The Word Logos is Light

I frequently hear Christians misuse the following famous passage from the Gospel of John:

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

Christians frequently use The Word in this passage to mean the Bible, and then extend this to Jesus, saying that both were “In the beginning”.

First, everyone from a Judeo-Christian background will agree that this verse is referencing the famous introduction to the book of Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. - Genesis 1:1

But where does the Word fall into the Genesis reference? We get additional clues of what the Word is referencing if we continue reading John 1:

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. 6 There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. John 1:4-9

It should be clear what the reoccurring theme in these few verses is: light. So how does this reference the Genesis account? The first words spoken by God in the Genesis story are “Let there be light!” or Yehyeh Or in Hebrew.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. - Genesis 1:3-4

So the Word referenced in John 1:1 is the word Light, not the Bible. With this in mind, other passages become clear, like why Jesus says “I am the light of the world”. Clearly Jesus did in fact believe he came from this primeval light source. However, throughout John he references this light and tells his followers that they have equal access to this light.

In addition, the ancient Hebrews associated the divine name YHWH with the Hebrew verb “to be”. This is most likely what the author of John believed as well. Remember, the phrase “let there be light” in Hebrew is only two words: “Yehyeh”=”let there be” and “Or”=”light”. Then it’s very likely John was trying to imply the following: “and the Word (light) was with God (YHWH=Yehyeh)”.

Language Application

I’m adding an appended section to this blog entry so that I can get a bit more technical for those who have some knowledge of the languages. I personally believe there is a strong possibility that there was an Aramaic original for the Gospel of John based on some indicators in the grammar. The word “with” in John 1:1 is the Greek “pros” which usually means “to” or “toward” in its simplest form. If there is an Aramaic original, the word “pros” in Greek indicates a prefixed Lamed preposition, which in Aramaic is also used to represent a direct object. As a result of this, I think there is a strong possibility that the fragment “the word was with God” and the fragment “the word was God” are two different possible translations of a single statement in the Aramaic original text. In other words, the original Aramaic text under this would have had only one sentence: “the word was [prefixed lamed]-God”. The scribe translating into Greek gave both possible translations, but by choosing the Greek preposition “pros” instead of “meta” or “syn”, he left an unintentional clue. The other option is that originally there was only one statement, but a scribe put a note in the margin of another possible translation, and when this manuscript was copied, the copiest shuffled the comment into the body of the text. This happened very frequently. In the LXX of Daniel there are sections of verses that are twice as long as the Hebrew. If you translate the additional Greek statements back into Hebrew, you begin to see that the letters in the Hebrew words had letter forms similar to the existing Hebrew letters. In other words, there were other possible translations of these texts that scribes put in marginal notes that were eventually shuffled into the main body of the texts by a later copiest. As a result, all copies of that copy branch, the branch we eventually inherited, had the comments mixed into the main body of the text making it impossible for readers to know what the original text had.

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October 10, 2009 | Filed Under Jesus 

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