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Breathing the Name of God:

“YHWH” and “Elohim” in the Gospel of John

James David Audlin

From The Gospel of John Restored and Translated, Volume II,

as published by Editores Volcán Barú.
Copyright © 2013,2014 by James David Audlin. All worldwide rights reserved.
Reprinted here by permission of the publisher, Editores Volcán Barú.

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The words for God will be discussed as they appear in the Gospel of John. First,
the word popularly known as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” will be discussed, and then the word
“Elohim”.

In the patristic period of Israelite religion the phrase ‫ אֶ ְהיֶה אֲשֶ ר אֶ ְהיֶה‬was more than
just a way of referring to God; it was a statement about the presence of God in each of us.
The phrase almost definitely was an expansion of the most sacred name for God, ‫יהוה‬.
Scholars agree that the pronunciation of this name has been lost for millennia, and hence
for millennia, in reading the Hebrew text of the Torah aloud, it has been the Jewish practice
to say ‫’( אֲ ֹדנָי‬Adonai, “my Lord”) in its place. Today it is often vocalized as “Yahweh” or
“Jehovah”, and the many classical Jewish place names and personal names (including
Jesus’s) built from those two names (as well as from Elohim) give them both credence –
still, both remain no more than guesses.
Josephus provides a significant clue to the original pronunciation in the fifth chapter
of his Jewish Wars: he speaks of the Name of God as τὰ ἱερὰ γράμματα ταῦτα δ’ ἐστὶ
φωνήεντα τέσσαρα (“[engraved with] the holy letters, and they are four vowels”). This is a
curious statement, since the Name comprises four consonants, not vowels; in classical
Hebrew vowels were not written. His comment brings to mind the ancient Jewish sages
saying that breath comes before Logos, since God had to inhale first, in order to exhale and
speak the Logos, the Breath or Wind blowing across the surface of the waters, that called
light into being.
A reader in ancient times would be viscerally aware of the sacredness of the Breath;
texts in the classical age were almost always read aloud, not silently, even when the reader
was alone (cf., e.g., Psalm 1:2, Habakkuk 2:2, and Revelation 1:3); thus the reader would
inhale before reading the holy words in the Torah, and likewise before beginning to read the
prayerlike poem that begins this gospel – and, in inhaling and speaking, feel a oneness with
God, microcosm with macrocosm, atman with Brahman, “I am” with I AM. And this would
have been intended by the eyewitness and amanuensis of this gospel: the one inhaled and
spoke his reminiscences to the other, who wrote them down, then inhaled and read his
edited version back to the first. While the act of inhaling and reading/speaking the Λογος
may have been undertaken by God, the eyewitness, the amanuensis, and the reader in
different moments of linear time (χρονος), theirs are not separate actions, but one act which
they all do as one; they are the same act of inhaling and speaking that really takes place in
a single “eternal now” of spiritual time (καιρος): they, we, are ultimately one in God in the
very act of reading the gospel – as Jesus will pray before his death (chapter 17). This
underscores a main point in my interpretation of the gospel, that the gospel itself is the
Paraclete, the Spirit/Breath that Jesus promised at the Last Supper would come to remind
his followers of everything he taught.
The sages also note that ‫ה‬, he, the second and fourth letter in YHWH, is in
pronunciation an exhalation, and the other two merely modify an exhalation by slightly
pursing the lips. I suspect that, in this word at least, there was a “priestly language” in the
Temple in Jerusalem, which breathed the word, and a “common language” pronunciation
as in names like Joshua and Jeremiah. If our breath is the name of God, then that would
explain why ‫’( אֲ ֹדנָי‬Adonai) was said in place of the Name in reading the Torah aloud: unlike
an exhalation, it would have been audible to the people listening to the Torah.
Thus to properly utter these “four vowels”, represented in English by YHWH, is not to
speak an ordinary human word but a Godly word, not to vocalize at all, but to emit a
whisper, a soft exhalation. For this Word is the Word, the Word before all others (έν αρχη),
the Λογος (John 1:1ff.) through which all things, beginning with light, were made. This
exhalation is the breath/spirit/wind that ‫יהוה‬, YHWH breathed over the surface of the waters
(Genesis 1:2). By breathing his Name into Adam’s nostrils (Genesis 2:7), God gave the
gift of a ‫נֶפֶ ש‬, nephesh, a breath/soul, the gift of life, to him – and so, by extension, all living
things, including you and me. The first thing we do as a newborn is inhale the breath of life
that is God’s Name, and the last thing we do, in the moment of our death, is exhale that
Name.
A beautiful Kabbalistic story says, in order to make room for the new Creation that
God was about to create, God inhaled (as does a newborn at the moment of birth) the
undifferentiated chaos that filled the universe, and that the exhalation (as at the moment of
death) thereof was the ‫חּור‬, the wind/breath/spirit, that God breathed across the waters. By
extension, since God inhaled to make room for Creation and then exhaled it in uttering
God’s own name to create it, our entire earthly lives are suspended in that moment between
the holy inhalation and the holy exhalation, and we are truly created not at birth but with
our death.
This ‫ חּור‬is always around us: “the mountains and the hills before you shall break
forth with song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12) with the
sound of the Holy Wind; no wonder that the garden of Eden was a garden of trees.
It is the ‫קֹול ְדמָ מָ ה דַ קָ ה‬, the “faint sound of breathing” (often mistranslated the “still
small voice” or “sudden sound of silence”), that Elijah heard in the cave wherein he had
hidden, wanting to die: on the one hand he was probably simply hearing his own breathing
without realizing it was his, and on the other hand he was hearing the Breath that called
him into being, and everything else as well.
It is the breath that God, ‫הוהי‬, breathed into the dry bones of Israel (Ezekiel 37). It is
the wind-spirit-breath that God will breathe out upon all flesh in time to come (Joel 2:28-
29).
It is the wind-breath-spirit that came down from the sky/heaven (όυρανος) in the
form of a whirlwind (πρηστηρ) when John the Immerser immersed Jesus (cf. the
commentary in this volume to the Greek text of John 1:32).
It is the same πνευμα from God that blew through the room where the apostles had
gathered (Acts 2), such that their own exhalations as they spoke were comprehensible in
every language of the world, reversing (Zephaniah 3:9) the calamity of Babel (Genesis 11),
and paralleling Jesus’s own immersion as they themselves were immersed with the ‫ חּור‬of
God in fulfillment of Joel’s and Jesus’s promise (John 14:16-17) that the Spirit/Breath
would come and enter them. So it is that Jesus told Nicodemus that one cannot enter the
realm of God without being born not only from water (amniotic fluid) but also from above
(άνωθεν), from the wind-breath-spirit of God.
Thus, from the patristic period through to Jesus’s time and after, it was believed
that the breath is the very presence of the Spirit/Breath of God within us, and that the wind
in the world is the Spirit/Wind of God, God’s Breath in the world, that wind and breath are
essentially the same. Therefore, to inhale is to receive the gift of a living soul from God,
and to exhale is to extol God with that Name that God breathed into us every time we take
a breath; further, breathing upon others confers the Spirit/Breath of God on them and can
heal their infirmities as well (John 20:22). What is more, as in the Native American “visible
breath” spirituality – far closer to the spirit of first-century Judaism than is twenty-first-
century Euro-American religion, we must always be truthful in our speech because to speak
is to breathe the Name of God (“I AM is the way, the truth, and the life”). These ancient
Jews were mariners and farmers – they knew the wind and water and earth in ways we
moderns have forgotten, and the world around them was deeply imbued in every moment
with the presence of God.
In this sense, the Name appears in several critical passages of the gospel. In 1:32,
as John the Immerser immerses Jesus the Πνευμα, the Wind/Breath/Spirit of God, descends
from heaven like a whirlwind. In 19:30 Jesus breathes out the wind/breath/spirit within him
for the last time as he dies. In the beginning of chapter 20 he has received again the breath
of life, and intermingles his with Mary’s own breath. In 20:22 Jesus exhales on the disciples
and says “Receive the πνεθμα άγιον” (the sacred breath/spirit/wind, equivalent in Greek to
‫[ חּור‬ruach]); by exhaling he proves he is alive, he heals them, he blesses them, he fills them
with the Name and Spirit of God.
For Jesus, and Jews of his time (and indeed many classical cultures worldwide), to
refer to someone’s name was not merely to the vocalization which is semiotically
associated with them, but to the person’s teaching and example; thus to give even a cup
of cold water in Jesus’s name (Matthew 10:42) or Kṛṣṇa’s name (Bhagavad-Gita 9:26), or
whoever’s, was to do it as that person’s disciple. More than that, in most traditional (non-
Euro-American) cultures, names are powerful magic spells in the sense that the names
evoke the spiritual presences. In this gospel, the Name of God (as mentioned in these
three verses) is the πνευμα, the Divine Breath that is also the Divine Wind and the
Divine Spirit that blew in Creation (Genesis 1:2) and many times upon the prophets.
Josephus calls it the “four vowels” of the Name of God, ‫הוהי‬, the exhalation. Since all other
names can only be spoken by exhaling, the Name of God is hidden inside every other name.
As it is put in The Circle of Life, “Those who keep the traditional ways know that spoken
words can carry a little glint of moonlight – a tiny sliver of the silent Logos, the exhaled
breath, the divine Name of G-d spoken in the beginning that echoes still in everything that
exists.” And our sacred names, known only to God, as the same book says, “are ultimately
one name, and point to the same Spirit that is in us all.” Therefore, Jesus and the amanuensis (I
John 4:8,16b) would agree with the Apache proverb: “It makes no difference as to the name
of the God, since love is the real God of all the world.”

In some of the most ancient strata from which emerged the Samaritan and Jewish religions,
God is a single deity called ‫ֹלהים‬
ִ ֱ‫א‬, Elohim, comprising male and female aspects. The name
“Elohim” is a feminine noun, with the plural formed with the masculine plural suffix -im.
Elohim speaks with the plural pronoun (“we”), but takes singular forms of verbs (e.g.,
“goes”). The word ALH (Eloh), root of “Allah” in Arabic, appears to mean “Power”, as in
the wind/breath. Rod Borghese writes:
Inasmuch as -im is usually the termination of the masculine plural, and is here added to a feminine
noun, it gives to the word Elohim the sense of a female potency united to a masculine idea, and
thereby capable of producing an offspring. Now we hear much of the Father and the Son, but we
hear nothing of the Mother in the ordinary religions of the day. But in the Kabbalah we find that
the Ancient of Days conforms himself simultaneously into the Father and the Mother, and thus
begets the Son. Now this Mother is Elohim.

The first creation story told in Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2:4a) says Elohim created the
universe by separating complementary opposites: day from night, above from below, land
from sea, and so on, and then populating these separated regions with creatures specific to
each: stars and birds to the sky, fish to the sea, crawling and creeping animals to the land.
Even the various creatures are made by this process of separating complementary
opposites: Elohim divides male from female in each species. But one creation is different,
however: the first human being is made not by dividing complementary opposites, but by
retaining the complementary opposites inherent in Elohim’s whole singleness, retaining
them in a perfect image of Elohim. Elohim is male and female as one, which is why Elohim
speaks in the plural, saying ‫“( םדא ונמלצב נתומדכ השענ‬Let us make humanity in our image
and after our likeness”), and creates a creature both male and female united; thus, the first
human being is hermaphroditic, both male and female as one, like Elohim (Genesis 1:26).
The second creation story (Genesis 2:4ff.) then relates the story of how YHWH, God
understood as the sacred Wind/Breath/Spirit, meted out justice for eating the forbidden
fruit to this hermaphroditic first human being. Several Talmudic rabbis say that the first
human, and Adam and Eve after the division, were perfectly aware of the differences
between good and evil before eating the fruit, and naturally preferred the good and
eschewed the evil, but that the fruit brought these complementary opposites back together
in their thoughts and desires, such that they could choose either as they wished. Thus
YHWH’s statement to them that they would enjoy becoming parents but there would be pain
associated with childbirth, and they would be able to eat the fruit of the earth, but it would
be at the cost of toil: after eating the fruit, YHWH says, good and evil will now inevitably be
mixed together for humanity. Most of all, male and female will yearn for each other, but
be ultimately unable to become fully one again. (The parables in Matthew 13:24-30 and
Mark 4:3-9 pick up on this midrash.) The justice, then, is inherent in the division into two,
into separate male and female persons – in other words, now humanity, in being not a
unitary composite of complements but complements divided from each other, was “fallen”
from being in the image and likeness of God, now as mundane as the other separated
complements, such as light and dark, above and below, and sea and dry land, and any
ordinary creature living in these separated regions. And therefore neither man nor woman
alone perfectly images God, nor alone can create new life as God can. Athanasius
concludes that “Humanity was in danger of disappearing” ever since this fall, which Father
Stephen Freeman thus illuminates: “Refusing communion with the only truly existing God,
we began to fall back towards the nothing from which we were created. Either we are
sustained by grace and flourish, or we increasingly cease to exist.”
A number of scholars have opined that the Hebrew story of the first woman coming
from the side of the first man to be his consort was a deliberate inversion by the Hebrews,
a rare patriarchal society in the Mesopotamian region, of the far more common story of the
first woman giving birth to the first man and then taking him as her consort, found among
such matriarchal Goddess-centered cultures as Sumeria and Babylonia. This may be true
to an extent, the Hebrew story may have been influenced in its telling by the earlier stories,
but such a theory ultimately fails because of the unique nature of the Genesis account: it
does not have the reverse of the staggered creation of the sexes just described, such that
the first male somehow “gives birth” to the first female, but rather Genesis has the
hermaphroditic first human, made in the image of God, torn asunder by God to create the
first male and the first female. Ultimately, the Mesopotamian creation stories, and both the
first and second creation stories in Genesis agree on one point: male and female were
created at the same time.
The main theme of this gospel is that we must choose to accord our lives to the
Λογος of God, God’s beautiful plan/pattern for the universe. And one of the most important
ways we do that, the gospel tells us, is by seeking to become one with all people – not
physically, of course, but one in spirit and love. Yet we are to become one not only in spirit
and love but physically with our spouses, this gospel tells us, and Jesus and Mary, who
become truly and fully one at the hierogamy (sacred marriage) that crowns Jesus’s
resurrection appearance, becomes the type, the wayshowing example, which we are meant
to follow.
The gospel begins by saying that those who believe in the Logos of God, as put into
the man Jesus, “who received it and believed in his name”, gain “the right to become
children of God, … begotten (as such) not out of racial ancestries, nor out of a natural will,
nor out of a man’s desire, but out of God” (1:12-13). To be a child of God is therefore not
a oneness of identity with God, on the part of Jesus or anyone, but a oneness of unity and
commitment. This is the oneness Jesus speaks of in his culminating pastoral prayer before
his execution: he and the father are one (17:22), but the goal is for all humanity also to be
one with God (17:20-23). This is the very Jewish concept of covenant, and marriage is the
central example given thereof in the Bible. Jesus throughout the gospel, and especially in
chapter 20 is depicted as one with his wife in unity and commitment, jointly forming with
her a sacred being that reflects Elohim’s nature – and so we must be, and will be, if we
heed his voice.
Our original nature was identical to Elohim, we were split apart into male and
female, and we can choose to be reunited again in the image of Elohim in order to recognize
and express that the nature of God is love (I John 4:8).
In the (Greek) Gospel of the Egyptians Jesus says: “When you have trampled on
the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female is
neither male nor female.” This is an eschatology in which the two genders become one, in
which they become again the image and likeness of their Creator, Elohim, in which male
and female are one.
This eschatology is found also in the Gospel of Thomas, particularly in the last
logion in the book (114), which, unfortunately, is widely misunderstood:
peje cimwn petroc nau je mare mariham ei ebol nhytn je nchiome mpsa an
mpwnh
peje ic je eichyyte anok ]nacwk mmoc jekaac eeinaac nhoout sina
ecnaswpe hwwc noupna efonh efeine mmwtn nhoout je chime nim ecnaac
nhoout cnabwk ehoun etmntero nmpyue

Simon the Rock said this to them: “Let Mariam [Mary] go away from us, for women are not
worthy of the [Æonian] life.”
 Jesus said this: “Look, I will draw her into myself so I may make her male, so she may also be
a living spirit resembling you males: for any woman who makes herself male will enter the Realm
of Heaven.”

Viewing it with modern sensibilities, scholars often dismiss this logion as an example of
first-century misogyny, saying Jesus couldn’t possibly have said the Æon, the Realm of
Heaven, was an all-male bastion! But Jesus is actually referring to the creation of male and
female. He is saying in the above logion that the female and the male, in order to enter into
the Æon, the Realm of Heaven, must again become one, as they were in the beginning.
Mary, as is made clear in the resurrection scene, is reborn to a new life along with her
husband Jesus: they experience in this scene a hierogamy, a spiritual marriage, which
renders them truly one, hence truly reflecting the image and likeness of Elohim, and
fully capable of entering into the Æon.
F. F. Bruce (Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament) is the only
scholar who to my knowledge interprets this logion correctly; he nicely summarizes Jesus’s
point thus: “Jesus’s promise that she will become a man, so as to gain admittance to the
kingdom of heaven, envisages the reintegration of the original order, when Adam was
created male and female (Genesis 1.27). Adam was ‘the man’ as much before the removal
of Eve from his side as after (Genesis 2.18-25). Therefore, when the primal unity is restored
and death is abolished, man will still be man (albeit more perfectly so), but woman will no
longer be woman; she will be reabsorbed into man.” Jesus thus transforms and elevates
Mary’s humble nakedness, the nakedness of a menial laborer and destitute widow, into the
highest sacredness: here truly he and she are transfigured into δοξα, the splendor of highest
glory.
This interpretation of logion 114 is supported by logion 22, in which Jesus says in
part, “When you make the two one … when you make the male and the female a single one,
such that the male is not male nor the female female … then you shall enter into [the Realm of
Heaven].” Likewise he says in logion 75, “There are many standing at the door, but the
united/whole/single ones (are) the ones who will go in to the bridal chamber.”
We find the exact same theology in the Gospel of Philip, for instance in logion 76:
n.hoou nere.euha [h]n a[da]m ne mn mou soop nta.re.c.pwrj [er]o.3 a.p.mou swpe
pa lin e.f.sa.b[wk eho]un n.f.jit.f ero.f mn mou na.swpe

In the days when Eve was within Adam, death did not exist. When she was separated from him, death
came into being. If again she goes into (him), and he takes her into himself, death shall not exist.
Several comments in the Talmud support this theology: “Rabbi Eleazer wrote, ‘Any
man who has no wife is no proper man; for it is written, “Male and female created He them
and called their name Adam”’” (Yebamoth 63). Rabbi Joseph of Hamadan similarly wrote,
“The Divine Unity is conceived as the union of the King and the Queen”, and that the sacred
body of the King is meant to be united with that of the Queen; then, “he will be One, as it is
written: ‘Hear Israel, YHWH is our God, YHWH is One’” (Sefer Tashak; the quotation at the
end is the Shema, found in Deuteronomy 6:4). Likewise, the Sheqel ha Qodesh says: “The
secret of the Shema Israel [is that] the Bride returns to her Bridegroom in order that they
unite in a real unity.”
Even Paul seems aware of this uniting-of-the-sexes-in-the-image-and-likeness-of-
God at Galatians 3:28, though he puts on it his usual spin, saying that all human differences
are eliminated if we become one with God in the form of Jesus.
In full union – soul and mind and body, fully spiritual and also entirely erotic and
sexual, we put male and female together again and restore our original nature in the image
of Elohim. Spirituality is the sexuality of the soul, and sexuality is the spirituality of the
body. For the modern reader, as a child of Western philosophy with its unbridgeable divide
between the physical and the spiritual realms and the latent repressiveness of the Puritans,
this will come across as very strange, even distasteful. But it was not to first-century Jews,
whose Tanakh often conjoins eroticism and spiritual profundity, nowhere more so than
in the exquisite Song of Songs. This conjunction of spirituality and sexuality would have
been familiar to Mary, the former Samaritan high priestess, whose ritual duties
encompassed sexuality; now, however, she is united physically and spiritually with her
husband, not anonymous others, and as such mirrors the image of Elohim and is united
with all humanity, “that they may all be one”. The gospel’s writer (and Jesus through him)
is telling us that love and marriage are also part of the Λογος, perhaps the most significant
part, since the story of Jesus’s ministry begins and ends with love and marriage. Together,
as one, Jesus and Mary are the very image of Elohim: they are Messiah (God’s anointed
representative) and mary (an Aramaic word meaning master, teacher, and presence-of-
God). Only together can they emulate Elohim’s ability to create life – and, indeed, Mary is
pregnant in the final scenes of the gospel.
The seventh-century poet Eleazar be-Rabbi Qillir records an old tradition in which
Reshith, the Torah personified as a woman, refuses to help Elohim create the universe until
she is wedded to the right man, who will teach humanity the Logos of God. That man is
Moses. This gospel repeatedly associates Jesus with Moses, and portrays Mary as an
incarnation of the Word, the Logos, equivalent to Reshith, especially at the resurrection
and in the earlier Aramaic version of 4:27.

It is a truism that what most people have written to interpret Jesus over two
millennia says more about themselves than they do about Jesus himself. This has been the
case from the first. Paul, a misogynist who loathed the very idea of sexuality, who loved to
have the spotlight on himself, who loved being a bigger-than-life man-of-the-world
everywhere from Jerusalem to Rome, a man who was dazzlingly proud of his oft-touted
humility, who wore his wounds like a general’s medals, presents Jesus as a sexless Roman-
style godling. Barnabas, as a Levite and probably a former Temple priest, portrays Jesus in
the letter to the Hebrews as High Priest. And Lazarus and John the Presbyter, whose own
work was as communicators, present Jesus as a medium of sacred communication (αγγελος,
“angel”, literally “messenger”), as a vessel (temple) containing the Logos of God – and
this gospel is exactly that as well: a messenger, and a vessel (book) containing the
Logos of God as given by the Messenger Jesus. This is how Jesus says in the gospel
that he will still be present with them/us: this gospel, the Paraclete, is his continuing
presence in the world.
This gospel is, of course, a story, a recollection in words. The modern Western
civilization has reduced storytelling to mere entertainment, to a profit-making commodity,
and disregards its power to inspire and teach. But classical cultures worldwide, in all
periods of time including the present (Native American, Native African, Taoist, Aborigine,
and others), know stories not only can inspire and teach, but even evoke the sacred
presence of “those who have gone before”. As it is put in The Circle of Life:
Stories are powerful ceremonies that, told properly and well, evoke powerful sacred presences;
they can be healing. … As the storyteller is telling it, the story is vivid in the minds of both
teller and hearers; the hearers enter into the story themselves, becoming a part of it. … In the
way of the traditional peoples, names and stories are everpresent, just as visions are everpresent,
if only we have the eyes to see them – and, more than the names, the spirits are everpresent. As
Jesus promised his disciples before leaving them, “Lo, I am with you always.” … Through stories
 we transcend the contours of linear time, moving into the past and future and coming back
enriching the present moment with meaning. Through stories we experience the deeds, the very
lives, of our ancestors, and gain perspective on our own lives. Every time we tell or hear a particular
story we recharge it, making it come alive again in the here and now. … Storytelling is central to
traditional cultures worldwide. It is stories – and the visions and dreams behind them – that gather
the people of a nation together and give them a common identity. More than that: stories – and the
visions and dreams behind them – are a nation’s treasure: the common heritage, the common
wisdom, and the source of its sacred power. Stories are sacred ceremonies: when told properly
and well, they evoke powerful presences. … The past, to the traditional way of thinking, is the
stories that have been told and can still be told; the future is the stories that have not yet been
told. Thus, this present moment is ceremony in progress, stories in the making. This moment now,
with you holding this book in your hands as you read it, is your story-in-the-making. Some day to
come you will remember reading this book. You won’t have this book in your hands, but you will
remember reading something in it that really struck you, and what it made you think about,
and what you did that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. This remembering will be for you a
story, part of the greater story of your life. … Stories, and their kin – songs, dances, art works
– are examples of gateways, as I call them: gateways between worlds and dimensions.
Stories, you see, are ceremonies of shared experience: when we tell stories of the First
Persons, the apparent distance in time and space is bridged by these gateways, and they are
present with us; even more, we become one with them. Therefore we tell stories with care, since
telling the stories activates those gateways and brings closer the beings of other worlds and
dimensions, or even the incomprehensible beings deep in the Spirit World. When we tell the
classic stories that have been told for generations, we are indeed drawing close some powerful
spirits indeed….

The Gospel of John (when restored) describes the events within one year, a
microcosm of all time. Within that year is a man’s life, from birth (the immersion of Jesus
by John the Immerser) through marriage to death and a new beginning, the Ouroboros, the
Circle of Life, what Eliade calls the myth of the eternal return. Within that year is Creation
(the Prologue) and the garden of Eden, the Prophets, the present, and the future. The gospel
is about the Æon, so it is a matter of course that it seeks to image the Æon; thus, the span
of a year, as a microcosm of beyond-time, of infinite time, is exactly correct.
This work is one of those rare and precious masterpieces that are what Borges
called an aleph – a finite thing that contains the entire universe in microcosm. The Don
Quixote is one. So, too, is Blake’s Jerusalem. The Divine Comedy. The Odyssey. The Genji
Monogatori. Borges’s own stories. And the Gospel of John.
Throughout this work I suggest there are in the gospel signs of Homer, Plato,
Euripides, and others. Am I right? Were these writings consciously hinted at by the author?
Or is it my imagination; am I only seeing familiar images in this mirror that contains all
but only in the form of my own reflection? For do I not also see in it less likely traces of
the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tao-te Ching, the yet-unseen visions of Black Elk and Lame
Deer? Do I not find impossible hints of Dante, Blake, and Borges? Or does linear time,
χρονος, not matter, for in spiritual time, καιρος, all these revelations are one?
This work has as its primary purpose the delivery of a message from God. Jesus, in
this gospel, perceives the raison-d’être for his very existence as about delivering that
message – that there is a Plan, an Order to the Universe, which he calls the Λογος. It
involves living in harmony and peace with one’s neighbor, being loving, generous, patient,
and forgiving. It involves listening and learning, sharing with those in need, and treating
everyone and everything with respect. It involves living not for oneself but for all living
things, and especially for God. It is all this and so much more that cannot really be put into
words but only felt and known. It is the same transcendent message given to us by Lao-tse,
Gautama Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, Socrates, Pte-skan Winyan, Skennenrahawi,
Mohammed, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, King, Lennon, and many others unheralded by the
world. It is more like holding an infant child or grandchild in your arms and weeping with
joy when it opens its eyes and smiles at you with its beautiful tiny face that looks like
your own grandmother than it is like an explanation in a book. As Einstein is supposed to
have said when asked to explain relativity in, ahem, relatively simple terms, “I don’t think
I can. But maybe I can play it for you on my violin.”
As an aleph, it contains even itself. Many have been the guesses as to the identity
of the Paraclete (Παρακλητος, “helper” or “advocate” or “comforter”) promised by Jesus
in 14:16-17,26; it is my contention that the Paraclete is this very gospel – for it says of
itself (20:31) that it was written to do the very things that Jesus says the Paraclete will do.
As an aleph, it contains even us, its readers. Therefore, this gospel is more than an
eyewitness record of Jesus and his teachings. It is also, and more so, a glimpse into the
Æon, and through the Æon it is itself an eyewitness to Jesus. Without seeing him in the
flesh, we yet see him, and therefore believe (20:29). In the gospel’s view, Jesus was not
God but a human being; in fact, a true human being, a human being as God intended, not
chronologically an Adam, but in spiritual priority an Adam, first of humankind to achieve
real humanity. Not God made flesh as the later dogma put it, but quite the opposite, flesh
made God: Jesus accepted the Λογος of God, and served as God’s special emissary,
messenger. In those days envoys from a king to another country were treated as if they
were the very presence of the sending king. Underscoring this relationship is the fact that
the Hebrew words for king (‫;מלֶך‬ ֶ ֶ֫ melek) and messenger (‫ ;מַ לְ אָ ך‬malak) are almost identical,
differing only in the vowels, which in Jesus’s day were not written. Jesus is the ίδεα, or
ideal, the Platonic form of humanity, this gospel suggests. If we were to emulate him, we
would do very well. Though pictured as a true human being, the gospel still emphasizes
that Jesus was the άγγελος (messenger) of the message, the μαρτυριαν (witness) to the
message, and not the message itself. Well, yes, he was the message itself inasmuch as he
lived the message of “Live before others the message of living in harmony with the Λογος,
even as you live in harmony with it yourself!” even as he lived in harmony with it himself.
But we are all, or we should all be, angels/messengers of the message, witnesses to
it, for ultimately the message is what is important. This gospel was written after Jesus was
no longer with his disciples, such that the message, as he so eloquently delivered it to them,
might keep on being delivered. This gospel, therefore, is in a sense his continued presence
on earth; it is like a living thing; that is why it is an aleph, a finite thing that contains all
things.
And this restoration of what it originally was and, as much as possible, of what it
was meant to be is also an aleph. It is a part of the Λογος, for all things – even Jesus’s
death, the worst that those who hate the light and refuse to take part in the Λογος could
do to him – are part of the Λογος. So, yes, this book I have put together and you are now
holding in your hands, and both you and I ourselves as well, are in the Λογος. For all things
have come into being through it (1:3). For through the medium of this book your life and
mine touch, since in God we are one, as Jesus said (17:22,21,23), and apart from God we
are apart from each other and ultimately apart from ourselves. Tat tvam asi, as the Hindus
say, तत ् त्वम ् असि; we realize our oneness with each other in and through our oneness with
God. Through the medium of this book your life and mine touch with the lives of the
Beloved Disciple and Jesus. You and I are not merely uninvolved readers who can while
away a few hours by enjoying this book, then put it down and forget about it; you and I
are now, by participating in this story through the very act of reading, becoming part of
the story. We are all one.
And thus it is that, not despite, not notwithstanding, but because of the faults that
this translation-and-commentaries surely has in great multitudes, like the person who has
put this book together, it is a part of the Λογος. And therefore, despite or because of the
praise of those who praise it and the condemnation of those who condemn it, it too serves
its purpose of being a μαρτυριαν, an άγγελος to the Λογος expressed so perfectly by the true
human being, Jesus of Nazareth. My prayer is that not only this book but all of my books,
and indeed my entire life, despite their and its many errors of omission and commission,
may be such a witness to the beauty and wonder of being a part of the Λογος.