There is also the hermeneutic approach that the Gospel of John was advancing Jesus as an Epiphany of God, and not the Incarnation per se.
The Incarnation is a doctrine that would not be formed until the period of the Nicene Fathers. Persons like Ignatius and Justin Martyr laid the groundwork, but the idea of the Incarnation is more than the idea advanced in John.
The author of John speaks of Jesus as the Shekinah or "light" of God, along with speaking of Jesus in terms of the personification of Wisdom as found in extrabiblical works, such as the Wisdom of Solomon. The idea is that John was teaching that God was come in the Person of Jesus, much like God is present in the Shekinah but is not the Shekinah itself (or rather the Shekinah isn't all there is to God).
The Incarnation involves the teaching that the one God exists in more than one divine Person, and that one of those Persons (namely the Second Person of the Trinity) became fully incarnate in Jesus. In other words unlike the Shekinah (which does not contain all there is of God), Jesus in human form was the total embodiment of the Second Person of the Trinity, an incarnation that was totally man but at the same time totally God the Son. No part of God the Son remained in heaven while Jesus was incarnate.
This idea is far more advanced than the Epiphany of John's Gospel, though it relies heavily upon it. One might even say they see the beginnings of the evolution of the idea in John.
As a Jew, of course, I subscribe to no such beliefs or even to a concept that demands a single, personal Messiah.
