He is speaking about John the Baptist as a witness to revelation. But only later, after the prologue, does he make this express distinction even though he, the author, is also called John, or wants to be called John, or is supposed to be called John according to the tradition. As though it did not matter much if there is a temporary confusion between the two Johns in the minds of readers, as though such a confusion or conflation might even be welcome, he first leaves a certain haziness around the name John which he removes only later. We follow a clue first noted by Franz Overbeck5 when we stress the remarkable proximity of the two Johns in the mind of the author. According to Overbeck this answers the question why the author wanted to be called John or to rely on the authority of John. Overbeck believed that in relation to Jesus the apostle John serves6 as another witness alongside the Baptist John. “As the Baptist is the witness of the Logos, the mediator between him and the world prior to the completion of his epiphany in the world, before the Logos is at the point of perfectly showing the world [by]7 himself the glory of God on earth, so John the apostle is the mediator for the Logos after his departure from the world.” “He is called John on account of his calling in the Gospel and the inner relationship of this calling to that of the Baptist in the whole economy of the divine light in the world according to the basic conception of this economy on which the whole of the Fourth Gospel rests according to the prologue” (p. 417).
As for the narrower issue of the name in the Fourth Gospel, one might question this hypothesis and still not affect the excellence of the observation on which it rests. There is in fact an inner relationship of calling between the two Johns. There is also perhaps—I am less certain of this—a parallelism, as Overbeck suggests, between the witness before and the witness after. One certainly cannot say that the Fourth Evangelist has only a negative or polemical interest in the one who bears his name. Note that in contrast to the Synoptists he is not content to assign to the Baptist merely the position of a forerunner in the sense of a prophet who simply predicts the Messiah, of one who proclaims him that is to come. No, with houtos ēn he at once stresses the Baptist’s word of witness (v. 15). He has him bear express witness to the one who has already come (vv. 26, 29ff., and then again in 3:27ff.). He is the first to point to the one who was then living unrecognized in the midst of Israel before there was ever a disciple or an “apostle” insofar as this word is to be distinguished from the term prophet. Note also that as compared with the Synoptics the Fourth Gospel enhances, as it were, the position of the Baptist by understanding and interpreting his function of preaching repentance and remission in direct reference to Jesus and claiming his baptism directly as Christian baptism (Overbeck, p. 419). The statement of Walter Bauer8 that the attitude of the Evangelist to the Baptist and his followers is to be regarded as one of “intentional contradiction” can hardly be viewed as a happy one in the light of these theses. But there is more. The Baptist is the man who in v. 32 bears witness to the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus from heaven. If the Evangelist now bears witness also to Jesus and his mission, he is not therewith opening a new, let alone an opposing, series. He is placing himself in the series that opens already with John the Baptist. To be sure, he is critical in relation to the Baptist. He shows reserve. He makes distinction. He sets him in his place. Yet we do not find criticism alone. Or, one might say, the criticism is positive. It is also—inevitably—criticism of himself in the same series. If the assumption is correct that according to the author’s intention we are to find in the unnamed disciple among those mentioned in v. 35 and v. 40 either the author himself or the one who vouches authoritatively for him, the one in whose name he speaks, then with the ambivalence that is fitting in this matter he is stating that the Baptist was his first teacher, his human master, through whose witness: “Behold, this is the Lamb of God” (v. 36), he was led to the eternal Word and light, to Jesus. By way of the Baptist he introduces himself, and he is at once on the most significant path to Jesus. And is he doing anything other, in writing the Gospel, than what this teacher of his has done? Does he have this teacher say anything less in v. 29, and especially in 3:35–36, than the sum of his own Gospel? Does he call himself, or his companions in 15:27, or the author, his later editor of 21:24, anything greater than simply a martyrōn. precisely as John the Baptist was? “I have greater witness than that of John,” says Christ in 5:36, but not his disciple! Often in the Gospel the words of Jesus as the incarnate Word are called martyrein or martyria. This fact obviously illuminates the relative dignity of him who in the prologue is called a mere witness, but who is set in contrast as such. Is it not noteworthy and significant, even if exegetically mistaken, that the entire exposition of the early church regarded vv. 16–18 as a continuation of v. 15, and therefore as the words of the Baptist rather than the words of the Evangelist, and that they could do so, things being as ambivalent as they are, with a claim to no little probability? What support have we even in v. 14 for excluding the Baptist from the hēmeis that is presupposed in the etheasametha? No, there is proximity or solidarity here. In Overbeck’s phrase, there is here an “inner relationship of calling.” In John the Baptist John the Evangelist—no matter how this may relate to the question of the name of the Gospel—recognizes and understands himself as well, and his own problematical status. Aware that I am probably trying to say something too precise to do justice to the complex material, but seeking to point in the direction in which, as I see it, the real significance lies, I might venture the paradox that John the Evangelist is wrestling with himself when he wrestles with John the Baptist; with himself, i.e., with his existence and function as the human witness who stands between revelation and humanity. He instructs his readers concerning his own relation to this subject when in the same context he instructs them concerning John the Baptist. He wants to make it clear what he, the Evangelist, does and does not do as such, what he can do and cannot do, what he is and is not. He does this by means of the one who for himself and his contemporaries is the great and most significant paradigm of the concept of the “witness,” namely, the figure of the Baptist.
Within this view, if the presuppositions are correct, there might be truth in all that Richard Reitzenstein9 and others, along the lines of the history of religion, say about the possible ecclesiastical significance of the treatment of the Baptist in the prologue and in the Gospel as a whole. It might well be that what is reckoned with here is a competing religion which goes back to a chronologically indeterminate form10 of Mandean thinking and which honors the Baptist as the revealer. In the last resort this theory might shed an interesting light on the problem of the genesis of the Johannine prologue. The troublesome phenomenon of a Baptist sect would then have provided the Evangelist with the occasion for bringing the prologue to this concrete climax. Yet in this very case too his own problem (and perhaps even his own biographical problem) would in fact have motivated him. And obviously this would have been a serious enough material problem for him to unfold it at the outset of the Gospel with a solemnity which ill accords with the almost complete disappearance of the question of the Baptist after ch. 3 if in fact the issue is merely one of ecclesiastical politics, of the Baptist sect. W. Bauer (op. cit., p. 14) undoubtedly claims far too much when he says that the depiction of the relation between Jesus and John is to be regarded “only as a practical one,” i.e., as a polemic against the Baptist sect. It is certainly practical in this very concrete sense but it is not only practical! I would rather say that through the transparency of what might have been a historical and ecclesiastical situation the author is speaking about the situation which arises, or is already present, when someone other than Christ himself, a man, but an authorized man, an anthrōpos apestalmenos para theou (v.