Logos: The Word That Was Already Speaking

John begins his Gospel with a word so loaded that translators leave it half translated: in the beginning was the Word. Greek readers heard a philosopher’s term. Jewish readers heard the first page of Genesis, where God says and it is. The argument about which John meant is as old as the church, and the answer is probably both.

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Lesson 7 of 12 · Greek

Logos is speech and the reason in it: a word, an account, a statement, the sense of a thing said. In Greek thought it had become the ordering principle of the world; in the Greek Old Testament it had become the standard rendering of the Hebrew dabar, the word by which God made the heavens and sent the prophets. When John writes that in the beginning was the Logos, both readers hear something true, and the Hebrew one hears more: that the speaking which made the world in Genesis 1 has now been born. English keeps Word with a capital, which preserves the mystery and loses the reason; it is the right choice and an incomplete one.

In the beginning was the Word

John’s first sentence is built to be heard against the Bible’s first sentence.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. — John 1:1 · WEB

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In the beginning: Genesis 1:1 in Greek begins with exactly those words, and any reader of the Greek Old Testament would have felt the echo before the sentence was finished. What follows in Genesis is God speaking, ten times, and each time the thing spoken comes to be. John says that speaking was a someone.

λόγος lógos G3056

from λέγω; something said (including the thought); by implication, a topic (subject of discourse), also reasoning (the mental faculty) or motive; by extension, a computation; specially, (with the article in John) the Divine Expression (i.e. Christ):--account, cause, communication, X concerning, doctrine, fame, X have to do, intent, matter, mouth, preaching, question, reason, + reckon, remove, say(-ing), shew, X speaker, speech, talk, thing, + none of these things move me, tidings, treatise, utterance, word, work.

From a verb meaning to gather, to count, to say: a word, a saying, a statement, an account, a reason, a reckoning. In ordinary Greek it is what someone said, or the sense of it. In the philosophers, from Heraclitus to the Stoics, it became the rational order running through everything. In the Greek Old Testament it translates the Hebrew dabar some nine hundred times: the word of the Lord that came to a prophet, the ten words spoken at Sinai, the word by which the heavens were made. John had both histories in front of him.

The Hebrew behind it

Before John, the Old Testament had already made God’s word an agent.

“God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” Genesis 1:3 · WEB
God said, and there was: the first act of the Bible is speech that does what it says.
“By Yahweh’s word, the heavens were made: all their army by the breath of his mouth.” Psalm 33:6 · WEB
By the word of Yahweh the heavens were made: the psalm reads Genesis 1 and names the instrument.
“so is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do.” Isaiah 55:11 · WEB
My word will not return to me void, but will accomplish what I please: a word that goes out, works, and comes back, like a servant sent.
“Now Yahweh’s word came to me, saying,” Jeremiah 1:4 · WEB
The word of Yahweh came to me: the standard opening of a prophet’s book, and the word arrives like a visitor.

A word that creates, that is sent, that works and returns, that comes to a person: by the time of the prophets, God’s dabar is already very nearly someone. John takes the last step.

Made flesh

The sentence the whole prologue exists to reach:

The Word became flesh and lived among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of the only born Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. — John 1:14 · WEB

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The Word became flesh and lived among us. Every Greek reader would have found that sentence absurd — the rational order of the universe does not get a body — and every Jewish reader would have found it something worse than absurd, and John writes it anyway, in the plainest words he has. What the Old Testament sent to the prophets and spoke over the deep is now a man who can be seen. The rest of the Gospel is what he said.

The argument, marked

Where John got the word has been argued since the second century, and a reader should know the shape of it. One reading says he borrowed it from Greek philosophy, or from Philo of Alexandria, who had already called the Logos God’s agent in creation, and used it to explain Jesus to a Greek world. Another says the source is entirely Jewish: Genesis 1, the psalms, the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 that was beside God at the making of the world, and the Aramaic paraphrases that spoke of the Memra, the Word of the Lord, where the Hebrew had God acting directly. Most readers now hold that John chose a word both audiences could hear and meant the Jewish sense first. The lesson does not settle it. It notes that the word was chosen because it could carry both, and that the choice was deliberate.

For the word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and is able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart. — Hebrews 4:12 · WEB

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The word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword. Hebrews is not talking about a book; it is talking about what John is talking about, a word that does things, and that reaches inside the person who hears it.

What the word asks

It asks to be heard as speech, not read as a term. Logos is not an idea about God; it is God saying something, and in John it is God saying someone. A reader who meets the Word in the New Testament and pictures a doctrine has the Greek philosophers’ word; a reader who pictures a voice, and then a face, has John’s.