Explanatory Notes -- John 1:1

1:1 In the beginning was the Logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

1. If you have grown up as a Christian, the expression, "the word of God," probably makes you think immediately of the Bible. The Bible is indeed the word of God. However, the New Testament was not yet collected when these words were written down. It is natural for us to come to the words of the Bible with the definitions in our heads, but to know what the Bible actually meant when God first inspired it, we need to know what these words meant when the author of John wrote them. [1] 

Spoiler alert. We will find out who this Logos is when we get to John 1:14. The "Logos of God" is not the Bible in this context. It is Jesus. Christ is the Logos. "The Logos became flesh, and tabernacled among us."

[I have since inserted several 100 words here on an orthodox, theological reading of John 1:1. It will appear in the published version, Explanatory Notes on Jesus' Birth.]

The phrase, "the logos of God" had a history. It had a known background at the time of Christ. It was not an expression that the beloved disciple came up with himself. Yes, we can find references to the "word" in the Old Testament. Psalm 119:105 says, "Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path." This psalm probably did especially have the Law, the Pentateuch, in mind. 

More immediately, John 1:1 has clear echoes of Genesis 1 and God in creation. "And God said, 'Let there be light.'" God speaks the entire creation into order in Genesis 1. Each day of creation begins with the word of God. The phrase here, "in the beginning" is clearly meant to echo Genesis 1:1.

2. However, much happened in the hundreds of years between Psalm 119 and the Gospel of John. In the Greek world, the Logos was a major part of Stoic philosophy, which originated around 300BC. In Stoicism, the Word was the Mind that governed the world. Those things that happened in the world happened because the Word wanted it to happen. Like fate, it was pointless to fight against the Word, because everything would certainly end up the way the Word directed it to be. 

Rather, you should "love your fate" (amor fati). The Stoic conception of the divine Mind was very amenable to the Jewish understanding of God. In fact, a famous Stoic hymn by Cleanthes called, "A Hymn to Zeus," could almost have been written to the God of Israel.

What makes this Greek background potentially relevant is the fact that some prominent Jewish thinkers, especially at Alexandria in Egypt, integrated the Old Testament sense of God's word and God's speaking with this Stoic philosophy, also mixing in some Platonic philosophy as well. This mixture of philosophies is known as "Middle Platonism." The best-known Jewish thinker to use this synthesis to interpret the Bible is Philo, who was probably born around 20BC.

From Platonism, Philo believed that God was the ultimate pattern of all things. The Logos or Word of God was the image of God, God's shadow. Then the world was a copy of the Word. In his synthesis, the Word was the instrument of God in creation, the one "through whom" God made the world. From Stoicism, Philo saw the Logos as the pilot of the world, the tool God uses to implement his will in the world.

A keen eye will see some possible parallels between this "Logos speculation" and various passages in the New Testament. The prologue of John is the most obvious intersection, as we will see, but several other passages also come to mind:

• Colossians 1:15 -- "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation" (cf. Philo, Special Laws 1.81).
• Hebrews 4:12 -- "The Logos of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword" (cf. Philo, Heir 130).
• Hebrews 10:1 -- "The Law, having a shadow of the good things to come, not the image itself of the things..." (cf. Philo, Allegorical Laws, 3.96).
• 1 Corinthians 8:6 -- "For us [is] one God, the Father, from whom all things... and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things" (cf. Philo, Cherubim 127).

Whether these parallels prove to be substantial or not, they are at least worth investigating.

3. a. "In the beginning, was the Logos."
How would a Jew like Philo have understood this statement? God created the world by speaking it into existence. The Word of God is God's will for the world in action. God said, "Let it be," and it was. Everything started with God speaking.

b. "The word was with God."
John uses a unique expression for "with" here. It is not the normal word of accompaniment. It is normally a word that means "to" or "toward." The Word was toward God does not really make a lot of sense at first glance. It would make more immediate sense if John had put, "the Word was from God."

On the one hand, it is hard to know the colloquialisms of late first century Ephesus. Perhaps this preposition simply meant "with" in town. Or perhaps it means something like, "the Word belonged with God." "The Word related or pertained to God."

c. "The word was divine."
This part of the verse has long been a point of debate. Jehovah's Witnesses translate the verse, "The Word was a god," pointing out that there is no word "the" (called the article) on God. However, there is a grammatical rule called "Colwell's Rule" that argues that the reason it doesn't have the article is the order of the Greek words. The order is "God was the Word." 

Colwell noted first that this is a situation where you have two nouns joined by "was," which is called a "to be" verb. He then noted that the "predicate" comes first (the predicate is the part of the sentence in English that normally comes after the verb). In this situation in the Greek language, he noted, the first noun usually does not have the word the on it, even though it is part of the meaning.

Bottom line? He argued that it should be translated, "The Word was God."

In general, when a noun in Greek does not have the word the on the front, it does not mean that we should stick the word a or an in front of it. The article ("the") in Greek is used when you are talking about a specific thing. However, without the article, the noun tends to be talking about a kind of thing. 

For this reason, I wonder if the best translation is something like, "the Word was divine." "God" in this case would give a categorization of the Logos. What category does the Logos belong to? It belongs in the category of God. 

It remained for the Church to unpack the precise relationship between the Logos, Christ, and God the Father. What we often find is that orthodox Christian belief is not simply a matter of "the Bible alone" or "the Church." God used both to reveal proper Christian understanding. We should not be troubled then if John 1 sowed seeds that came to full blossom in the understanding of the Church in the 300s and 400s.

It would be very easy for me to believe that God used the thinking of Alexandria to help some early Christians have words to express some of these mysteries. Did Jewish Logos speculation provide the early church with language to express mysteries about Christ, mysteries that God then helped develop into orthodox Christology in the Church of the next few centuries? In this regard, I have long been struck by the fact that Apollos was an extremely educated and eloquent man from Alexandria (Acts 18:24).  

Philo does have a passage where he notes the absence of the word the in relation to God. In the Greek translation of Genesis 31:13, one instance speaks of the God and another only of "God" without the word the. To what does the second instance refer? It refers to the Logos. To Philo, the word logos without the word the on the front "calls God's oldest Word 'God'" (Dreams 1.130).    

[1] Tradition is that the Gospel of John was written by John the son of Zebedee, one of the first disciples Jesus called (cf. Mark 1:19). The Gospel itself only indicates that the "beloved disciple" was the source of the Gospel's information (John 21:20-24). We will refer to the author as John and the beloved disciple for convenience.