Verse 18
18. No man hath seen God… Son hath declared him The Evangelist winds up this exordium as he began it, with the declaration that the Son, like the Word, is the manifest God, revealing the God invisible and unknowable. In the 17th verse the Son gives, reveals, grace and truth; in the 18th he is the declarer or revealer of the infinite Unseen.
The only begotten This begetting is as truly figurative as the utterance of the Word is figurative. Derivation and infinite wisdom are expressed in the latter; derivation and infinite power are expressed in the former.
Only begotten Son Mr. Tregelles seems to have established the fact that the true reading is only begotten God. The passage thereby becomes a striking proof-text of the divinity of the Son.
In the bosom of the Father As the Word was in the divine intellect before its incarnation, so the Son was in the love, the bosom, the heart of God, before his earthly birth. The Wordship and the Sonship are equally divine, before the creation and the First Advent, and eternal.
The prologue of the Gospel has now terminated, and the narrative proper commences at this point; to which point the forty days’ Temptation in the Wilderness is the last preceding event. Nor is there, as sceptical critics have pretended, the slightest difficulty in finding ample place for the Temptation at this point.
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