same implication is seen in the fact that the third clause describes the Logos as God rather than as God’s. Moreover the anarthrous character of the word for God (theos rather than ho theos) [“god” rather than “the god”] is further protection against any misunderstanding of the phrase as teaching an identity between the Logos and the supreme God.

Marcellus’s interpretation is preserved in Fragment 52. He identifies ‘the beginning’ with ‘the Father’, since God is he ‘from whom are all things’. Thus for him the first clause directly affrms that the Logos is in God, the very conception that Eusebius claims the author has carefully avoided. But the Logos is also ‘with God’, so that two distinguishable relations of the Logos to God must be intended. The difference is said to be one dunamis and energeia. That distinction is one that plays a large part in the thought of Marcellus. energeia is regularly described as the only category in terms of which one may speak of any separation of the Logos from God. The reason for such a separation is most commonly described as being for the work of creation, though sometimes for the sake of incarnation. It is the former that is explicitly envisaged here, since the later words of the prologue, ‘All things were made through him and without him was not anything made’, are cited by way of elucidation. The words dunamis and energeia are best translated as ‘capability’ or ‘faculty’ and ‘its exercise in practice’, rather than as ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’. In its activity as energeia, the Logos docs not cease to continue as dunamis. Thus the first two clauses of John 1 : 1 indicate the two coexisting forms of the relation of the Logos to God. Finally Marcellus understands the third clause, ‘the Word was God’, in a way that contrasts sharply with that of Eusebius. The anarthrous character of the word is not commented on, and the phrase is taken to indicate the undivided character of the Godhead [divine nature, i.e. the oneness of God].

It is not hard to see how such contrasting approaches to the exegesis of the Johannine prologue could have been carried on consistently throughout. But we do not have the evidence to trace that out in detail. One example from v. 3 must suffice. There the preposition dia [“through” or “by”] is used in describing the role of the Logos in creation. Marcellus appears to have argued that the use of dia supports his less independent, less personal conception of the Logos. Had the author conceived of the Logos in personal, hypostatic terms, hupo [“by”] would have been the natural word for him to have used. Eusebius counters this argument by stressing the mediatorial role of the Logos, and sees the use of the word as ensuring our recognition of the Father as the ultimate source of creation.

Neither the position of Eusebius nor that of Marcellus on the pre-existence of Christ established itself as the faith of the Church. For while orthodoxy unequivocally sided with Eusebius on the personal hypostatic character of the pre-existent Son, it eliminated the clearly secondary and subordinate understanding of his status that was an intrinsic element in the teaching of Eusebius. Yet it might be claimed that Eusebius and Marcellus represent, rather better than later orthodoxy, the two basic exegetical options in relation to New Testament teaching about the pre-existence of Christ. As the continuing divergence of views among New Testament scholars today reveals, it is possible to read most of the relevant texts in either way.

– Maurice Wiles, “Person or Personification? A Patristic Debate about Logos,” in The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology in Memory of George Bradford Caird, Oxford, 1987, 287-88.