To understand a book as its author intended, you don’t look to its future, but rather to its past. What has this author read, and what could he presuppose his audience to have read? These other pieces of literature are like tools in the author’s hands.

The biblical book of Proverbs famously features a vivid personification, Lady Wisdom. She pleads with people to seek and find her, and she even appears alongside God when he is creating. As Dr. Dustin Smith explains, this character appears in a number of later ancient Jewish writings in various ways, and can even be described as “incarnate” in certain people. Many of these would have been accessible both to the author of John and his audience.

Paul famously writes that Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). But as James Dunn has observed, this idea of Christ as God’s wisdom is more prominent in John than in any other New Testament book. Drawing on an impressive array of recent scholarship, in Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John Dr. Dustin Smith argues that “the Johannine Jesus is incarnate Wisdom and that this christological presentation permeates all twenty-one chapters of the Fourth Gospel” (p. 213).

In this new discussion we focus on the basics of “wisdom christology” and on how that idea sheds light on the famous opening to the fourth gospel, John 1:1-18.

Links for this episode:

Smith, Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John

Smith, The Son of God: Three Views of the Identity of Jesus

Transfigured: Dr. Dustin Smith – Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John

previous trinities podcast episodes with Dustin Smith

Unitarian Christian Alliance

podcast 301 – Dr. Daniel Boyarin on John 1

podcast 295 – James Martineau on John 1

John A. T. Robinson on “the Word” of John 1

How John 1 was intelligible in the first century

podcast 338 – What John 1 Meant

This week’s thinking music is “Spacedust” by airtone.