More Thoughts on John 1:1-18 and the Logos

EN APXH HN O ΛOΓOC…

At the start was the Logos…

      I decided to just open my Greek New Testament randomly again this morning and it fell open to John 1. John 1:1-18 talks about the “Logos”, referring of course, to the Person of the Trinity we call God the Son, incarnating into the Man, Jesus Christ.

      John choice of words here is really interesting. The word Logos, as it is used in this text, in the first century Mediterranean world was pregnant with meaning, and held particular meaning in the ancient belief system of Stoicism. But this meaning was not just confined to Stoicism, as it permeated Jewish theology and philosophy as well in the writings of Philo. Nearly everyone at this time would have understood to what John was referring by using the word “Logos.”

      The Logos was both the conscious rational mind of the individual, and the conscious rational mind which governed the cosmos, operating in both. When it was physically embodied, the Logos existed as pure ΠNEYMA (“breath,” “wind,” “spirit”), which is easily synonymous with our modern concepts of manifestations of energy like fire, which was also the animating force of all animals and human beings. In a way, as I think about it, a modern analogy of the Logos might be “the Force” from Star Wars, existing as both the “Cosmic Force” ordering and maintaining the universe with a will and mind of its own, and the “Living Force” interacting with and cooperating with living beings. Though certainly divine in nature, it wasn’t seen as a “deity” per se, or like one of the “gods” in the Roman and Greek pantheons, but even these had to submit to its order and will.

      It is this latter understanding, the position of the Logos in relationship to even the Olympians (who, while immortal, were still limited beings in the pagan mind), which makes John’s statement in the very first verse of his gospel so meaningful, not just to the Jews, but to everyone across the Roman world: “At the start was the Logos, and the Logos was right next to God, and the Logos was God.” John identifies the Logos itself, and everything which this word implied, with the God of the Jews, as both being in His immediate presence and God Himself simultaneously.

      And then he says in verse 14, “And the Logos became flesh and camped out among us…” This Cosmic Conscious Mind which orders the universe as well as the conscious minds of individual human beings, and identified with Yahweh the God of the Jews, incarnated as an individual Human Being and chose to go camping among us (literally “lived in a tent”) for a while. Understand what John is saying when he’s calling Jesus Christ, most likely his own first cousin, the Logos become flesh and blood.

      Again, a modern analogy to what John is saying here is if, in the Star Wars universe, the Cosmic Force chose to incarnate itself as a human being. Not just cause the birth of a human being, but to, itself, become a human being in order to manifest itself as an individual person. This is akin to what John is saying in the first eighteen verses of John 1. That would have been just as mind blowing to those reading this in the first century as it would be to the Jedi of the Star Wars universe, and just as controversial.

      And the purpose of this incarnation John states in verse 18, “No one has seen God at any time…” The word ΘEON, “God,” is first in this sentence, meaning that this is the word which is to be emphasized or stressed, perhaps as “No one has seen God Himself…” or “No one has seen God as He truly exists…” John then says, “...that one of a kind God who exists in the embrace of the Father explained Him.” The purpose of this incarnation of the Logos was to explain who God is as a person, to show human beings what He’s really like and who He really is in a way they could understand and relate to. This is something which Paul restates again later when he describes Jesus Christ as “the [mirror] image of the unseen God.”

      John wasn’t just writing to Jews, as many now teach. From the very beginning of his gospel, he uses terms and concepts which both Jew and non-Jew would understand, and the miracles he records later are all personal rebukes to the Greco-Roman pantheon demonstrating the Logos-become-flesh’s superiority and mastery of even them. But in order to understand and get that, you have to step outside of the Old Testament Scriptures and Rabbinic Jewish culture and learn about the wider 1^st century Hellenistic Roman world and culture. John didn’t write in a Sunday School color card vacuum, and to assume that none of the authors of the New Testament wrote with the broader ideas, concepts, and common understandings of the place and period is to anachronize the New Testament into a closed system narrative that it was never intended to be. And to do this, is to do a grave injustice to those authors, and the overarching Author of the whole, who intended these writings for the whole world.