La parola fosse. Everything made through him divenne. Then the Word himself divenne flesh.
| Greek verb | John uses it of |
|---|---|
| eimi, Essere | the Word with God (verses 1–2), the life and the light in him (4, 9), the Word in the world (10) |
| ginomai, to come to be | all things (3), John the Baptist (6), the world (10), and the Word made flesh (14) |
Tap any word to see the Greek behind it.
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Where did John find “the Word”? Mostly in the Old Testament.
John wrote in Greek, and logos was already a large word in Greek thought. Scholars weigh the two backgrounds differently. Here is each side’s case, and the verses you can read for yourself.
From the Hebrew Scriptures
Raymond E. Brown, 1966
The Prologue’s picture of the Word is far closer to the Bible and to Jewish thought than to anything purely Greek.
The Gospel according to John I–XII, Anchor Bible 29, 524
D. A. Carson, 1991
The word would mean most to Jewish readers, but it would also reach readers from wholly pagan backgrounds and push them into fresh thought.
The Gospel according to John, 116
John Burnet, 1920, a historian of Greek philosophy
John’s teaching on the Word has nothing to do with Heraclitus or anything else in Greek philosophy. It comes from the Hebrew Wisdom books.
Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 133, note
From Greek thought
Heraclitus of Ephesus, about 500 BC
“Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all.”
Fragment B1, kept by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.132; John Burnet’s translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 133
Philo of Alexandria, about AD 40
A Jewish writer who read Genesis in Greek. He calls the Word God’s “first-born word”, and says he is called “the authority, and the name of God, and the Word”.
Sulla confusione delle lingue 146, C. D. Yonge’s translation (1854), vol. 2, 31
C. H. Dodd, 1953
Teaching about the Word much like Philo’s runs all through John’s Gospel, not only its first verses.
The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 279
Philo stands between the two sides: a Jew, writing in Greek, about the Word in Genesis.
Read the verses yourself
The Hebrew side points to the Old Testament
John begins where Genesis begins
The first three words of the Gospel are the first three words of the Bible.
In the Old Testament, God makes the world by speaking
God speaks, and it is so; his word goes out and does what he sends it to do. John says the same of the Word.
What John’s own words show
John keeps “was” and “became” apart
The passage above marks them: eimi for the Word, ginomai for all things, for John the Baptist and for the world. Westcott saw it in 1882: “Creation itself is represented as a ‘becoming’ in contrast with the ‘being’ emphasized before.” In verse 14 the same verb that made all things is used of the Word: he became flesh.
B. F. Westcott, Il Vangelo secondo San Giovanni (1882; reprint 1892), 2, 4, 11
John calls Jesus the Word in two other places
Abbott-Smith lists three places where logos is the name of the Word himself: John 1, the opening of 1 John, and Revelation 19.
The darkness has not overcome the light
The verb in verse 5, , can mean to overtake or to understand. Abbott-Smith gives both: “to overtake” and “to apprehend, comprehend”. The King James Version took the second. The Berean Standard Bible takes the first, and Westcott pointed to the same verb in 12:35, “that darkness overtake you not”.
B. F. Westcott, Il Vangelo secondo San Giovanni (1882; reprint 1892), 5
What no one had written before John
Augustine read the books of the Platonist philosophers in Latin. He found John’s opening there, in other words: in the beginning was the Word. He did not find verse 14.
“But that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there.”
The Greek for “made His dwelling”, , comes from the word for a tent. Abbott-Smith gives it as “to have one’s tabernacle, to dwell”. It appears five times in the New Testament: here, and four times in Revelation.