18) Who, or What, is the Word of John 1:1?, Exegesis of John 1:1, Part 2, with Rivers O Feden

Fuller written summary to this episode, click here.

1. In this podcast we consider how to best understand what or who John meant by the word “word” in the phrase: “In the beginning was the W/word”. The Greek word for “word” is logos. We will often refer to the word, “word” using this Greek term, logos.

2. As with the phrase “in the beginning” the meaning of logos, “word” in John’s prologue is best understood and defined first and foremost by other uses of the same word in John’s Gospel. We shouldn’t ignore or dismiss how the author himself uses logos and go looking for its meaning in other extra-biblical literature.  Logos and in its various forms occur nearly 40 times in the Gospel of John, and in the vast majority of occurrences logos means: a word, a verbal expression, a statement, a teaching, a saying, something spoken.

3. Jesus is the Logos in John’s Prologue because through and in Jesus, God is speaking. Jesus said more than once “And the word (logos) that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me”. John 1:18 states that no one has seen God, but the unique son who is in the bosom of the Father has explained Him”. Likewise, the author of Hebrews says that in these last days God has spoken by a son”, and Revelation 19:13 says the name by which Jesus is called is “the Word of God”.

4. Rivers places a bit of a different emphasis on how Jesus is the logos, stating that in the Gospel of John, logos is primarily the verbal utterance or teaching of Jesus, that is, things that Jesus said during his public ministry, and that it is difficult to separate the verbal utterance from the speaker Jesus.

5. We address the question: “If Jesus is the Logos of John’s Prologue, why isn’t he called the Logos again in John’s Gospel outside of the Prologue?

6. We analyze how both deity of Christ theologians and One God believers who see John’s prologue as commentary on the Genesis creation have gone outside the Gospel of John to define what John’s logos means. Rivers outlines the steps that One God believers (so-called Biblical Unitarians) have taken in an attempt to make logos of John’s Gospel synonymous with personified wisdom of Proverbs 8 and other extra-biblical literature. It’s a fairly twisted path that Biblical Unitarians of this persuasion have had to take.

9. The same kind of thing happened with “deity of Christ” interpretations of John 1:1, but from a different direction. “Deity of Christ” interpretations of logos in John 1 adapted into Christianity non-biblical, Greek philosophical ideas of what or who logos was. To some Greek philosophers the logos was some kind of a secondary or intermediary divine being. 2nd century Gentile church fathers, influenced heavily by Greek philosophy, jumped on these Hellenistic concepts of logos, and imposed these ideas on to their interpretation of John 1 by stating that the logos was a pre-existent divine figure who then “took on flesh” as Jesus.

11.  The adaptions of the Greek logos ideas into Christianity in the centuries following Jesus did not originate in Jerusalem. The prophets say, “For out of Zion shall go the teaching, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.” Rather, these church fathers’ ideas about the logos originated and developed in places like Athens Greece, Alexandria Egypt, and Cappadocia and Constantinople in modern Turkey.

12. Contrary to claims that John’s definition of logos can be informed by Hellenized conceptions of the word, John have used logos as a polemic, that is, as a direct attack or contrast to Greek ideas.