John 1.1-5.
I’ve written previously about when God became human. Now let’s look at God before he became human. Beginning with the beginning of the Gospel of John.
- John 1.1-5 KWL
- 1 In the beginning is the word.
- The word’s with God,
- and the word is God.
- 2 This word is in the beginning with God.
- 3 Everything comes to be through the word,
- and not one thing, nothing, comes to be without him.
- 4 What came to be though the word, is life.
- Life’s the light of humanity.
- 5 Light shines in darkness,
- and darkness can’t get hold of it.
“The word” which the author of John wrote of, exists at the beginning of creation. Is with God. Is God. And is the means by which everything is created.
And round 7BC, this word became a human we know as Jesus of Nazareth. Christians recognize him as the Christ.
Why’d the author of John (and for convenience we’ll just assume he’s John bar Zebedee; he probably is) use “word” to describe the pre-incarnate Jesus? You realize this passage is the reason so many Christians are hugely fascinated by the word “word” (and its Greek equivalent λόγος/lóyos, which they mistransliterate logos and pronounce all sorts of ways; and sometimes its Aramaic equivalent ܡܐܡܪܐ/memrá), and have written endless things about the Word of God. Some of it is extremely profound and useful… and some of it is sour horsepiss. I grew up hearing a lot of both.
This John passage tends to get translated in past tense. The KJV famously renders it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Which is fine; the beginning of time and creation of the cosmos did happen in our past. But most of this passage was written in the aorist tense, a verb tense which is neither past, present, nor future. It has no time connected to it. You have to figure its time from other verbs in the passage, or from context. Well, there is a verb in this passage with a time-based tense; the present-tense ἦν/in from καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος/ke Theós in o lóyos, “and the word is God.” He is God, present tense. God at creation, and never stopped being God.
Okay, now to the concept of λόγος/lóyos. It literally means “word.” Why’d John use it?
For centuries, Christians presumed lóyos comes from ancient Greek philosophy. Blame ancient gentile Christians. As non-Jews, they had no idea what Pharisees taught about the lóyos of God—or as the Aramaic-speaking Pharisees called it in Jesus’s day, the memrá of God. They usually figured whatever the Pharisees taught was wrong, hypocritical, and heresy, so they ignored it altogether.
Instead they interpreted bible through the lens of their own culture. Which was wrong then, and is wrong now. Yet Christians still do it. But that’s a whole other rant; let’s get back to criticizing ancient Christian gentiles.
Ancient Greek philosophers had written a whole bunch of navel-gazing gibberish about the word lóyos. ’Cause they were exploring the nature of truth: What is it, how do we find it, how do we prove it, how do we recognize logical fallacies, and what’s the deal with words which can mean more than one thing? For that matter, what’s a “word” anyway? Is it just a label for a thing, or is it a substantial thing on its own? Maybe that’s why God can create things by merely saying a word. Ge 1.3 And so on.
Follow the Greek philosophers’ intellectual rabbit trails, and you’ll go all sorts of weird, gnostic directions. Which is exactly what gentile Christians did.
Now let’s practice some actual logic. John wasn’t a gentile; he was a Galilean Jew who grew up attending, and getting the equivalent of a middle-school education in, Pharisee synagogues. So let’s look at that culture: What’d Pharisees teach about what a memrá is and means?
Turns out Pharisees had a lot of interesting ideas attached to it.