40 EARLY WISDOM GOSPELS
John, John the baptizer, in contrast to Jesus, is nobody: he admits that he is
neither the messiah nor Elijah (the prophet of the end time) nor another
prophet. The author of the Gospel of John is clearly painting a polemical por-
trait of John the baptizer, in order to play down the significance of a figure
whose role elsewhere, as we have seen, rivals that of Jesus. Among the Man-
daeans, John the baptizer is said to be the guarantor of the true ways of manda,
or gnosis, and Jesus is depicted as one who perverts the law and encourages
sorcery and error by departing from John and his ways. The author of the
Gospel of John also appears to paint a polemical portrait of another character
in his gospel account, namely, Thomas, who becomes in John's gospel the
quintessential skeptic, "doubting Thomas." That may be John's way of casting
doubt upon the hero of the Gospel of Thomas and other texts, the twin who
was responsible for safeguarding the wisdom and knowledge of Jesus.
The Gospel of John, unlike the Gospel of Thomas (and the sayings gospel
Q), is a narrative gospel, with a narration of the life of Jesus. John begins his
gospel story with the poem to the divine logos:
In the beginning was the word
and the word was with god,
and god was the word.
The word in the beginning was with god.
Through god everything was born
and without the word nothing was born.
What was born through the word was life
and the life was the light of all people
and the light in the darkness shone
and the darkness could not apprehend the light. (1:1-5)All this echoes what is said of divine wisdom in Proverbs 8 and other texts
(see above), but here the Johannine poem serves as a preamble to the story of
Jesus. That story proceeds with miracles, called "signs" (Greek, semeia) in
John, such as Jesus' changing water to wine at Cana.^8 The signs, like the say-
ings, have hidden meanings: Jesus explains this and other signs to Nikodemos
(Nicodemus) in a long, rambling discourse that is characteristic of the Gospel
of John—and some other gnostic texts. In his discourse Jesus distinguishes- This is originally the famous miracle of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, whose power
comes to expression in the transformation of water into wine.