"I AM THE LIGHT OF THE

WORLD" (JOHN 8:12):

CONNOTATION AND CONTEXT

J. Gerald Janzen
MacAllister-Petticrew Professor of Old Testament, Emeritus
Christian Theological Seminary

I n John 8:12 Jesus proclaims—seemingly out of the blue—"I am

the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in
darkness, but will have the light of life.*'1 What does he mean by
"light" and "darkness"? And what, therefore, does it mean to "follow"
Jesus so that one has "the light of life" and no longer "walks in
darkness"? These questions are not easy to answer, because, as
metaphors go, "light" appears in a wide variety of contexts within a
given culture, and across all cultures; and its primary connotations
will vary with the context within which the reader seeks to understand
its metaphorical tenor. Should we, for example, take the
light/darkness contrast as reflecting the influence on Jewish
apocalyptic imagery of Iranian religion and its opposed leading
figures, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman? Closer to home, should we look
to the Qumran sectarians for the primary interpretive context, insofar
as that community is taken by some to be the origin of the phrase
"light of life"? Should we be attentive to one of its documents, "The

unless otherwise indicated, scripture is taken from the Revised Standard

Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. Used by permission. Allrightsreserved.
War of the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness,"
which may likewise be reflected in Jesus' saying, "While you have
the light believe in the light, that you may become children of light"
(John 12:36)? Nowadays many scholars favor a Qumran context,
while of those who would look to the Old Testament as the primary
context for interpreting both John 12 and the Qumran texts, H. Braun
says, "unmöglich," that is, "impossible."2 On the assumption that
sometimes the impossible just takes a little longer, in this paper I will
attempt to show two things: that a specific aspect of the Old
Testament is the primary context in which to interpret John 8:12 (and
12:36); and that, so interpreted, the claim "I am the light of the world"
may be heard in reference to its primary connotation which then
provides the focus for all the secondary connotations.
Before doing so, I hasten to assert that I have no doubt as to
the influence of the Qumran texts on the choices of word and phrase
in John's "light/darkness" discourses. But in such matters, the
question is always whether such a connection provides the context
within which to interpret John, or the context vis-à-vis which to
interpret this Gospel. If, for example, J. Louis Martyn is correct in
taking the peculiar use of the Hagar/Sarah story of Genesis 21 in
Galatians 4 as Paul's way of rebutting a quite different use of that
story on the part of his opponents in Galatia, it is always possible that
John uses the terminology of the Qumran sectarians precisely to
engage the sort of apocalyptic vision they entertain and to transform it
in the light of Jesus as the Christ. It is the case, after all, that while
John several times quotes the Old Testament and many, many more
times clearly alludes to it and echoes it, and while he and his
opponents several times refer to "Moses" or "the scriptures" as
sources of validation, they never in any of these modes of reference
appeal to a source of validation that would have left centuries of
commentators wondering what in the world they were appealing to
until we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

For a summary of recent views, see H. Braun, "Qumran und das Neue
Testament," Theologische Rundschau 28 (1962): 218-20. See also Raymond
E. Brown, The Gospel According to John: i-xii, The Anchor Bible (Garden
City: Doubleday and Company, 1980).

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 7 Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

LIGHT'S NEW SYMBOLIC LIFE

In his short classic Metaphor and Reality, Philip Wheelwright
offers what he calls a "metapoeücs, which is to say an ontology not so
much of concepts as of poetic sensitivity."3 After setting out what he
understands by the word "metaphor," or as he also calls it, "tensive
symbol," he asks concerning tensive symbols, "[h]ow wide-ranging is
their power of suggestion and evocation? What is the social extent of
their expressive function?" And he proposes "five main grades of
comprehensiveness, or breadth of appeal." His distinctions are of such
extraordinary usefulness that it will be worthwhile to quote him at
some length here (I shall insert bracketed numerals for ease of
reference):

[1] A symbol may complete its work as the presiding

image of a particular poem; [2] it may be repeated and
developed by a certain poet as having special importance
and significance for him personally; [3] it may develop
literary life ("ancestral vitality") by being passed from poet
to poet, being mingled and stirred to new life in fresh
poetic contexts; [4] it may have significance for an entire
cultural group or an entire body of religious believers; and
finally [5] it may be archetypal, in the sense of tending to
have a fairly similar significance for all or a large portion
of mankind, independently of borrowings and historical
influences.4

Wheelwright goes on to elaborate each of these "grades of

comprehensiveness" under the following headings:

(1) The presiding image of a single poem (pp. 99-102).

(2) The personal symbol (pp. 102-5).
(3) Symbols of ancestral vitality (pp. 105-8).

3
Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968), 20.
4
Ibid., 98-99.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 117

 (4) Symbols of cultural range (pp. 108-10).
(5) Archetypal symbols, or archetypes (pp. 110-28).

Interestingly for our purposes, he ends his discussion of grade 4 with

a paragraph on the Gospel of John, which, he says, "offers the
greatest treasure of Christian symbolic material." Then he mentions
the following "prominent images" for Christ: Door, Bread of Life,
Vine, Word, and Light With the exception of "Word," these images
are all introduced by the phrase Ego eimi, "I am."5
Now, it is important to note a tension in Wheelwright's
discussion of "light." In his lengthy analysis of archetypal symbols—
which he has already said "have a fairly similar significance for all or
a large portion of mankind"—he says of "light" that "[o]f all
archetypal symbols there is probably none more widespread and more
immediately understandable than light, as symbolizing certain mental
and spiritual qualities,"6 This should mean that, whatever might be the
causes of misunderstandings and conflicts between Jesus and his
opponents in this Gospel (not to speak of such misunderstandings and
conflicts with other extra-biblical religions), everyone would
immediately grasp the central point and attendant connotations of
Jesus's claim to be "the light of the world." Or would they? Despite
what he says in general about archetypal symbols, and despite what
he says about light as such a symbol, Wheelwright says, at the very
end of his discussion of grade 4, "Each of the last four symbols
[bread; vine; word; light] had a precursory symbolic life before
Christianity, but they receive a new meaning in the Christian

5
If C. T. R. Hayward is correct in his analysis of the background of ho
logos in John 1:1-2, as rooted ultimately in the ehyeh I ego eimi I Targumic
memra9 of Exodus 3:14, then there is in fact the deepest connection between
*'Word" in this Gospel and the seven "I am" pronouncements. (C. T. R.
Hayward, 'The Holy Name of the God of Moses and the Prologue of St.
John's Gospel," New Testament Studies 25 [1978-79]: 16-32; and Robert
Hayward, Divine Name and Presence: The Memra [Totowa, N.J.: Allanheld,
Osmun, 1981],)
^Wheelwright, 116.

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 "/Arn the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

context. So what is that context, specifically, in the Gospel of John,

what is the "precursory symbolic life" of the symbol "light of the
world," and what is the new meaning it receives in this Gospel?
I will begin with what the writer of the Fourth Gospel
identifies as the central purpose for writing: "Now Jesus did many
other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in
this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his
name" (20:30-31). Here, the writer applies to Jesus of Nazareth two
images: "Christ/Messiah" and "Son of God." This conclusion mirrors
the conclusion to the prologue, according to which "the law was
given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No
one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father, he has made him known" (1:17-18). Here again, Jesus is
explicitly characterized as "Christ/Messiah" and as "only Son
[monogenes huios]'9 Even if we follow the Greek text on 1:18, as
presented in the edition of Nestle-Aland, and adopt the manuscript
reading "God" (monogenes theosf instead of "Son," nevertheless the
term monogenes, together with the reference in 1:14 to the "only Son
from the Father," secures the connotation of Sonship in verse 18. The
importance for this Gospel of Jesus as Christ/Messiah can be traced in
John the Baptist's repeated denial that he is the Christ (1:20, 25-28,
30; 3:28); in Andrew's report to Peter that "we have found the
Messiah" (1:41); in the affirmation of the woman at the well, "I know
that Messiah is coming" and Jesus's response, "I who speak to you
am he" (ego eimi, ho lalon soi) (4:25-26); in the controversy over
Jesus and messiahship in 7:26, 27, 31, 41, 42; 9:22; 10:24; 12:34; in
Martha's full-bore affirmation, "I believe that you are the Christ, the
Son of God, he who is coming into the world" (11:27); and in Jesus's
words in his high-priestly prayer (17:3). It is not without interest—
indeed, I take it to be of the utmost significance—that apart from

7
Wheelwright, 110; italics added.
8
As Raymond Brown observes, this reading is supported by the best
Greek manuscripts.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 119

 1:17-18 and 20:31 the only two places 9 in John where "Christ" and
"Son of God" occur together are 11:27, in the context of the dead
Lazarus who is shortly to be resurrected, and 12:34, in the context of
Jesus' showing "by what death he was to die." The clear implication
is that, whatever others may have understood as the means by which
Israel's Messiah would bring deliverance to this people, 10 for this
Gospel writer the phrases "Messiah/Christ" and "Son of God" are to
be understood henceforth in terms of Jesus's crucifixion and
resurrection to the glory of God. So, if the Gospel of John is a story of
Jesus as Messiah/Christ and Son of God, those terms are to be
understood as receiving their meaning in and through the Gospel
narrative, and not simply (to use Wheelwright's words) in terms of
their "precursory symbolic life."
Now, I find it intriguing, in reviewing the occurrences of the
word "Messiah/Christ" in John, that the positive embraces of this

^his statement may need material qualification in view of Nathaniel's

confession in 1:49, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of
Israel!" But in respect to the collocation of the specific terms "Christ" and
"Son of God" in John, my observation holds good formally.
10
In Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), Alan F. Segal succinctly
represents the view that "[n]owhere in pre-Christian Jewish tradition is there
the slightest evidence of an expectation of a messiah whose suffering will be
redemptive for the people. The Christian idea had to come from somewhere
else" (84; see also 67, 143). He says, further, "[t]he identification of the
servant in Isaiah S3 with the messiah is first attested by the Christians" (93).
To be sure, the text in Isaiah S3 and its near Isaianic context did not of itself
generate such an expectation. But in retrospect—"doing a double take," as it
were, in light of the testimony concerning Jesus's death and resurrection—
one may observe that if (as many hold) the servant in Isaiah S3 is to be
construed as a collective figure for Israel, and if in Isaiah 55:1—5 that same
Israel is designated as the collective recipient of God's covenant with David
vis-à-vis other peoples and nations, the conflation of the images for Israel in
these two proximate Isaianic passages may be taken in retrospect to
reverberate with hitherto unheard connotations. See my essay, "On the Moral
Nature of God's Power: Yahweh and the Sea in Job and Second Isaiah,"
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 56 (1994): 458-78.

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 "I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

term come from northerners—one might say, Galileans (1:41; 4:25,

39)—while the first indication of resistance appears among Judahites
("Jews") in Jerusalem, who object to the notion of Jesus as Messiah
on the grounds that the Messiah should come from Bethlehem (7:42)
while Jesus comes from Galilee (7:41). This is most intriguing,
especially in the context of the several allusions and appeals to
scripture in this passage, appeals and allusions which, among other
things, throw the reader's peripheral vision in the direction of the Old
Testament as the frame of reference within which this controversy is
to be heard. I shall return later to the possible significance of this
Galilee/Jerusalem difference, and to its scriptural basis. At this point,
I want to take up another line of investigation, involving the seven "I
am" passages, of which "I am the light of the world" is one.

THE INTERPLAY OF SYMBOL AND SETTING

As every well-taught Sunday school child knows, one of the

distinctive features of the Gospel of John is its characterization of
Jesus as making seven "I am" claims about himself, as

(1) the Bread of Life (6:35,48, 51);

(2) the Light of the World (8:12);
(3) the Door (10:7,9);
(4) the Good Shepherd (10:11,14);
(5) the Resurrection and the Life (11:25);
(6) the Way, the Truth, and the Life (or, the True and
Living Way) (14:6); and
(7) the True Vine (15:1,5).

Do these claims—as apparently in 8:12—simply come out of the blue

into contexts unprepared for such utterances? If they did, one
implication would be that their connotations are so self-evident (given
the universal significance of bread, light, way, life, and so on) that
they need no context to guide their interpretation. But in most of these
seven cases the claim does arise in a thematic context, and it will
repay us to review the evidence to see if in fact they all do.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 121

 In the first instance, "I am the Bread of Life" comes in the
context of actions and discussion concerning food. What happens
here is typical of the Jesus of this Gospel: a term or an issue engaged
at one level of reference and understanding is suddenly shifted into
another register. As examples we may cite the shift from ordinary
water as slaking thirst (4:7) to Living Water (4:10), and again in the
same chapter, from food as assuaging hunger (4:8, 31, 33) to food as
doing the will of God and finishing God's work (4:32, 34). The
hermeneutical segue here goes to the heart of Wheelwright's
distinction between metaphors of universal range (such as food) and
metaphors of revised and thereby circumscribed connotation, which
yet, precisely as revised, are offered for universal appropriation (such
as Jesus's flesh for the life of the world in John 6:51). So it is that
what begins in chapter 6 as "ordinary" bread (admittedly multiplied in
an extraordinary way) becomes something quite extraordinary in
every sense of the word.
Again, "I am the Resurrection and the Life" comes in the
context of a death that leads Jesus first to invoke, and Martha to
affirm, the belief current among some Jews concerning a
"resurrection at the last day" (11:23-24). It is this exchange that
provides the thematic context for Jesus's fifth "I am." Similarly, in
the sixth instance, Jesus's "I am" comes in the context of words about
his going away and then coming again to take his disciples to himself,
all of this a matter of "a way" and a "destination" that they know. It is
Thomas's candid confession of ignorance on these two points that
triggers Jesus's "I am."
What about the third, fourth, and seventh instances,
concerning Jesus as the Door, the Good Shepherd, and the True Vine?
In the first two of these, Jesus has taken up a metaphor with roots
older than Hammurabi in Mesopotamia and long familiar in the Old
Testament—the king or leader imaged as a shepherd. But he develops
it in his own way, with the result that (or in order that) his hearers do
not understand what he is getting at. It is in this context that he
identifies himself as the Door and the Good Shepherd. Granted that
the latter image is generically clear from its scriptural occurrences,
what of the Door? Given how Jesus will shortly reiterate that the

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 "lAm the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

Good Shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep and take it up
again, and that this whole image then is to be understood as receiving
redefinition through that act, two passages come to my mind: first,
Psalm 24:7-10, with its reference to "gates" and "everlasting doors"
whose connotations in regard to the power of death have been so
suggestively explored by Alan Cooper;11 and second, Psalm 118:14—
23, at the heart of which "David" is depicted as returning victorious
from battle to enter the gates of righteousness along with the
righteous (plural)—a psalm appropriated early in Christian circles in
reference to the passion and resurrection of Christ. Whether the
connotations of the Door are correctly identified here, the fact

"Alan Cooper, "Ps 24:7-10: Mythology and Exegesis," Journal of

Biblical Literature 102 (1983): 37-60. In Cooper's analysis, the "everlasting
doors" are "none other than the gates of the underworld," and these psalm
verses reflect an earlier "descent myth—a myth in which a high god,
forsaking his ordinary domain, descends to the netherworld, where he must
confront the demonic forces of the infernal realm" (42-43). He goes on to
say, "Like Psalm 29, Ps 24:7-10 describes the kingship and majesty of
YHWH in the language of Canaanite myth" (53). It may be objected that the
imagery of the gate and the door in Psalm 24 has a vertical reference,
pertaining to the extent of God's divine realm as encompassing also the
infernal region of the dead, while the imagery of the door in John 10:1-5 is
horizontal and purely mundane, pertaining to the way in which the true
shepherd genuinely cares for his sheep. But when Jesus goes on to "unpack"
the parable, in 10:7-18, suddenly it is all about a shepherd who gives his life
for his sheep, so that they may have life—eternal life—in such fashion that
none may pluck them out of his or his Father's hand. How does this relate
back to the door? And come to think of it, what overtones may arise between
"he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" and "Lazarus, come
out!" in 11:43? Is it possible that the contrast between the true shepherd and
false shepherds, in 10:1-2, lies in the fact that they seek to rule without
going through the "everlasting doors" of death in behalf of their sheep—that,
indeed, their rule consists in their power to administer death to those who
oppose their rule? In that case, to know the voice of the true shepherd, and to
"not know the voice of strangers," may mean to recognize in the crucified
and risen Jesus the true pattern of messiahship and the discipleship it calls
for, and to abjure the allure of messiahship as conventionally understood.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 123

remains that both "I am" statements come in a parabolic context in
which they take on their distinctive meaning.
What of the seventh "I am"? Does not "I am the true vine" in
15:1 come out of the blue? Granted it comes in the midst of a long
discourse; but what, if anything, in the form of a viticulture allusion
in chapter 14 prepares the reader for the pronouncement in 15:1?
Dearly as I would love to find such an allusion in the text itself, I
confess that I cannot. But there may be a clue in the possible
implications of the strange ending to chapter 14: "Rise, let us go
hence." What is this meant to signal, in the midst of a discourse which
then continues, seemingly unbroken, for another three chapters?
C. K, Barrett opines that the "discourse comes to a close; it
was originally intended to be followed at once by 18:l."12 In the same
vein, Raymond Brown writes, "The last line of [v.] 31 was the ending
of the original Last Discourse. We have suggested that the final editor
did not want to tamper with this ending and so, despite the fact that he
was creating an awkward sequence, added additional forms of the
Last Discourse after [v.] 31." Summarizing Dodd's attempt to read
the ending of chapter 14 as containing a theological message, he
rejects it and concludes, "It is more plausible that the final editor
simply made the best of a difficult situation and did not seek to force
a new meaning on [v.] 31."13
Let us retrace the reasoning here, from the point of view of
the final redactor. There is, supposedly, a form of the Fourth Gospel
that at one point moves directly, and smoothly, from 14:31 to 18:1:

"I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world

may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go hence."
When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with
his disciples across the Kidron valley, where there was a
garden, which he and his disciples entered.

l2
C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St. John (London: S.P.C.K.,
1958), 392.
13
Brown, 656-57.

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 "lAm the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

Along comes the final editor who decides that he should insert
"additional forms of the Last Discourse." Where to put them? He
decides to put them between "Rise, let us go hence" and the report in
18:1 of their going to cross the valley to a garden. Why put them
there? Why not find some place prior to the end of 14:31? And if he
can find no place there to put them, why not delete the words "rise, let
us go hence" or transpose them so as to follow the end of chapter 17?
Because he "did not want to tamper with this ending"? But with all
due respect, he certainly tampers with the sequence between 14:31
and 18:1, creating what appears to be a humongous non-sequiturl
After such a disturbance of the text before him, why would the final
editor stick at deleting one little clause? I find such explanations lame
in the extreme. They do serve the interests of those scholars who are
engaged in reconstructing the compositional history of this Gospel,
for whom the "awkwardness" of the present text is a tell-tale ragged
"seam" between compositional stages. But there is always the
question of whether the "seam" that is discerned is a compositional
clue or a narrative stratagem. And even where it is clearly an instance
of the former this does not thereby rule out its being also an instance
of the latter. That is to say, if we suppose that the final editor placed
chapters 15-17 between an earlier smooth segue from 14:31 to 18:1,
without excising the end of 14:31, this must mean that the final editor
wanted us to read these chapters as following from that call to "go
hence" but before arriving at the garden. Westcott puts the matter
simply:

We must suppose that after these words were spoken the

Lord, with the eleven, at once left the house and went on
the way which finally led to Gethsemane; and
consequently that the discourses which follow, xv.-xvii.,
were spoken after He had gone from the upper room and
before He crossed the Kidron (xviii.l).14

14
B. F. Westcott, The Gospel according to St. John (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B.Eerdmans, 1978), 211.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 125

 Let us "suppose" with Westcott that this is how to read the
Gospel. May we then discern a context within which Jesus's
discourse about the vine takes on its significance? I think we may. We
may remind ourselves that for all its frequent loftiness of discourse
the Gospel of John is very conscious of the locus of various events
and conversations: Galilee; Jacob's well; the Temple environs; the
pool at Bethesda; and so on. These geographic loci typically are tied
into the theological "loci," or topics, raised there.15 Oddly enough, for
all the importance of Gethsemane in the Synoptics, John seems to
pass it by completely. Or rather, John disperses the Gethsemane
themes to different places in his narrative. For example, Jesus's agony
of prayer concerning the cup that looms before him to drink (Mark
14:32-39 and parallels) is echoed in John 12:27. I would like to
suggest that chapter 15 forms another such displacement. In the case
of the other "I am" passages examined to this point, I have looked in
what precedes the pronouncement for the context whose theme is
heightened by the "I am." In the case of the True Vine
pronouncement I have sought in vain to find any viticultural
thematics in chapter 14. Of course not! The context in this instance is
not retrospective, but prospective! The language about vine, branches,
and vinedresser arises in view (figuratively and literally) of the
garden into which they are soon to enter. Granted that it is an olive
grove, and the name of the place bears witness to the pressing out of
oil (gat shemane)16 rather than the treading out of grapes;

l5
The English word "topic" comes, of course, from the Greek word
topos, "place, location." The medieval phrase loci communes refers,
likewise, to common topics of theological discussion and debate. One
prominent biblical example of the interaction between geographical topoi
and literary/theological topics is the meeting of future bride and groom at a
well. See my essay, "How Can a Man Be Born When He Is Old?
Jacob/Israel in Genesis and the Gospel of John," Encounter 65, no. 4
(Autumn 2004): 323-43.
16
In The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 80, Philip Wheelwright
quotes the following poem by Emily Dickinson as an example of the
"semantic rejuvenation" of words through their "conceptual dislodgement"
from conventional contexts of usage and their embeddedness in new

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 7 Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

nevertheless, it is in that garden, where Jesus first meets his captors,

that his own pruning at the hand of the vinedresser, intimated already
in 12:27, is about to commence in earnest. And so it is the perfect
context for him to instruct his disciples on the need to abide in him—
and what it may mean for them—if they, like him, are to bear much
fruit.

contexts: "Essential oils are wrung; / The attar from the rose / Is not
expressed by suns alone, / It is the gift of screws." In passing, one may
wonder whether Dickinson derived the inspiration for this poem from the
following passage by Robert Southey, part of his contribution to Omniana, a
volume of readings which he produced with Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"Ottar of Roses: In the Historie Generale de l'Empire de Mogul (T. 1, p.
327) compiled by Catrou the Jesuit from Manouchi's papers, this perfume is
said to have been discovered by accident. Nur-Jaham, the favourite wife of
the Mogul Jahan-Guir, among her other luxuries had a small canal of rose
water. As she was walking with the Mogul along its banks, they perceived a
thin film upon the water.. .it was an essential oil made by the heat of the sun.
They were delighted with its exquisite odour, and means were immediately
taken for preparing by art a substance like that which had been thus
fortuitously produced" (Robert Gittings, ed., Omniana or Horae Otiosiores
by Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge [Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press
Ltd., 1969], 291).
With reference to the topic of this paper, one might say that while the
light of the sun is "fortuitously" produced, the Light of the World, as shining
from Gethsemane, is "the gift of screws." As in Dickinson's poem, which
rejuvenates the word "express" by invoking its original meaning, "press
out," the Gospel of John rejuvenates the "expressive" functions of words in
narrating the passage of the incarnate Word through Gethsemane. Austin
Fairer, in commenting on the debate between Rudolf Bultmann and several
German colleagues on the question of "demythologizing" the New
Testament, suggested as an alternative that in the New Testament itself we
are presented, not with the demythologizing, but with the crucifixion of
images. He had in mind specifically the crucifixion, in Jesus's death, of the
image of Messiah as God's means of deliverance. See his essay, "An English
Appreciation," in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans
Werner Bartsch (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 212-23; and
especially his sermon, "Emptying Out the Sense," in A Celebration of Faith
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), 31-35.

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 127

 This last point is underscored by a telling thematic connection
between the end of chapter 14 and the parable of the vine in chapter
15. Brown observes that

Verse 31 [of chapter 14] is the only passage in the NT that

states that Jesus loves the Father. What this love consists in
is made clear by the second line, for the "and" that joins
the second line to the first is epexegetical...—the love
consists in doing what the Father has commanded, just as
the Christian's love for Jesus consists in doing what Jesus
has commanded.17

If "doing what the Father has commanded" has its supreme instance
in Jesus laying down his life for the sheep (10:11-18), and if Jesus as
the true vine is the supreme instance of being pruned at the hands of
the vinedresser in order to bear much fruit, then the application of that
parable to the disciples in their love for him in chapter 15 makes
14:31 a perfect set-up for what follows.
All of this is by way of asking whether, in 8:12, "I am the
light of the world" does in fact drop out of the blue without any
thematic preparation in the narrative. By now we should expect there
to have been a preparation, and by now it is difficult to miss the
implications of chapter 7. Here the references to "the Christ" mount
up with unusual frequency, and the controversy converges on the
issue of locale: How can a Messiah who is supposed to come from
Bethlehem come from Galilee? What scriptural basis could such a
notion claim?
We may note, parenthetically, that the pericope concerning
the woman taken in adultery appears to have found its way into the
interval between 7:52 and 8:12 very late in the history of the
manuscript transmission of this Gospel. Unlike the question of layers
of compositional history in regard to chapters 15-17, where no
manuscript testifies to an original sequence from 14:31 directly to
15:1, in the present instance the manuscript evidence for a sequence
from 7:52 directly to 8:12 is overwhelming. Even if we wish to take

17
Brown, 656.

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 "I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

the intervening pericope as in some sense providing a context for

Jesus's pronouncement in 8:12, that context is ancillary to the main
context provided by chapter 7 and in particular 7:52, where Jesus's
opponents taunt him, "Are you from Galilee too? Search and you will
see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee."
In my view, Jesus is to be construed as responding directly to
this taunt by saying, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me
will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." In saying
this, I propose, he lays implicit claim to an Isaianic passage that
begins with a sharp division between a prophet and his disciples on
one side and his unbelieving hearers on the other, a sealing up of his
testimony (sic!) and teaching (sic!) among his disciples (sic!), an
assertion that "I and the children who the LORD has given me are
signs [semeia] and portents in Israel from the LORD of Hosts, who
dwells on Mount Zion," a proclamation of the coming of "gloom and
darkness" upon the prophet's opponents (Isa. 8:1-22), and then these
words:

But there will be no gloom for her that was in anguish. In

the former time he brought into contempt the land of
Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he
will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the
Jordan, Galilee of the nations (Isa. 9:1).

And these words are followed immediately by the words,

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.

And in short order the reader is ushered into the dynastic oracle,

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;
and the government will be upon his shoulder,
and his name will be called
"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 129

 Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom,
to establish it, and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and for evermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this (Isa. 9:6-7).

The pronouncement "I am the light of the world" is, then, part and
parcel of the primary theme of John's Gospel: that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, whose coming, like the announced royal
birth in Isaiah 9, brings light to those who walked in darkness.
That the Messianic theme should contain such a connotation
of light might be taken to reflect the universal significance inherent in
light as an archetypal symbol. As Wheelwright writes, in a vein that is
highly suggestive,

Light and lordship are two image-ideas drawn from

familiar experience which are elements in the complex
image-idea of Deity....In theology the image-idea of light
is developed into the abstract idea of omniscience, that of
lordship into the abstract idea of omnipotence. Although
the ideas of omniscience and omnipotence are humanly
unintelligible and are probably both, when examined in
strict logic, self-contradictory, this slight difficulty does
not diminish their symbolic power. The mythological ideas
of light and lordship and the theological ideas of
omniscience and omnipotence exercise roughly parallel
semantic features.18

Wheelwright's remarks are nicely exemplified already in

Mesopotamian political religion. The collection of laws known as the
Code of Hammurabi opens with an extensive prologue in which that
Babylonian king sets forth his conception of the basis and character of
his royal rule. As the following lines indicate, the imagery displays

I8
Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 123.

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 "I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

generic similarities to some of the royal imagery in the Old

Testament:

When lofty Anum, king of the Annunaki,

(and) Enlil, lord of heaven and earth,...
determined for Marduk, thefirst-bornof Enki,
the Enlil functions over all mankind,...
called Babylon by its exalted name,
made it supreme in the world,
established for him in its midst an enduring kingship,
whose foundations are as firm as heaven and earth—
at that time Anum and Enlil named me
to promote the welfare of the people,
me, Hammurabi, the devout, god-fearing prince,
to cause justice to prevail in the land,
to destroy the wicked and the evil,
that the strong might not oppress the weak,
to rise like the sun over the black-headed (people),
and to light up the land.
Hammurabi, the shepherd, called by Enlil, am I;
the one who makes affluence and plenty abound.

The prologue that begins with these words, after another 150 lines of
Hammurabi's self-description, draws to a close with these words:

the ancient seed of royalty, the powerful king, the sun of

Babylon,
who causes light to go forth over the lands of Sumer and
Akkad;
the king who has made the four quarters of the world
subservient;
the favorite of Inanna am I.
When Marduk commissioned me to guide the people
aright,

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 131

 to direct the land, thereby promoting the welfare of the
people,
At that time (I decreed):19

And then follow the laws through which this universal kingship of
Hammurabi is exercised, a kingship imaged at the beginning and the
end in terms of the rising of the sun to light up the land. That kingship
is the human expression of the divine kingship of Marduk. It is clear
that Hammurabi as "the sun of Babylon, who causes light to go forth
over the lands of Sumer and Akkad," is the effulgence of Marduk. For
in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, when the gods proclaim
Marduk as their king, and in so doing "proclaim his fifty names" as
signifying that all divine powers henceforth are concentrated in his
person, they begin by saying,

He whose ways are glorious, whose deeds are likewise,

MARDUK, as Anu, his father, called himfromhis birth;
Who provides grazing and drinking places, enriches their

Who with theflood-storm,his weapon, vanquished the

detractors,
(And) who the gods, his fathers, rescuedfromdistress.
Truly the Son of the sun, most radiant of gods is he.
In his brilliant light may they walk forever!

That this early Semitic imagery of just royal rule as the light of the
sun lies behind Isaiah 9 is suggested by the old poem in 2 Samuel
23:2-7, called by current scholars "The Last Words of David." The
poem reads in part,

19
James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 164-65
(concerning Hammurabi); and 69 (concerning Marduk). One may note
further that in the epilogue to the Code of Hammurabi that king says, in part,
"By the order of Shamash, the great judge of heaven and earth, may my
justice prevail in the land" (178). Shamash is, of course, the sun god.

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 "I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

The Spirit of the LORD speaks by me,

his word is upon my tongue.
The God of Israel has spoken,
the Rock of Israel has said to me:
When one rules justly over men,
ruling in the fear of God,
he dawns on them like the morning light [photi proias],
like the sun shining forth upon a cloudless morning,
like rain that makes grass to sproutfromthe earth.
Yea, does not my house stand so with God?
For he has made with me an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all things and secure.
For will he not cause to prosper all my help and my desire?

As I shall argue, the Johannine affirmation of Jesus's messiahship and

divine Sonship in terms of light (beginning with John 1:4-5) takes the
challenge of intelligibility in the notions of omniscience and
omnipotence to an even greater extreme, and threatens to throw that
affirmation completely out of gear with what Wheelwright calls the
universal connotations of light.
Going back to Isaiah 9,1 note again that, vis-à-vis those who
will not heed his message, the prophet says, "I and the children whom
the LORD has given me are signs [semeia] and portents in Israel from
the LORD of Hosts." This is the only passage in the Old Testament
that bears any resemblance to a refrain distinctively Johannine in the
New Testament. I refer to those seven times that Jesus refers to "those
whom you have given me" (6:37, 39; 10:29; 17:6, 9, 24; 18:9). And I
find myself wondering if Jesus's reference in 8:32 to the liberating
effect of his word of truth on those who continue in it echoes Isaiah
9:34, "For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the
rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as on the day of Midian."
But what of the segue to Abraham and those who are truly
children of Abraham? How does this connect with anything that I
have been proposing? This, of course, is a question that anyone's
interpretation of Jesus as the Light of the World must answer: how
does a discourse that presumably begins with the pronouncement in
8:12 wind up talking about Abraham and his true children? The
connection, I suggest, is through passages such as Genesis 17:6, 16,

Encounter 67.2 (2006) 133

I
where Abraham and Sarah are promised kings among their progeny,
and Psalm 72:17, which concludes by evoking the promise to
Abraham in Genesis 12:3.

CONCLUSION: TRANSFORMING LIGHT TO

UNIVERSALIZEIT
If the above thesis concerning John 8:12 is supportable, it
sheds an interesting light on John 1:5, "The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness has not apprehended [katelaben] it." I
translate the verb with "apprehended" because, unlike
"comprehended" and "overcome," this verb is capable of both
possible meanings of katelaben, in that it can mean cognitively to
apprehend what someone is saying, and physically to apprehend
someone pursued as a fugitive or criminal. The reason the darkness
does not apprehend the light that shines in Jesus is that the darkness
lives by the illumination, so-called, of universally accepted
connotations of intelligibility and power, and especially of
omniscience and omnipotence. Standing within such a pool of light,
what sense can one make of the claim that God's Messiah, as the
incarnation of the world-creating Word that is itself with God and is
God, manifests God's glory in dying the death of a common criminal?
What kind of omnipotence is that? And what kind of omniscience is it
that, having spoken of his own impending death (12:23-26), and
having earlier spoken of being authorized to lay down his life and to
take it up again (10:18), can nevertheless suddenly be troubled at the
prospect (12:27)? Strange omnipotence! Strange omniscience! The
only way the Gospel writer can account for it is by appeal to Isaiah
53:1 and 6:10 (John 12:38, 40), before having Jesus recapitulate the
pronouncement of 8:12 in saying, "I have come as light into the
world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the
darkness" (12:46).
Commentators such as Raymond Brown are wont to trace
John's language of light and darkness to Qumran. Brown, citing some
Old Testament references to light (but not the messianic two that I

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 "I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)

have identified), writes, "Yet, in the OT light and darkness are not
opposed as principles of good and evil as they are in John; and for
such dualistic opposition the Dead Sea Scrolls offer a far better
parallel to Johannine usage.*'20 To say it again, the diction and the
critical sharpening of terms so characteristic of John may well stand
in some relation to the usage among the community of Qumran. But it
is a question of what is done with that diction; and the answer to that
question, I suggest, lies not in Qumran (let alone the religion of Ahura
Mazda and Ahriman) but in the Old Testament as claimed by John in
support of his presentation of Jesus as Messiah. At one level it is true
that the story of Jesus in the Gospels—and especially in the Fourth
Gospel—gives a new connotation to the universal symbol of light.
And yet, those who "do a double take" on exilic Isaiah in light of that
new connotation may be pardoned for hearing hitherto unperceived
overtones in the fact that die servant who is given as "a covenant to
the people, a light to the nations" (Isa. 42:6; 49:6) is one "who walks
in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the LORD and
relies upon his God" (Isa. 50:10).
In terms of Wheelwright's typology of metaphors according
to their range of usage, I would suggest that John takes an image of
archetypal range, narrows it almost intolerably by investing it with
connotations that stand the archetypal meanings on their head, and
then offers it back to the world that "God so loved" for universal
reappropriation in its transformed significance, "so that the world
may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you
have loved me" (17:23). Such an appropriation, transformation, and
manifestation is entirely in accord with the universal vision with
which this Gospel begins. It remains to be seen whether we will truly,
effectively, buy into a love that plays such havoc with our treasured
notions of omniscience and omnipotence, or whether, like the persons
in Isaiah 50:11, we prefer to continue to warm ourselves by those
conventional bonfires that we love to light for ourselves.

20
Brown, 340.

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