"I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD" (JOHN 8:12): CONNOTATION AND CONTEXT

In 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 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, "unmoglich," 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.

LIGHT'S NEW SYMBOLIC LIFE

In his short classic Metaphor and Reality, Philip Wheelwright offers what he calls a "metapoeiics, 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).

(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