Note: I do plan to use this space for regular, short posts, but here’s another paper for those interested. It’s a fairly straightforward tracing of the various meanings of Logos leading up to the Gospel of John, including the use of Memra in the Aramaic Targum Neofiti.
Introduction
Of all the titles of Jesus in the New Testament, none has created more questions than John’s use of the Greek logos in his Prologue. Freighted with various meanings for Jew and Gentile alike, logos is used in the Prologue to make a bold, high-Christological statement about Jesus’s pre-existence, unity with God, role in creation, and revelatory action. Were these Christological aspects of the term implicit in the word as it was historically used up to and the point of the Gospel’s composition, or is John doing something wholly new by deploying the language as he does? In this essay, I’ll briefly touch on the background of the word in Greek, and more expansively on its understanding in Hebrew, particularly in the light of the Wisdom tradition. Finally, led by Oscar Cullmann, who calls the Logos “the essential content of all Christology,”[1] I’ll explore how this is all synthesized in John to express the coming of the God-Man Jesus Christ as the revelation of God.
Cullmann argues that Kyrios allowed Christians to apply statements about God to Jesus, giving that title a high-Christological vector while maintaining a distinction between Father and Son. When we consider the Logos, we find a clearer articulation of this difference. Cullmann does not emphasize the logos as articulating a unity in essence or nature, although that is present, but rather a unity in function and revelation. While Kyrios deals primarily with Jesus’s rule, logos concerns his “original function as mediator of creation.”[2]
Logos in Greek Philosophy
Logos was a common concept in the ancient world. It has a variety of meanings in Greek literature and is rarely used to mean a single thing. Depending upon context, it may have either a mathematical sense, such as measure, ratio, or proportion, or a constellation of meanings such as “definition, narrative, oration, conversation, dialogue, oracle, proverb or saying.”[3] We find it first in Heraclitus (c. 500 BC), where it may mean either proportion, or more likely a sense of cosmic order. It is “the omnipresent wisdom by which all things are steered.”[4] At this point in history, it is an abstraction rather than a substance or underlying reality. There is no sense that it is a hypostasis.
More than a century later, Plato would use it to mean something akin to rational discourse, “the stream that flows from the soul in vocal utterance through the mouth.”[5] Aristotle would also use logos in multiple ways, but with an ethical element, suggesting that to live ethically one must has right reason (orthos logos).[6] In both Plato and Aristotle, it has more of a sense of “the real.”
It is possibly the Stoics, however, who most directly informed its use in the Gospel of John. The word was central to their cosmological sense, and they regarded “logos, God, and nature” as one, as “a rational element that pervades and controls all of the universe.”[7] Human rationality participated in the rational nature of the cosmos itself, but was particularly material for the Stoics, contrasted with Plato and Aristotle, who considered human reason as “beyond the realm of the material.”[8] The goal of the Stoic was to govern the passions with right reason, which enabled man to participate in an ordered and rational cosmos. For the Stoics, the logos was an “impersonal, pantheistic World Soul.” [9]
There are other foreshadowing's in ancient religion. Hermes and Thoth are both called Logos, and that connection eventually gave rise to the large body of Hermetic literature the continues to influence esoteric circles. An “original man” concept is found in some forms of paganism, giving us Logos and Nous. Rudolf Bultmann believed there was a non-Christian logos-type figure that preceded Christ, but he could never prove it because all the gnostic texts that supported his idea were post-Christian.
In Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and Stoics, however, we do not have the logos as it was to Christian or even Jewish writers who came later. Cullmann will claim the difference is stark:
“We must guard against being led by the terminological analogy to read into Greek philosophy of the late Jewish or Johannine understanding of the Logos. Augustine well knew that the complete entrance of the logos into history and humanity is utterly foreign to Platonism, although formal similarities did lead him to remark that with somewhat different expressions the Platonic books say the same thing about the original logos that John teaches in his gospel. Actually, of course, the similarities between the two is more one of terminology than of content itself.”[10]
But is it merely terminological? And doesn’t the terminology, to some extent, determine the meaning, even when that meaning is polyvalent? Doesn’t the use of particular words evoke a particular understanding for both writer and audience, and can’t we assume that this was the intent of the author? The varying notions of logos for the Greeks and others, broad in concept and diverse in meaning as they are, do in fact trail behind them a cluster of meanings that give resonance to its use for Jews and Christians. John drew this tool from the toolbox on purpose.
Logos in Judaism
The dense meanings of logos cannot be avoided when we come to the Septuagint, and find logos adding new depths to the original Hebrew. These ideas influenced Jewish and pagan concepts of a personified logos, and lay at the root of the idea’s development, particularly when we come to the Hellenistic-Jewish philosopher Philo.
In the Hebrew Scripture, there is a sense that this word or command was more intimately bound with God’s work in the cosmic order:
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty, (Is 55:11)By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, (Ps 33:6)
by his word all things hold together. (Sir 43:6)
This last passage opens up the issue of wisdom literature, where the ferment of Greek philosophy and Semitic religion created the fertile ground in which the Gospel of John would grow and find its form.
In particular, the language of logos gained in prominence in Jewish philosophy just as the nascent Jesus movement was taking shape. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20BC to 50AD) represents the fullest expression of Hellenistic Jewish thought at this crucial stage. Philo interpreted Hebrew scriptures in light of Greek philosophy, and logos was central to his understanding.
Sophia and logos are not interchangeable in Philo, but they are closely identified with each other. Philo use the figure of logos in different ways, but it was essentially “the intermediate reality between God, who was essentially transcendent, and the universe.”[11] It is that which is closest to God:
But the divine word which is above these does not come into any visible appearance, inasmuch as it is not like to any of the things that come under the external senses, but is itself an image of God, the most ancient of all the objects of intellect in the whole world, and that which is placed in the closest proximity to the only truly existing God, without any partition or distance being interposed between them.[12] (On Flight and Finding, 101)
It was both the image of God above, and the ordering principle of the world below. All that is, is contained in the logos, and the universe is sustained in and through the logos. Through all the concepts and titles used by Philo to unfold his notions of the logos—First-Begotten Son of the Uncreated Father, the Chief of the Angels, the High Priest of the Cosmos, and the Man of God[13]—one thing remained consistent: the logos was the mediator between a fully transcendent God and the material universe.
In his interpretation of Genesis 1:27 in On the Creation (25), Philo sees the logos functioning as the paradigm for the human mind, with man created according to the logos. Because of this, the logos can draw man into God. Human striving for an encounter with the divine was intrinsic because of this imago dei, which also provided a mechanism by which it could be achieved. Philo, in keeping with his Platonic roots, considered the material world and the realm of the senses to be an obstacle, but believed the divine logos allowed man to free himself from the material world in order to contemplate God.[14]
And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel. (147) For which reason I was induced a little while ago to praise the principles of those who said, “We are all one man’s sons.” For even if we are not yet suitable to be called the sons of God, still we may deserve to be called the children of his eternal image, of his most sacred word; for the image of God is his most ancient word.”[15] (Confusion, 146)
Logos did a lot of heavy lifting for Philo, and its myriad meanings and interpretations can make it difficult to pin down just what role it played in his philosophy. Is it personal or impersonal, metaphor or reality, a kind of proto-hypostasis or something altogether distinct? In his attempt to integrate Hellenistic concepts with Semitic scriptural interpretation, he never quite makes it clear, leaving the field open to a more specific claims, which would come in the prologue to John.
Was there a direct influence of Philo upon early Christology, or did both Philo and John simply drink from a common stream of thought running through first century Judea? Beasly-Murray suggests the similarities “clearly reflect related traditions and modes of thinking.”[16] which are also found in Gnostic traditions. In other words, both Philo, John, and the Gnostics were drawing from a common well.
For the unbeliever, this is merely coincidental, but for the believer, it is providential. It is also taking on a sense that is uniquely congenial to Jewish thought. For the Jews, the word of God, as in the opening of Genesis, is not merely a statement, but “a powerful action, a concept not native to Greeks.”[17] This sense was not limited to the Jews, but is also found in other ANE cultures. “In Assyrian and Babylonian thought the word of God is a cosmic power…In Egypt the power of creation and the maintenance of the universe are attributed to the divine Word.”[18] In light of this, we begin to wonder less about why John used logos, and wonder instead if any word could have conveyed so much to so many.
Wisdom and the Word
Let’s return to the Hebrew Scripture to draw out another sense of the word, and that is its connection to wisdom. Word and Wisdom are intimately connected in ANE thought, and particularly in late Judaism. In the first century BC, the Wisdom of Solomon identified the word as personified Wisdom. J. Rendel Harris has suggested that the prologue of John had its origins in a hymn to wisdom. Although this has not been proven, there is an obvious similarity between Logos and Sophia that “they are almost interchangeable.”[19]
O God of my fathers and Lord of mercy,
who has made all things by your word
and by your wisdom has formed man (Wis 9:1-2)
Logos and sophia remain distinct, but they both appear to be participating in the cosmic work of the Lord. Indeed, their actions are such that they are identified with God in a way that plausibly anticipates later trinitarian formulas. On the other hand, if we consider this passage as a parallelism, then it is simply saying the same thing twice to bring out different nuances in the statements. In this case, Word is Wisdom, and Wisdom is Word.
Even earlier, in Proverbs 8:22-31, we find Wisdom acting in ways that suggests a creative Word. The passage begins
“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.
The passage in Proverbs continues by describing the creative action of God wrought by Wisdom in the same way Genesis and other passages describe it being wrought by his Word. The Word acts in the world, and is sometimes seen descending from the divine realm only to rejected. In the pseudepigraphal 1 Enoch 42:2, a late work, we read
Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men,and found no dwelling place
The author of Sirach, however, sees Wisdom finding a place, and for a good reason. For Jesus ben Sirah, Wisdom is Torah:
Then the Creator of the universe laid a command upon me; my Creator decreed where I should dwell.
He said, “Make your home in Jacob: find your heritage in Israel.” (Sir 24:7-8)
The word Torah “is itself many hued,” and can be God’s word, the will of God as embodied in the Law, and divine instruction.[20] In time, this led to Wisdom being identified with the Word
I [Wisdom] am the word which was spoken by the Most High. (Sir 24:1)
These elements of Wisdom and the Word weave in and out of Hebrew Scripture, with later texts (Wisdom, Sirach) drawing out meanings which were less explicit in earlier texts (Pentateuch, Psalms). Eventually, we find the logos in two distinct forms: in early Judaism, as the action of God, and in later Judaism, as a divine mediator.
In later Judaism, the word was conceived of as a hypostasis, and was influenced by pagan and Greek philosophical understandings of the word as a divine mediator. These two understandings obviously can't be separated since one influenced and informed the other, but they are distinct. The common denominator in each is the idea of word. In the Hebrew scripture the Word of God is the action of God, even when it is not personified. God says that something shall happen, and it happens. His word is efficacious. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made.” (Ps 33:6)
This is particularly true of Genesis, of which the Prologue to John is a deliberate recapitulation and reinterpretation. It’s a meaning explicitly teased out in the Aramaic Targum through the word memra, or word. Here is Genesis 1:1, so famously echoed in John 1:1, in the Aramaic Targum Neofiti:
1. From the beginning with wisdom the Memra of the Lord created and perfected the heavens and the earth.
This Memra (word, logos) is active, and suggestive of personification:
3. And the Memra of the Lord said: “Let there be light”; and there was light according to the decree of his Memra.[21]
A footnote in Targum Neofiti (Cathcart, Maher, McNamara edition) explains that the 16th century manuscript for Genesis 1:1 originally read:
1. From the beginning in wisdom the son of the Lord (br’ dyyyy) perfected the heavens and the earth.[22]
We can’t get too carried away with this. Targum Neofiti is usually dated to the 1st century AD, and may already display a Christianizing influence upon a pre-Christian original. Nevertheless, it shows how easily the ideas of Word and Wisdom, of God’s action and revelation, of Father and Son adapts to John’s language. This is the soil in which John cast his seeds.
Logos in the NT
In the New Testament, logos appears over 300 times with a variety of meanings, such as sayings, accounts, words, statements, story, proverb, command, message, speech, and utterance.[23] In Acts, it is also used to mean cause (Acts 10:29: “I ask then why you sent for me.”) and reason (Acts 18:14: “I would have reason…”). In most cases outside of the Prologue of John and 1 John, it means the word of God, a proclamation, a parable, a teaching: in essence the spoken word of God.
It has power: “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.” (Heb 4:12) It is active: “the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Th 2:13) It is the seed of God, sown into our hearts and demanding a response: “receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” (Jas 1:21) These passages, and others, can be isolated from John to make them purely about the word of God in the sense of his action, will, command, and so on, but why would we do that? Indeed, Cullmann asserts that the Prologue teaches
“nothing essentially different at this point from what we have found in Paul's writing in connection with other titles. And we shall ask what are the ‘Son of God’ designation, which was already known to the oldest synoptic tradition, did not to a certain extent contain similar conceptions.” [24]
In other words, High Christology was not the creation of John and his use of logos. Rather, John drew out high-Christology present in Paul and synoptics using a bold new language.
The word logos makes its striking entry in two places in the writings of John, where it has a different sense than it does in the rest of the Bible, even in the rest of John. In John 1:1-18 and 1 John 1:1-4 the logos takes on a uniquely Johannine high-Christological character, evoking the Greek and Hellenistic-Semitic senses already discussed, but in a distinct way. Augustine was forcibly struck by the parallels between John and the Greeks, when some “books of the Platonists,” (probably not Plato himself) were given to him:
In them I read (not that the same words were used, but precisely the same doctrine was taught, buttressed by many and various arguments) that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; he was God.[25]
But the parallels with the Hebrew Scripture are even more striking, as this paper as already shown. Let’s look at it line by line.
Table of Parallels between OT and John (External Link)
The first thing that should strike us about this table is the heavy representation of not only the wisdom tradition, but specifically the late, Greek-influenced wisdom tradition. If there’s any question about why John reached for a Greek philosophical term to explain the pre-existence of a Hebrew messiah, that should provide a substantial answer.
But what, exactly, does John mean it to say about Jesus of Nazareth? The spoken words of Jesus in John have such import that we have to believe the Evangelist understood a dynamic sense of Logos as pre-existent creating force and Logos as message, as the spoken word of Jesus himself. This is borne out by the dualities present in the gospel: light/darkness, ascending/descending, life/death, and so on. Jesus brings light and is Light. He brings life and is Life. He brings word and is Word. This is not incidental: he can bring these things because he himself is these things.
A simple search for logos in John will reveal that that the dual sense of word/Word is used by John through his entire corpus (Gospel, Epistles, Revelation) 65 times. If we extend that search back further, we find logos in the LXX roughly one thousand times, with approximately 700 of those meaning the word or statement of God. (Jeremiah uses the word twice as much as any other book.) The word of God (debas Yahweh) is what the prophets hear, and what the Torah is. There is the common meaning of a word spoken with the mouth and heard with the ear, but there is also a sense in which the word has a “specifically theological use.”[26] This kind of hearing is revelation, and requires faith to truly understand. Cullmann calls this sense of the word “identical with the kerygma,”[27] the truth per se. The entire gospel bends towards a single purpose: identifying the man Jesus with the revelation of God himself. Jesus is Truth itself.
God communicates himself through creation, and through his action in creation. In this sense, John is identifying revelation with the person of Jesus. When we speak of Jesus as Lord, we acknowledge his divinity. When we speak of him as logos, we acknowledge that this divinity is not through assignment or apotheosis or divine favor, but is intrinsic and eternal. It is from the beginning. Jesus is not one god among many nor does he become God. He is not made, but always was with God, communicating God to man through creation and revelation.
Conclusion
Although the Prologue clearly asserts the pre-existence of the logos, his relationship with the Father, and his incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth, Cullmann insists that John is “not interested in a speculation about this pre-temporal existence of Jesus.”[28] He largely leaves these issues to one side to focus on what he sees as the core of John’s concerns:
1. Primarily, the understanding of the life of Jesus, as the center of all divine revelation; the understanding that in his very person, Christ is what he brings in proclamation and teaching; the theological reflection upon the origin of all revelation in connection with the Old Testament story of creation through the word.
2. Secondarily, the utilization of contemporary speculations about a divine hypostasis to express, not a synchronistic but a genuine Christian universalism.[29]
Jesus is the great summing up of the revelation of God, and its bursting through into the world. He is the action of God, God communicated, God present among us, God the substance of reality made flesh. Widespread philosophical and religious belief about this fundamental ground of reality often deployed the language of logos or similar concepts in the ancient world. Jesus did not baptize those thoughts. He did not prove this or that theory about God, logos, revelation, or reality to be true or false. Rather, he burst through as an entirely new, universal witness to a heretofore unspoken truth, that “genuine Christian universalism.”
John isn’t claiming that the revelation of the logos has already occurred elsewhere and Christianity is simply adding something to it. Rather, they spoke of him without knowing him. The universalism occurs because “where non-Christians spoke truth, the evangelist sees Christ, the same Christ who at a concrete, particular time became man.”[30]
The roots of logos in Greek and other pagan thought is not the end of consideration about the logos, but only its beginning. We do not find logos in the Stoics or Philo and consider that the answer. Rather, John takes his place in a continuum of thought about a pre-existent, revealing, creating divine force and draws from the life of Jesus its final form and ultimate answer. In the logos of John, many lines of thought converge without one being an extension of another. [31] We understand those lines best by seeking the uniquely Jewish and Christian character of thought as the starting point, and understanding the non-Christian parallels not as a source or an inspiration, but as “foreign elements secondarily utilized by him.”[32]
The understanding of the logos asserted in the Prologue is borne out in every title, every sign, and every “I am” statement that suggests a divine messiah. At the end, after the resurrection, John returns to the Prologue’s themes in the moment that Thomas calls Jesus “My Lord and My God” (20:28), thus confirming what this Gospel is about from beginning to end. It is about Jesus as the revelation of God to man.
Bibliography
Aristotle. “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, trans. W. D. ROSS, vol. 9 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925).
Augustine, The Confessions, Part I, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, Second Edition., vol. 1, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012).
Beasley-Murray, George R. John, vol. 36, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1999).
Cathcart, Kevin, Michael Maher, and Martin McNamara, eds. “Cathcart, Kevin; McNamara, Martin; Maher, Michael,” in The Aramaic Bible: Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis, trans. Martin McNamara, vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992).
Cullmann, Oscar. Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1963).
Plato. “Sophist,” Plato in Twelve Volumes Translated by Harold N. Fowler, vol. 12 (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1921).
Tobin,Thomas H. “Logos,” ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
Younge, Charles Duke with Philo of Alexandria, “On Flight and Finding,” The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995).
[1] Oscar Cullmann, Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1963), 249.
[2] Cullmann, 248.
[3] Thomas H. Tobin, “Logos,” ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 348.
[4] George R. Beasley-Murray, John, vol. 36, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1999), 6.
[5] Plato, “Sophist,” Plato in Twelve Volumes Translated by Harold N. Fowler, vol. 12 (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1921).
[6] Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, trans. W. D. ROSS, vol. 9 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925).
[7] Tobin, 348–349.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Cullmann, 251.
[10] Ibid, 252.
[11] Tobin, 350.
[12] Charles Duke Yonge with Philo of Alexandria, “On Flight and Finding,” The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 330.
[13] Tobin, 350–351.
[14] Charles Duke Yonge with Philo of Alexandria, “On the Confusion of Tongues,” The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 67.
[15] Ibid, 247.
[16] Beasley-Murray, 6.
[17] Ibid, 7.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Cullmann, 257.
[20] Beasley-Murray, 8.
[21] Kevin Cathcart, Michael Maher, and Martin McNamara, eds., “Cathcart, Kevin; McNamara, Martin; Maher, Michael,” in The Aramaic Bible: Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis, trans. Martin McNamara, vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992), Ge 1:3.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Verbum Bible Software search results.
[24] Cullmann, 259.
[25] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Part I, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, Second Edition., vol. 1, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), 169–170.
[26] Cullmann, 260.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Cullmann, 249.
[29] Ibid, 268-9.
[30] Ibid, 264.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid, 265.
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