The Jewish Shape of the Fourth Gospel: a new translation of John 1:17

Steve Stewart has recently complete his PhD thesis. The following is a short summary of one chapter, “The Law of Moses in John’s Prologue: the Law As Central to a Jewish Fourth Gospel”, in which he argues for a new translation of John 1:17.

John’s Gospel is now widely recognised as deeply Jewish. Yet this recognition has not always led interpreters to expect a correspondingly high view of the law of Moses within the Fourth Gospel. In the argument summarised here, focusing on John 1:17, I challenge that imbalance. If the Fourth Gospel is meaningfully Jewish, and if first-century Jewish identity was inseparable from monotheism, election, and the law (as I argue elsewhere in my thesis), then we should not begin by assuming that John treats the law as obsolete, marginal, or superseded. We should instead ask whether John presents Jesus as the one through whom the law’s true meaning, grace, and truth come fully into view.

The present consensus of the law having for John a certain redundancy, has most commonly been arrived at through the lens of the Prologue, and particularly through John 1:17: ὅτι ὁ νόμος διὰ Μωϋσέως ἐδόθη, ἡ χάρις καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐγένετο. 

Most English readers know the verse in some form of the supersessionist rendering: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Older English tradition, especially the King James Version, sharpened the contrast by adding “but”: “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” That “but” has no direct equivalent in the Greek. It has nevertheless shaped centuries of Christian reading, encouraging a contrast between Moses and Christ, law and grace, and indeed “Judaism” and “Christianity”. To date, the vast majority of commentators are happy to accept antithesis between the two clauses of John 1:17, and assume this antithesis as readily as the translators.

My thesis proposes that this traditional contrast is not required by the Greek and may be misleading. A better translation, I argue, is: “Because the law was given through Moses, the grace and the truth came into being through Jesus Christ.” This is not a small adjustment. It changes John 1:17 from a verse often read as contrastive into one that may be read as causal. In the causal reading for which I argue, the law given through Moses is not displaced by grace and truth in Jesus Christ. Rather, the giving of the law is the theological condition within which grace and truth come to their proper expression in Christ.

The first issue is the opening word ὅτι. It is commonly translated “for” in John 1:17, suggesting antithesis between the law/Moses and Jesus Christ. But ὅτι can also function as a subordinating conjunction meaning “because.” The thesis argues that this causal “because” meaning should be taken seriously here. Grammatically, there is no barrier to reading John 1:17 in this way. Koine Greek can begin a sentence with ὅτι used causally, and the Fourth Gospel itself uses this pattern with notable frequency. John often writes in the form, “because x is the case, y follows.” Examples include John 14:19, “because I live, you also will live,” and John 15:19, “because you do not belong to the world … therefore the world hates you.” Such usage of ὅτι is not alien to John’s style; it is characteristic of it.

This matters because John indicates contrast frequently, using words such as ἀλλά or δέ (“but”) to set one clause over against another – the one thing he does not do in John 1:17! If he had wanted John 1:17 to mean “the law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” he would have inserted ἀλλά or δέ, just as he does on on well over 100 other occasions in his Gospel. Yet the earliest and strongest Greek witnesses do not contain such an adversative particle. The rare manuscript attempt to insert a δέ appears isolated, polemical, and ultimately unsuccessful. The Greek text, as received in the main tradition, does not force an antithesis between Moses and Christ in John 1:17.

The second issue is John’s phrase in 1:16, χάριν ἀντὶ χάριτος. This is often translated “grace upon grace” or, in the even more supersessionist readings, “grace instead of grace”: a new grace replacing an old grace. But I argue that the syntax points in another direction. When Greek uses the same noun on both sides of ἀντί, the sense is not necessarily replacement. It may mean like-for-like correspondence: “life for life,” “eye for eye,” “evil for evil,” just as we find famously of the Septuagint Greek of Exodus 21:23-25. In John 1:16, therefore, χάριν ἀντὶ χάριτος may be better heard as “grace for grace.” That is, John is not contrasting grace with law but inviting readers to recognise grace within the law and to see that grace rightly interpreted in Jesus Christ.

This argument gains weight from the Jewish Scriptures. In Exodus, Moses receives the law in the context of divine favour, or grace. The language of “finding favour” before God is bound up with Moses’ request to know God’s ways and with the covenantal identity of Israel. In the Septuagint, the Greek term χάρις regularly translates Hebrew language of favour. Grace, then, is not a late Christian replacement for Torah. In Israel’s Scriptures, divine favour is already bound to God’s revelation, God’s ways, and the covenant life of the people. John’s “grace and truth” therefore need not be read as the opposite of Moses’ law. They may be the law’s deepest intention brought into being through Jesus Christ.

The third issue is John’s verb ἐγένετο, which John uses on six occasions in his prologue (1:1-18). Many translations render it simply as “came.” But throughout the Prologue, ἐγένετο carries the sense of came into being: all things came into being through the Word; life came into being in him; the Word became flesh. In John 1:17, then, “grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ” may be closer to the theological resonance of the text than the flatter “came.” This does not mean that grace and truth did not exist until Jesus’ earthly ministry, as if God had not been gracious or true before. Rather, John presents Jesus Christ as the one through whom the meaning, origin, and embodiment of grace and truth are disclosed. As with creation and life, their source is not Moses but the divine Word.

On this reading, John 1:17 does not demote Moses. It places Moses within the larger economy of divine revelation. The law was indeed given through Moses. That passive verb, “was given,” honours the divine origin of the law. Moses is not the law’s creator; he is its commissioned mediator. Likewise, Jesus is not merely a messenger of grace and truth. Through him, grace and truth come into being in their decisive, embodied, revelatory form. The verse is therefore not Moses versus Jesus, nor law versus grace. It is Moses as witness and mediator within a story whose source and goal are disclosed in Jesus Christ. Anything less than this would leave us with a very “un-Jewish” Gospel.

This has major implications for reading the whole Gospel. If John 1:17 is antithetical, the reader is primed to see Jesus as replacing the law. The Sabbath controversies, temple scenes, purification imagery, festivals, and disputes with “the Jews” may then be read as evidence that Jesus abolishes or supersedes Jewish law.

But if John 1:17 is causal, the reader is invited to ask a different question: not “How does Jesus free us from the law?” but “How does Jesus, being the law’s ultimate author and keeper par excellence, reveal the law’s true meaning?” The Fourth Gospel then becomes not a rejection of Jewish law but an intra-Jewish argument over its interpretation in the light of the Christ event.

That shift is pastorally and theologically significant. In so many sermons, we are used to hearing law and grace contrasted, often with the law associated with burden, judgement, and failure, and grace with freedom, mercy, and Christ. John in his Gospel may be asking whether the law has been misunderstood by those who claim Moses while failing to recognise the one about whom Moses wrote. In John 5, Jesus does not accuse his opponents of caring too much about Moses; he says that if they truly believed Moses, they would believe him. Moses is not the problem. Misreading Moses is the problem.

My proposed translation also resists anachronism. It cautions against imagining first-century Jews could simply discard Torah as one might abandon a philosophical system. For Jews of John’s world, the law was not an optional ideology. It was bound to election, covenant, worship, identity, and the story of God’s dealings with Israel. If John is Jewish in any serious sense, we should expect him to think from within that world. A Gospel that reveres monotheism while casually abandoning Torah would be historically odd. A Gospel that presents Jesus as the true interpreter and embodiment of Torah’s grace and truth is far more plausible.

There is also a christological gain. The proposed translation does not lessen Christ; it heightens him. Jesus is not great because he renders Moses redundant. He is great because the divine grace and truth already witnessed in the law come into being through him in their fullest personal reality. The Word who was with God and was God, through whom all things came into being, is also the one through whom the law’s deepest grace and truth are disclosed. John’s high Christology is therefore not anti-Torah. It is the revelation of Torah’s divine depth.

For preaching and teaching, this means John 1:17 should be handled with care. The familiar “law versus grace” contrast can too easily collapse into a caricature of Judaism and a distorted account of the Gospel. John’s Prologue may instead be inviting the Church to see continuity without flattening difference. The law is given; grace and truth come into being through Jesus Christ. Moses mediates; Christ embodies. The law witnesses; Christ reveals. The Gospel is not that God once gave law and later replaced it with grace. The Gospel is that the God who gave the law through Moses has now made known, in the flesh of the Word, the grace and truth to which the law always pointed.

My proposed rendering of John 1:17, “Because the law was given through Moses, the grace and the truth came into being through Jesus Christ,” therefore offers more than a grammatical refinement. It reframes the theological imagination with which we read John. It asks us to begin not with rupture but with fulfilment understood as faithful interpretation of the law, not its abolition. It encourages us to preach John as a Jewish Gospel in which Jesus as the incarnate Word of God does not – and would not – stand over against the law but instead reveals its gracious and truthful heart. In that sense, John 1:17 may be less a farewell to Moses a more an invitation to read Moses again, now in the light of the Word made flesh.

Revd Dr Steve Stewart, PhD is Rector of the Church of England Benefice of Hanborough and Freeland in Oxfordshire and tutors in both New Testament and Preaching at St Martha’s College, Guildford. He has been married to his amazing wife Amanda since 1993, and they have three daughters—two still with us, and one with the Lord.