In the beginning was the Logos
Elaine Miles writes about the words of John’s Gospel in the light of her understanding of ancient Greek
What was the Logos? Logos was a very common word in Greek, with a vast range of meanings, and is not an exact equivalent of our English ‘word’. Basically logos meant ‘something which is stated or can be stated’ (from the verb lego – I say). So, it can mean: a narrative; a report, whether of money spent or a historical account; an argument, reason, or ground; a first principle; a formula or ratio; a phrase or sentence (but not usually a single word).
Consequently, it has to be translated according to the context. The main context in the prologue to the fourth gospel was Ephesus, the home of the writer of this gospel for the last seventy years of his life, but also the birthplace of Heraclitus. No one who lived for long in Ephesus at that time could help being influenced by his theory of what was the first principle from which everything came – verses two and three are virtually a quotation from Heraclitus. He named this first principle ‘the Logos’. So, that is what the word logos means here. The fact that logos is a masculine word means that any pronoun referring to it is in the masculine form, which does not justify translating ‘him’ rather than ‘it’ – the Logos of Heraclitus was not personal.
However, something else which we have to keep in mind is the background of the author himself. John Mark, who wrote these words, was himself Jewish, brought up in Jerusalem in his youth on the Torah. He is very likely to have identified Heraclitus’s idea of the Logos with the Creator God of the book of Genesis. Thus, he writes of the Logos: ‘It was almost God, in fact it was God’ and ‘in the beginning it was close to being God’. However, there do not seem to be any grounds up to this point for identifying the Logos with Jesus. At this point there was only a glimmer of light (phôs) in the darkness of the pagan world which John Mark saw all round him in Asia Minor. Logos/Yahweh gave a glimmer of light, which the darkness could not extinguish. The arrival of John the Baptist heralded the entry of Jesus (John 1:6) and this is the first ‘he’ in the prologue. Through John the Baptist John Mark was to encounter Jesus, and for him it was momentous.
Finally, I think we have a definite mention in John 1:9 of Jesus: ‘[This] was the True Light which [gave light to all men by coming] into the world’. In Jesus that glimmer of light becomes a Light sent from God, a revelation of God’s true nature, as God’s unique (monogenēs) Son. (The word monogenēs, although originally used literally came to be used metaphorically as ‘unique’ by Greek philosophers, and one cannot imagine Jews thinking that having just one son was something to be proud of.)
John 1:14 says: ‘So the Logos became flesh and [pitched his tent – dwelt] among us.’ John knew Jesus for only the last three years of his life. There seems a wistfulness in the choice of the Greek word eskenose, which does not suggest any long-term stay as ‘dwelt’ does.
‘We marvelled at his “presence” [doxa] as a unique son of the Father, his tremendous appeal and the truthfulness of his teaching.’ (Doxa means ‘how a person seems to other people’ from the verb dokeo ‘I seem’, and ‘glory’ does not seem appropriate here.)
John always saw Jesus as a man because he had known him personally, unlike Paul, and unlike the other Gospel writers. Paul might well have seen Jesus as a ‘vision’ with angels, but John does not seem to have gone all the way with Paul on a number of things. There is no reference to anything as dramatic as a resurrection in John’s Gospel, or of any symbolic Last Supper. Paul was dead, and of all the people who had told stories about Jesus (John 21:25) he, John Mark, was the only one who had known Jesus personally, and this might well have been his reason for writing his account, even at an advanced age.
Bible quotes are based on the Authorised (King James) Version, with amendments sourced from the original Greek.
