“Before Abraham was, I am”; and before John was the Apocalypse of Abraham

Thank you for this fascinating hypothesis.

Thank you, Andrew; this is wonderful. 

Question re:  “Abraham rejoiced because he had been told that he would see in a vision the day when the Jews would be delivered from their enemies. In the Gospel, the Jews get hold of the wrong end of the stick,”

Could there be a connection between this and the author’s interpretation of the meaning of Jesus death in Jn 11:47-52?  Perhaps, in the view of the author of the Fourth Gospel, a sufficiently large number of Jews did not grasp the wrong end of the stick (namely those in Judea and in the diaspora for whom Jesus’ death had some salvific effect*) that there is grounds to assert that this would have been a cause of rejoicing for Abraham. 

Being ignorant of Greek, I have never previously noticed the tendentious character of the conventional rendering “never see death” in Jn 8:51. I am tempted to understand this text in terms of “whoever obeys my commands will not perish in the troubles that are coming on Judea, troubles that will amount to the end of the current age and the beginning of the next.”

*Perhaps it is just my obstinacy, but I continue to think that there are at least hints that Jesus’ execution had a kind of de-escalatory effect (“moral influence”, or perhaps “morale influence”, cf. Lk 24:19-21) on Judean militancy. Perhaps Jesus ransomed Israel from Rome, but only for a generation. 

You raise a real interpretive pressure point in Johannine studies: John repeatedly depicts Jesus as the Father’s sent agent—speaking what he has been taught, doing nothing “from himself,” acting with delegated authority—yet John also frames Jesus with language that, in Israel’s Scriptures (especially in Greek Isaiah), functions as YHWH’s own self-declaration. You propose that the “Before Abraham was, I am” saying (John 8:58) should be read primarily within this agency framework, drawing on James McGrath’s discussion of divine name-bearing (with the Apocalypse of Abraham as a key example) and on the “light of the world” discourse’s intertextual links to Isaiah’s servant motif and Wisdom traditions. You further suggest that John’s Jesus is, to a significant extent, a rhetorical-theological construct shaped by later apocalyptic speculation rather than a reliable representation of the historical Jesus.

A Trinitarian reading can affirm several of your instincts—especially that John’s Jesus is the obedient, sent one and that Isaiah 40–55 matters greatly for the “I am” sayings—without accepting your reduction of John 8:58 to “personal significance” or to delegated name-bearing. The decisive question is not whether John uses agency language (he does), but what kind of agency John attributes to Jesus, and how the absolute ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) functions syntactically, intertextually, and narratively in the immediate context of John 8. On linguistic and discourse-level grounds, the absolute “I am” in 8:58 is doing more than marking authorization; it is a deliberately stark contrast between Abraham’s coming-to-be and Jesus’ unbounded being, placed in a narrative environment where “I am” echoes the monotheistic self-attestation of YHWH in Isaiah’s Greek. John’s agency Christology is not an alternative to “high” Christology; it is one of its principal vehicles.

1. John’s “Agency” Language Does Not Settle the Question Against Ontological Claims

You begin with a broader doubt: perhaps John’s Christology is not “higher” than the Synoptics after all, because in John 5:17–18 and 10:33 Jesus’ response to accusations of equality with God amounts, in effect, to: “No, I am the Son of Man, authorized by God to speak and act on his behalf.” But even as a summary of those dialogues, that formulation blunts the distinctive force of John’s presentation. The “sent one” theme in John is not merely functional delegation; it is repeatedly paired with claims about divine prerogatives and divine-level participation in God’s work.

In John 5, the charge of making himself “equal with God” arises from Jesus’ claim to share the Father’s work (including Sabbath prerogative) and, in the same discourse, to exercise life-giving and judgment functions in a way that Jewish monotheism reserves to God (John 5:19–29). Jesus’ insistence that the Son does nothing “from himself” does not read naturally as a retreat to creaturely status; it reads as an account of inseparable operation and perfect filial correspondence—what later theology would call unity of action grounded in unity of being. Classic Johannine scholarship has long noted that the language of dependence in John does not map neatly onto creaturely subordination (see, e.g., D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St John). John’s aim is not to downgrade Jesus; it is to identify Jesus’ works with the Father’s works so tightly that the Father is known in and through the Son.

The same is true in John 10. The blasphemy accusation (10:33) is answered in a way that both engages Israel’s Scripture and intensifies the issue: Jesus speaks of sanctification and sending (10:36), yes, but the discourse is framed by claims such as “I and the Father are one” (10:30) and by a mutual indwelling formula (10:38). Whatever one makes of those lines, they do not sit comfortably inside a merely “authorized prophet” profile. In other words, John’s “agency” language is not a deflection from divine identity claims; it is the Johannine mode of expressing the Son’s relation to the Father.

That matters because you treat John 8:28 (“you will know that I am… and that I do nothing by myself, but as the Father taught me…”) as if it supplies an authorial gloss that restricts absolute “I am” to agency. But in John, agency and divine identity are not mutually exclusive categories. The Fourth Gospel is capable of saying, in adjacent breaths, that Jesus is sent and obedient and that Jesus is the locus where Israel’s God is encountered.

• 2. The Grammar and Discourse Force of John 8:58: Becoming Versus Being

Your central concern is John 8:58: πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι, ἐγώ εἰμι (“before Abraham came to be, I am”). You rightly note that this is not a predicated “I am the light” form but an absolute “I am.” You also rightly see that Isaiah’s absolute ἐγώ εἰμι statements are the most plausible Septuagintal background—arguably more so than Exodus 3:14 taken in isolation. Where your argument falters is in treating the absolute present as primarily a marker of “personal significance” or mission-authorization rather than as a deliberate ontological contrast.

Two features are crucial.

First, the verb for Abraham is γενέσθαι (aorist infinitive of γίγνομαι), which characteristically denotes coming into being, entering a state, becoming—an ingressive event. John could have used an infinitive of εἰμί (“to be”) for Abraham if he simply wanted an “earlier/later” comparison. The choice of γίγνομαι is rhetorically loaded: Abraham became; Jesus is.

Second, the main clause is the present indicative εἰμί, and it is used absolutely: ἐγώ εἰμι, with no expressed predicate. This is not the ordinary “I am he” identification that you rightly discuss in places like John 4:26, 6:20, and John 9:9. In John 8:58, the predicate is not merely implicit and easily supplied (“I am [the Messiah]” or “It is I”); the absolute form is part of the point. The statement is framed as the climactic answer to “You are not yet fifty; have you seen Abraham?” The natural expectation would be a past-tense reply (“I was,” “I existed,” “I have been”). John instead has Jesus answer with an absolute present that refuses to locate Jesus’ existence as one more item inside the timeline Abraham belongs to.

This is precisely why the line has struck readers as extraordinary from antiquity onward and why, even in modern grammatical discussion, many scholars treat John 8:58 as an instance where the present tense functions in a way that is not reducible to a simple “present perfect” paraphrase. Daniel Wallace, for example, discusses 8:58 as a special use of the present that transcends ordinary duration categories (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics). Buist Fanning’s work on verbal aspect similarly helps clarify why an absolute present can be used to portray unbounded existence rather than a durative process that began at a point (Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek). Even if one does not adopt every label used in modern grammars, the discourse effect is plain: Abraham is characterized by temporal origination; Jesus is characterized by unbounded being.

If John’s intended meaning were merely “I existed before Abraham,” it is difficult to explain why he did not put a straightforward past form on Jesus’ lips, especially given that you yourself note (elsewhere in your discussion) how common and flexible Greek is in expressing simple temporal precedence. The form we actually have is best explained as intentional, not accidental: it dramatizes the becoming/being contrast.

• 3. John 8:28 and the “I Do Nothing from Myself” Clause: Economic Dependence, Not Ontological Denial

You treat John 8:28 as Jesus’ own interpretation of “I am,” insisting that it means he “speaks and acts as an agent sent by God, not as God incarnate.” The trouble is that the inference does not follow from the text, even within your own intertextual framework.

In Isaiah 40–55—especially in the Greek passages you cite—YHWH’s absolute “I am” is frequently embedded in contexts that emphasize YHWH’s unique identity and YHWH’s purposeful action in history (saving, judging, teaching, vindicating). “I am” is not a free-floating divine name; it is a self-attesting claim that grounds mission and authority. So even if John is echoing Isaiah, the combination “I am… and I do nothing from myself” need not demote Jesus to “mere agent”; it can instead locate Jesus’ action within the Father–Son relation, in which Jesus’ speech and works are the Father’s self-disclosure.

Put differently: Jesus’ insistence that he does nothing “from himself” functions in John as the opposite of autonomy, not the opposite of deity. It distinguishes the Son from the Father (he is not the Father; he is sent by the Father) while uniting the Son’s action with the Father’s action (what the Son does and says is what the Father does and says). That is exactly the sort of conceptual space later Trinitarian theology occupies: distinction of persons, unity of essence and operation. Barrett’s worry (as you report it) that it would be “intolerable” for John to have Jesus say, “I am Yahweh… and I do what I am told,” only bites if one assumes a crude identity claim that collapses Father and Son into one person (a modalistic caricature). Nicene Trinitarianism does not say that. It is fully capable of affirming that the Son truly shares the divine identity and yet, as Son, speaks and acts from the Father.

• 4. “I Am” in Isaiah: Not Merely “Personal Significance,” but Monotheistic Self-Attestation

A major move in your argument is to relativize the “I am” formula itself. You propose that Isaiah’s ἐγώ εἰμι statements are “arguably of the same type—less a reference to Exodus 3:14 than an affirmation of divine significance in the particular context.” But in the Isaianic context you yourself quote (Isaiah 43:8–13 LXX), the function is not merely “significance.” It is exclusive deity and exclusive saviorhood in polemic against rivals: “Before me there was no other god, nor shall there be any after me… besides me there is none who saves.” That is not a generic “I matter” statement; it is a claim about unique identity.

This matters because you also emphasize the witness motif: “Be my witnesses… so that you may know and believe and understand that I am.” In Isaiah, that formula is not simply about the servant’s mission; it is about establishing who YHWH is in the face of competing claims. When John places absolute ἐγώ εἰμι sayings on Jesus’ lips in precisely a “witness” setting (John 8:18) and then drives the discourse to the becoming/being contrast of 8:58, it is exegetically strained to reduce the result to “personal significance.” The Isaianic “I am” is the self-attesting marker of YHWH’s unique identity; John’s appropriation, at minimum, is doing something far stronger than saying “I am important.”

Here your own intertextual work—linking John 8’s discourse to Isaiah 43’s witness scene—pushes toward, not away from, a high Christology: in Isaiah, YHWH and the servant stand together as witnesses to YHWH’s “I am.” In John 8, the Father and Jesus stand together in a witness configuration around Jesus’ “I am.” That is not a neat “agency-only” transfer; it is a deliberate relocation of Israel’s monotheistic self-attestation into the Father–Son relationship.

This is one reason why scholarship on “divine identity” in early Christology has repeatedly found Isaiah 40–55 (especially the “I am” formulas and the exclusive claims of deity) to be a primary matrix for New Testament claims about Jesus (see, e.g., Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel). Your essay names the right Isaiah texts; it draws too small a theological conclusion from them.

• 5. McGrath’s Name-Bearing Agent Model and the Apocalypse of Abraham: Relevance and Limits

Your use of McGrath is careful: you present the argument that Jewish texts sometimes portray an agent of YHWH (including angels) bearing the divine name “in order to be empowered for his mission,” and you cite Apocalypse of Abraham’s Yahoel as an example. You then link this to John 17:11 (“your name, which you have given me”), suggesting that if “I am” is the divine name, it has been given to Jesus as the supreme agent.

Two points should be separated.

First, yes: “name-bearing” motifs exist in Second Temple traditions, and you are right that they can express empowerment and authorization. But those motifs, by themselves, do not determine John’s usage. John’s Gospel is not merely depicting an angelic emissary; your own essay notes that John’s prologue identifies the Light with the Logos/Wisdom of God who “became flesh.” That is categorically different from a created angel who bears a delegated name. If John is drawing on “agency” categories, he is doing so in a way that uniquely positions Jesus on the divine side of the Creator–creature distinction, not simply at the top of the creaturely hierarchy.

Second, John 17:11’s “name” language does not naturally reduce to “Jesus has been granted a divine title to perform a task.” In biblical idiom, “name” commonly denotes revealed character, authority, and presence, not merely a lexical label. To be “kept in God’s name” is to be guarded within God’s covenantal power and identity. When John says that this “name” has been given to Jesus, the giving can denote the Father’s entrusting of divine self-revelation and authority to the Son in the economy of salvation—without implying that Jesus is an ontologically separate agent who merely “wears” the name externally. In fact, the logic of the Fourth Gospel more readily supports the reverse: Jesus can mediate and bear the Father’s name precisely because he uniquely shares in God’s life and reveals God from within (a point developed extensively in standard Johannine commentaries such as Brown, Barrett, and later theological readings like Marianne Meye Thompson, The God of the Gospel of John).

So McGrath’s model may illuminate one strand of Jewish conceptuality, but it does not “solve” John 8:58 unless one first assumes that John’s Christology is fundamentally angelomorphic. Your own appeal to the Logos/Wisdom prologue undercuts that assumption.

1. 6. “Light of the World,” Servant Israel, and the Transfer of YHWH’s Prerogatives to Jesus

Your Isaianic reading of John 8:12–9:41 is one of the strongest parts of your essay. The correspondences you note—blindness, witness, light to the nations, servant identity, the Abraham motif—are real and widely recognized. The question is what John is doing with them.

You treat Jesus as the “authentic servant” in place of Israel, “taught by the Father” and doing the Father’s works. A Trinitarian reading can agree with the transfer—Jesus embodies what faithful Israel should have been—while insisting that John simultaneously intensifies the servant motif by identifying Jesus with YHWH’s own saving action. In Isaiah, the servant is the instrument through whom YHWH’s salvation is displayed; in John, Jesus is not only the instrument but also the one who can say, in absolute terms, what Isaiah’s God says. This is why your witness parallel is so striking: in Isaiah 43, the “I am” is YHWH’s self-attestation; in John 8, Jesus stands in the very position where Isaiah locates YHWH’s “I am,” with the Father as the corroborating witness.

This is not “loosely” done, as though John lacked a prophetic-narrative framework. It is a characteristic Johannine move: Jesus fulfills Israel’s calling precisely because he is the incarnate Logos/Light, not merely a representative Israelite prophet.

7. Wisdom Traditions: Sirach 24, 1 Enoch 42, and What John Claims in the Prologue

You appeal to a Wisdom trope: Wisdom was meant to dwell among Israel (Sirach 24), but in some strands of Jewish reflection Wisdom finds no dwelling among the children of men (1 Enoch 42). You then propose that John reconfigures this: Wisdom/Word becomes flesh in Jesus, because Israel failed. That is a plausible way of describing John’s polemical story (you cite John 1:11).

The crucial point, however, is that Wisdom traditions do not automatically imply “mere agency.” In many Jewish texts Wisdom is not an independent angelic being; Wisdom is God’s own self-expression and presence in the world—sometimes highly personified, but still functioning as a way of speaking about God’s immanent action. John’s prologue radicalizes this: the Logos is not only the means of divine action but becomes flesh. Once you grant the prologue’s central equation—Light/Logos becoming flesh—you have already moved beyond the category of a name-bearing emissary like Yahoel. The question becomes not whether Jesus is an agent, but whether he is the kind of agent who participates in God’s unique identity.

You try to hold the prologue and the agency reading together by saying: according to the Wisdom trope, the Word took initiative in becoming flesh; but according to Jesus’ teaching, he is Wisdom/Word because he has been taught by the Father and does the Father’s works. Yet in John, being “taught by the Father” is not an external credential that makes him Wisdom; it is the economic manifestation of the Father–Son relation—Jesus speaks what he hears because his life is from the Father. That is entirely compatible with Nicene Trinitarianism, and it is difficult to reconcile with a model where Jesus becomes Wisdom merely by being authorized.

• 8. Your Typology of “I Am” Sayings: Helpful, but Too Flattened in Application

Your classification of “I am” sayings into predicative (“I am the bread”), identificational (“It is I”), and absolute (“I am”) is broadly helpful. The difficulty lies in your attempt to treat John 8:58 as functioning primarily like the identificational type—“an affirmation of personal significance”—rather than as a distinct absolute use.

John 9:9 certainly proves that ἐγώ εἰμι can be mundane. But that observation is logically limited: it establishes that the phrase is not always divine, not that it is never divine or self-revelatory. Meaning is determined by syntax, discourse, and intertextual cues. In John 9:9 the context supplies the implied predicate (“I am [the man]”). In John 8:58 the form is absolute, and the clause is crafted as a contrast with Abraham’s becoming. That is not the same speech-act.

Likewise, your insistence that the reaction in John 18 is not because Jesus used a “verbal spell” is fair as far as it goes; but John’s narrative still portrays the utterance ἐγώ εἰμι as an epiphanic moment that overwhelms the arresting party. The evangelist is signaling that more is happening than ordinary self-identification.

• 9. The Apocalypse of Abraham Hypothesis: Parallels Without Demonstrated Dependence

In the second half of your text you suggest that Apocalypse of Abraham (in its post-70 to mid-second-century window) may illuminate why John connects Jesus’ “I am” with Abraham’s rejoicing and seeing “my day,” and you propose possible correspondences: the prominence of “I am” language, light imagery, Abraham’s commanded rejoicing, sending of an agent, visions of judgment, enmity with an evil figure (Azazel/devil), and so forth. You conclude that John is in “critical dialogue” with Jews who knew Apocalypse of Abraham or related tradition, and that this makes John’s Jesus semi-fictitious.

Here methodological caution is essential. The parallels you list are, for the most part, high-level apocalyptic and scriptural motifs that recur widely across Second Temple and early Jewish-Christian literature: Abraham as a visionary, “light” as eschatological symbolism, a sent mediator, conflict with evil powers, judgment imagery, and “I am” self-identification formulas. Such motifs can generate superficial resemblance without direct literary dependence. To argue dependence, one normally needs tighter controls—distinctive shared sequences, rare motifs clustered in the same configuration, or linguistic markers that are unlikely to arise independently.

Your own evidence is not yet of that sort. In particular, the linguistic channel is obscure: Apocalypse of Abraham survives in Old Slavonic and is often discussed as having a Semitic (possibly Hebrew) origin; John is a Greek Gospel saturated in Septuagintal idiom. Where John’s “I am” language is most distinctive, it is precisely where it most closely matches Greek Isaiah’s absolute ἐγώ εἰμι formulas, which you already treat as the primary intertext. That is a sufficient and much simpler explanation: John does not need Apocalypse of Abraham to place Abraham into a prophetic-vision framework, because Abraham is already a flexible figure in Jewish interpretive tradition, and Isaiah already supplies the exact “I am” idiom in Greek.

You cite R. Rubinkiewicz’s judgment that there is “no direct relationship between the Apocalypse of Abraham and the New Testament” (in the standard Old Testament Pseudepigrapha collection edited by James H. Charlesworth). Even if one allows that scholarly judgments can be revisited, overturning such a conclusion requires stronger evidence than thematic overlap.

• 10. “Semi-Fictitious Jesus” and the Historical Claim: A Non Sequitur from Theological Shaping

Finally, you conclude that it is “not the historical Jesus” who says “Before Abraham was, I am,” but a Jesus produced by later apocalyptic speculation, and that the Gospel functions as a rhetorical-theological construct rather than a window into Jesus’ mind.

This conclusion does not follow from the premises you provide. The presence of intertextuality, typology, and theological narration does not entail fabrication. Ancient historiography and ancient biography routinely interpret events through Scripture and symbol without ceasing to be claims about real speech and real action. At minimum, your argument would need to show that the saying is (a) implausible within Jesus’ own first-century Jewish context and (b) best explained by a demonstrable chain of dependence on later texts. But your own analysis repeatedly anchors John 8 in Isaiah 40–55, precisely the kind of scriptural-theological world Jesus and his contemporaries inhabited. If anything, John’s saturation in Isaiah makes the saying more, not less, intelligible within a first-century Jewish matrix.

Moreover, within John 8 itself, the saying functions as the climax of a sustained dispute about identity (“Who do you make yourself out to be?”), paternity (Abraham vs. the devil), and truth-bearing. The narrative logic does not require a second-century apocalyptic catalyst to explain why Abraham appears as a foil; it requires only John’s theological conviction that Jesus’ “day” is the horizon toward which Israel’s story tended—and that Abraham, as the archetypal ancestor, can be rhetorically positioned as seeing that horizon.

• Conclusion: Isaiah’s “I Am” and John’s “I Am” Converge in a High Christology, Not an Agency-Only Model

Your argument is strongest where you insist that Isaiah 40–55 and the witness/light themes are central to John 8–9, and where you recognize that “I am” language in John cannot be reduced to a single simplistic template. Where it overreaches is in drawing an agency-only conclusion from agency language, and in treating Isaiah’s absolute ἐγώ εἰμι as merely “significance” rather than monotheistic self-attestation. John 8:58 is crafted to contrast Abraham’s coming-to-be with Jesus’ unbounded being, and it is embedded in precisely the Isaianic discourse world where “I am” functions as YHWH’s self-identifying claim. John can portray Jesus as taught, sent, and obedient while simultaneously identifying him with the divine self-revelation—because John’s “agency” is the agency of the Son who shares the Father’s identity, not the agency of an exalted intermediary who merely carries a borrowed name.

If one wants to keep your intertextual gains while avoiding your reduction, the simplest synthesis is this: John’s Gospel intentionally re-reads Israel’s servant/light/wisdom motifs around Jesus, not to replace divine identity with delegated authority, but to locate the Father’s unique identity and saving action in the Father–Son relationship. That is exactly the theological space Trinitarian Christology was later developed to articulate.